A friend suggested I read James Rebanks, Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey”, more than a year ago….It went on to my list, with 150 other titles. Inclusion doesn’t put it into some methodically followed cue. Some titles, my interest shifting, fall off the list, others jump to the front, other times, simple availability at the library, brings one my way. I always have two or three in process. I’m dogged and rarely give up on a book once begun so I’m reluctant to read a book based only on someone’s recommendation. With this one finishing wasn’t in question.

This book is a great companion to, “Wilding:
The Return of Nature to A British Farm
by Isabella Tree, which I read in February. Both discuss the problem of survival for small farmers in an economic world that favors efficiency, minimizing costs, externalizing that not understood or valued, in order to maximize profits. In both cases the authors come to reject the path laid out for them and choose another that prioritizes the health and welfare of the farmer, the land, in its broadest sense including the overlooked and essential lives of the countless wild things that comprise it.

Rebanks takes the reader through time, following him beginning with his life on a small Lake District farm in Cumbria, a child, growing up on his grandfather’s farm, learning its qualities, its little beauties and the traditional practices that sustained it. It was diverse, depending on a minimum of purchased inputs, growing most of what the family and their practice required. Later, working with his father, as economic pressures, technologies, government programs and bankers pressed them into following others into the trap of specializing, ‘improving’ their fields, incurring massive debt while their share of food prices, shrank. An ever swelling proportion of the money spent on food going instead into the profits of the agro-chem-machinery companies, food processors and distributors. Farmers were getting locked into a sucker’s game, each having little leverage, a shrinking number of ever larger, and more powerful corporations, setting the price…The general population has been reduced to being one dimensional consumers, hardly more than an adjunct to the corporations, chasing cheap food and ‘work’ that provides them income to pursue secondary activities, distractions and ‘entertainment’, while the quality and diversity of food stuffs shrinks. All connections between farm and table distant to the point of meaninglessness. Food becoming simple fuel. The land industrialized and degraded.

The latter third of the book describes their efforts to not just regain their farms financial future, but to begin the recovery of its degraded soil and the wild life upon and within it, which ultimately, is the generative ’engine’ of any farm’s productivity….His writing is strong, direct, personal and vulnerable. This is his story, and in his telling, he makes the reader acutely aware that it is also our story and of what is at stake. Farming is no mere incidental activity. It is central to the kind of society we live in today, to our quality of life, our health. We are today separated from it at great cost to ourselves while corporations drive the process. We all suffer because of this.

While Tree’s “Wilding” is an impassioned portrait of a farm struggling to make it financially in which the owners come to fully embrace an ecologically sound reclamation model, they are creating as they go, working with like minded farmers and conservationists, with discussions of the many problems they faced and what they chose to do to ‘fix’ it as well as how the land and farm has responded to their efforts. Tree’s writing emphasizes the use of hardier livestock breeds, less dependent on refined feeds and care, able to fend for themselves, while integrating wildlife in an attempt to mimic living communities that sustained a diverse and healthy landscape long before the advent of agriculture.

Both of them write of the essential rewilding of the landscape itself, leaving/creating havens for wildlife whose presence are both a sign of the land’s health and one of the paths to ensure its continuing, of planting trees, providing cover, of a mixed landscape, of allowing the land and life upon it time to rest and health, releasing it from relentless and one dimensional production which is ultimately exhausting and unsustainable.

Rebanks writes passionately of his love of the land, what was being lost, and in making the change, how the ‘healing’  of his land and farm was doing much the same for his family and would for rural communities as well. His beginning place is that of the farm, how over several thousands of years of early agriculture the land had retained its richness, which was rapidly being lost with the wide adoption of industrial agriculture, the maximization of yields at the cost of the land’s health, the use of the plow and the continuous demands of the land, the extraction, of unrelenting harvests. His story is not a quixotic one for a lost and romanticized past, but one of the reexamination of a place and way of being, a look at how work was once done and what was sacrificed as corporate agriculture reshaped their land and lives…what we are all losing. His path is one of blending, of saving what traditional agriculture was doing right, that was sustainable, with the added knowledge we’ve gained from our study of ecology and how we might improve our practice, meet the needs of an urbanized population while also making farming and agriculture, genuinely sustainable into tomorrow…not just profitable for the large corporations. To do this he envisages a changed relationship between farmers and the huge majority urban population they are dependent upon. Our corporate global agricultural system works to hold down prices, pressing farmers into exhausting the land as they struggle to survive. In the process we are all being deprived of a relationship with the land on which all our lives depend. Both authors, and their farms, have pioneered paths to mixed farming emphasizing different elements, showing us a way forward. Both are optimistic. Neither, I believe, sees that we have much time to waste if we and the land are to survive.