The Complicated Truth
An Appreciation of Pastoral Song: A Farmer's Journey
“The complicated truth is that we need nature everywhere, even in our most intensive farmlands…We need to put farming and nature back together, not drive them further apart.”
This winter, nestled under a warm blanket for several pleasurable afternoons, I (Sue) read James Rebanks’ book, Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey. Rebanks, a British farmer and shepherd, offers insights into the complexities and contradictions of farming life, as well as the joys and delights.
I loved best how Rebank expresses the tensions he experiences as a farmer in today’s world, and how he tries to bridge that gap. He takes us beyond the black and white view that “farming is bad” and “nature is good”.
“I was powerfully aware of the widening gulf that existed between people who thought it natural and necessary to shape the land and those who were troubled by it; between people who farmed and people who didn’t.”
Pastoral Song is divided into three sections: “Nostalgia”, “Progress” and “Utopia”, each mirroring his life on the farm as he grows from a boy into a man.
“Nostalgia”
We are invited right into the rhythms of daily farm life when Rebanks was a sidekick to his beloved grandfather. He writes, “Each field to my grandfather had a character, almost a personality, and a backstory, which was kind of a series of stories which made up a kind of epic poem.” Their small fields filled with varied crops fed cattle, sheep and chickens as well as humans. Wildlife was abundant.
“Progress”
As a young man, Rebanks went to Australia to work as a farm labourer. Here, he writes, “there was no history to slow anything down, or none that was spoken of. It was a blank slate on which these modern farmers were writing the future.”
He came home painfully aware of how “backward” their farm was. English farmers felt squeezed as the emerging cult of cheap food* forced them to modernize. He writes, “The new technologies and ways of using them unraveled our farm like someone pulling a loose thread on an old jumper”. Soon, “all of the fields were a single shade of green”.
Any barrier to efficiency was removed – hedgerows and stone walls taken out, fields drained, rivers straightened. Many mixed farms let go of their sheep or cattle. During this period Rebanks writes,
“I had almost conditioned myself to exclude nature from how we thought about the farm.”
As more of their neighbours also modernized their farms, Rebanks and his father grew increasingly uneasy. They noticed the loss of so many birds, wildlife and plants in the new “improved” landscape. A devastating flood changed the shape of the land and altered lives.
But, the clearest comparison to the old way of farming, came by way of their neighbour Henry: “Mention of Henry’s name was a gentle joke about a farmer who had never modernized and been left behind by his progressive farming neighbours.”
When Henry died, everyone felt sad that one of the last old-timers was gone. But Henry surprised them all. When the new owners did soil tests to see what nutrients should be added, the report came back saying the soil was super healthy and needed nothing added.
“Utopia”
Henry’s story, and what they observed all around them, confirmed their gut feelings; the more progress they saw, Rebanks writes, the less they liked it.
He confesses to having been “lost in a kind of magical optimism that somehow nature would be okay. The idea that nature was vulnerable seemed like hippie or communist propaganda to my grandfather and even my father’s generation.”
Then the chair of the local river conservation trust, Lucy, visited with an offer to help. The trust had money, and could pay for fences to put the old field boundaries back, could help them plant trees and let the river take its original shape again to create more natural river habitats.
Rebanks and his dad had always been suspicious of “meddling outsiders”, but Lucy offered to pay for half of the new fencing . He writes, “We would for the first time, manage some land for something other than farming…it was probably the first time in generations we had ”unimproved” land”.
There were major changes, yet Rebanks was also realistic. “I was determined I would not intensify more and scale up, take huge financial risks and make factories of our fields. Nor could I see how to manage our land entirely for nature, producing less without going broke. I knew if we farmed in more sustainable ways – and no one wanted to pay us to do that – that we would just go bankrupt.”
While they began once again to make room for nature on their farm, it became clear to Rebanks that he needed a second income to make a go of it, even with the financial help from Lucy’s trust.
James Rebanks makes it all real.
If you decide to read Pastoral Song: One Farmer’s Journey, I hope you enjoy it as much as I have. Even though we are separated by a vast ocean, James Rebanks wrestles with many of the questions Vera and I are pondering here in Saskatchewan as we collaborate on “Where will the frogs sing?”
Here are a few more excerpts to entice you:
“A field is not a natural thing. Whether it is used to grow plants or animals, it ultimately comes into being as a result of killing some of the original species… the creation and sustaining of a field can mean life for some things and death for others and always did.… We are all complicit (directly or indirectly) in killing for our food, regardless of what we eat.”
Globally, 80% of farmers are small scale farmers. The genetic diversity provided by older farming systems, animals and crops is needed – we need diversity to thrive, especially in unpredictable times. Rebanks also believes that some intensive farming is needed because there are so many of us on the planet.
“A farm is a once wild place, that has been tamed for our purposes, part of an ecosystem that has often become broken or impoverished.”
As he and his dad thought about these changes, they saw “business school thinking applied to the land with issues of ethics and nature shunted off to the margins of consciousness.” Farming was seen as an “engineering and financial challenge rather than being understood as a biological activity.”
Rebanks determined that the economists were dead wrong. “Farming is a business unlike any other because it takes place in a natural setting and affects the natural world directly and profoundly.”
“Farmers used to assume that nature could adapt and cope with whatever we did on the and, but that is no longer credible. Our power to beat up Mother Nature has grown exponentially in my lifetime, wearing the mask of progress.”
* It is shocking to read the words “cult of cheap food” in 2023 when we hear about rising food costs daily. Because Rebanks uses British statistics, I checked Canadian sources and learned that in 2022, food costs made up 11% of our disposable income. Back in 1969, we spent 18.7% of our disposable income on food. The biggest factor in this shift, according to Rebanks, is that farming became more “efficient”.
James Rebanks' Twitter and Instagram handle is @herdyshepherd and he has 61,000 followers (and counting!) Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey published in 2021, won the Wainwiright Prize for Nature Writing. We know that among our readers are farmers and landholders here in Western Canada who are farming “as if nature matters”. In small and big ways. Please reach out if you would like to share your story with us.
“Where will the frogs sing?” is the collaboration of two rural settler artists creatively responding to the beauty and destruction of remnants of wild and naturalized land in the aspen parkland of Saskatchewan. Things we wonder about: what is our/your relationship to the land? What does society value? Why do these small remnants of land matter?
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This is an excellent post....it resonates with me big time. Putting farming and nature back together is music to my ears.
In such a thoughtful way, you have described the main ideas/concepts and enticed us to read Rebanks book. Can’t wait to dive into his book.
I had been yearning for a post from you and Vera these past couple days, and here you are.
Thank you for such a beautiful offering.
I shared it with some of the farmers in my world whom I’m sure could empathize.
As I was reading, I was thinking of how we have also done this with people. Instead of honouring diverse ways of being (I’m thinking specifically of my experience of First Nations culture, spirituality, language, etc) we have homogenized, marginalized, impoverished and pushed out the very diverse perspectives and ways of being we need to survive and thrive. Just what I was thinking and feeling:) thank you so much for your post 💖💖