English Pastoral: An Inheritance - The Sunday Times bestseller from the author of The Shepherd's Life

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Since then, the author has become a frequent presence on radio, ranging from dedicated farming topics to general and very popular broadcasts on food, the countryside, and the environment. He makes no bones about the hardness of the life and his frustration at having to earn money outside the farm to make ends meet.

Most people are now largely illiterate when it comes to agriculture and ecology,’ says Rebanks, who has shone a brilliant light onto a world about which the vast majority of people know little. An eloquent, well-informed, and practical Lake District shepherd was a welcome addition to any conversation.It is therefore no surprise that Rebanks has matched his first publication with this second book, which again quickly became a bestseller helped along by a public desperate to take advantage of a blast of fresh Lake District air in the midst of a pandemic. The story he tells is one of hard work, little money and narrow horizons, reminiscent of Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie but without the adolescent sex and occasional violence. Told with humility and grace, this story of farming over three generations - where we went wrong and how we can change our ways - will be our land's salvation. International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. On the other side the author does not tackle perverse incentives that still remain such as the 'red diesel' subsidy that encourages farmers to use massive machinery and undertake ploughing and drainage operations that may have a negative effect on the environment.

If it hadn’t been for high-tech agriculture, there would have been less food, more hunger and possibly an even greater loss of pristine ecosystems, as food production sought to keep pace with population growth.In 1974, when Rebanks was born and I first made my way up the River Nile, after spending a month hay-timing on a farm in the Yorkshire Dales, over half of the population in sub-Saharan Africa was malnourished. Rebanks is a rare find indeed: a Lake District farmer whose family have worked the land for 600 years, with a passion to save the countryside and an elegant prose style to engage even the most urban reader. Estimates of this shrinkage in the areas of agricultural land have been made ranging from 8 to 11% ( https://ec. In 2015, Rebanks described life on his family farm in The Shepherds Life: A Tale of the Lake District (Rebanks 2015), which quickly became a non-fiction bestseller and was serialised by the BBC in a Book of the Week, radio broadcast. Seen in these terms, Rebanks is making a plea for a better understanding of a much wider picture, which is about a way of life as much as the landscape or animal husbandry.

His second book, English Pastoral , was also a Top Ten bestseller and was named the Sunday Times Nature Book of the Year. He's refreshingly realistic about how farmed and wild landscapes can coexist and technology can be tamed.

Many of these improvements are community-inspired, reaching out beyond the traditional core farming families. But many farmers would benefit – and it’s estimated that there are a billion of them around the globe – by following his example. There were others too: reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring; noticing the decline of curlews and other wildlife on the land; visiting the US and seeing fields of oilseed rape full of weeds resistant to pesticides; experiencing the Cumbrian floods of 2015.