This is a book about what it means to have love and pride in a place, and how, against all the odds, it may still be possible to build a new pastoral: not a utopia, but somewhere decent for us all. I can imagine future historians mining English Pastoral for information about ploughing and harvesting, making hay and scything thistles, pulling out ragwort and ferreting in the days before the tentacles of modern agriculture reached into the hills. James Rebanks is a farmer based in the Lake District, where his family have lived and worked for over six hundred years. His bestselling memoir of five years ago, The Shepherd’s Life, told the story of his work with Herdwick sheep, against the backdrop of his unlikely progress from schoolboy dropout to high-flying Oxbridge graduate. 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.

It tells of how rural landscapes around the world were brought close to collapse, and how the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things were lost. But in spite of it all, he would have no other life, as the sight of a barn owl at dusk or a meadow of wild flowers afford a moment of wonder that make it all worthwhile. James Rebanks takes an honest and heartfelt approach to one of the challenges of our time; a degrading landscape due to intensive farming practices. 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. James Rebanks combines the descriptive powers of a great novelist with the pragmatic wisdom of a farmer who has watched his world transformed.A lot, as it turns out: about being a farmer, not just a shepherd, and about balancing the need to make a living with a sense of duty towards future generations.

The men and women had vanished from the fields; the old stone barns had crumbled; the skies had emptied of birds and their wind-blown song. This is a course of action that increasing numbers of farmers will have to pursue as we leave the EU’s subsidy system.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. Through the eyes of James Rebanks as a grandson, son, and then father, we witness the tragic decline of traditional agriculture, and glimpse what we must now do to make it right again. Opening with a short four-page preface, the author quickly draws the reader into this world of a family farm with a long and deep-rooted tradition and then sets the scene for a radical departure from simply carrying on with business as usual and hoping to make do. After a while he realised that he was no longer going outside to work because he had to, but because he wanted too. Vivid, accessible, inspiring - a story about one man's emerging land ethic, and an appreciation of the old ways in modern times .

Across Europe, the future impact of agricultural reform and changing patterns of trade is bringing into focus the issue of land abandonment. 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. We should bear this in mind when Rebanks describes the last forty years of farming as ‘a radical and ill-thought-through experiment’. I really enjoy James Rebank books and his latest is a really smart way of thinking for future living and farming.Managing to cram the whole modern history of British farming and nature into 270 beautifully written pages, this is a gem that's moving and immensely informative. 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. His second book, English Pastoral , was also a Top Ten bestseller and was named the Sunday Times Nature Book of the Year. A lament for lost traditions, a celebration of a way of living and a reminder that nature is 'finite and breakable.

In “Digging”, Seamus Heaney wrote how, unable to handle a spade like his father and grandfather, he chose to dig with a pen instead. A book that explains beautifully how we have lost our way with modern farming and what we can do to heal our earth. Poor Henry was a joke – until the soil from his fields was sent to an analyst and found to be richer than the intensively farmed land around it: “The most traditional farmer in the district had the healthiest soil. But he has put his environmental ideals into practice by planting 12,000 trees, rerouting the river across his land to create wetland areas, dispensing with pesticides, and sacrificing arable land to encourage wildlife. I think, genuinely, this is the best book I've read this year, and one of the most important books of recent years.For Rebanks, farming and writing have proved complementary: while working long hours on the land, he has produced a book in a pastoral tradition that runs from Virgil to Wendell Berry. bestselling debut, The Shepherd's Life, won the Lake District Book of the Year, was shortlisted for the Wainwright and Ondaatje prizes, and has been translated into sixteen languages. The vision of a place which brings separate worlds together, replacing an older suspicion between those who work in the place and those who simply live there.