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

Product Information

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. Changes in farming practices have meant that globally the production of a given quantity of crop, such as wheat or maize, now requires two-thirds less land than it did in the early 1960s.

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.I was hoping that after a fair amount of repetition the author would branch out more boldly into the challenges faced by Lakeland farmers and in particular the influence of subsidies, grants and taxation. The author provides encouragement to do so but his portrayal of the Lakeland farmer as independent of such influences is a piece of pastoral fantasy. English Pastoral concludes with a description of the changes made on Rebanks’s farm in recent years. English Pastoral builds into a heartfelt elegy for all that has been lost from our landscape, and a rousing disquisition on what could be regained - a rallying cry for a better future.

He is also highly critical of the economists of the '8os who urged farmers to "modernise", damaging the land and pushing them into debt and ultimately bankruptcy. I see farmers starting to work together to make this place even better, finding ways to farm around wilder rivers. The traditional pastoral is about retreat into an imagined rural idyll, but this confronts very real environmental dilemmas.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. The UK has an estimated 30 million sheep, and James Rebanks looks after around a thousand head on his upland farm in the heart of the English Lake District ( https://www.