English Pastoral by James Rebanks (cat reading book .txt) 📗

sweep everything else away. The productivity of these intensive farming systems masks their reliance on the older, more traditional systems; they need them for long-term sustainability. This can only be addressed by protecting the old systems.

Britain is still one of the richest places on earth for agricultural diversity, a result of its unique farming history and its gift of being one of the best places on earth to grow grass for livestock. Our islands are the birthplace of many hundreds of breeds of cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, horses and ponies – most of which have clung on around the edges of the new farming on smallholdings and old-fashioned farms in remote areas, and as a result of their stubborn champions in the farming community. As large areas of the world have been converted to modern livestock farming over the last two or three centuries, many of the animals farmed in those lands are either pure British breeds or hybrids of them. Hereford and Aberdeen Angus cattle, Suffolk and Leicester sheep, and Large White pigs are farmed in places as far afield as Texas, Western Australia, South Africa and Ukraine. In Britain, farmers’ lives often still revolve around the historic systems based on those different breeds. The knowledge of how to farm them, and the skills to do so, are vital.

The world has already made much use of our ‘library’ of agricultural diversity to feed hundreds of millions of people over the past few centuries. Now is not the time to lose the old breeds and plant species. We should think holistically because we need to produce lots of good food in sustainable ways; we need agricultural diversity and we need lots of nature.

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We can’t dispense with efficiency or technological change altogether, that would be silly: there are way too many of us. We are heading towards a world of more than 10 billion souls by 2100, and if every farm is inefficient, then we as a species will need to utilize more of the planet to feed everyone, which will leave little or no room for wilderness and wild nature to thrive. The reason so many ecologists are seduced by agricultural efficiency gains is because it is a way for us to get what we need from a smaller proportion of land. The complicated truth is that we do need efficiency gains, and we can’t live completely in the past. It is about finding a balance and being aware that other things matter as well as efficiency. We have to think about the problem clearly and holistically – not one fashionable issue at a time, as tends to happen. And time is running out: we have to act now.

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We came back from the Mid West to the worst winter I have ever known. It dragged on and on, with gales and storms, trees felled by the wind, rain, sleet and snow. The land was sodden for weeks, with mud and puddles everywhere. And after that came the worst storm of all: 14 inches of rain fell on the already saturated ground in one day. The lakes were already full, the ground soaked like a sponge, and then the worst rainfall ever recorded in our valleys. The storm roared over the houses in giant, violent, battering waves; we felt like crabs hunkering down in a seashell at the bottom of the sea. The next morning, the hillsides ran with rivers where there had never been rivers before.

Over the fells from us, the rocky basin below Helvellyn became one vast bowl that was channelling water down towards the village. The water gathered force, formed a vast muddy torrent tumbling over the rocks; gathering speed to become ever more violent, picking up stones and boulders and thundering down the fellside, scouring out the riverbanks. Not finding space in the gravel-filled channel through the village, it tore out the walls that usually held the beck, spilling over the banks. It cut new channels through the roads and tore up the tarmac, throwing it across the streets. It flowed under front doors and into shops, hotels and kitchens. As people retreated upstairs, the river roared its way through the village and on down to the lake. With every hour it carried thousands of tons of gravel, boulders and rock and piled it on the fields by the lake and throughout the village.

This torrent, and dozens of others, tumbled down the hillsides and into the frothing brown soup that was the Ullswater lake. It rose and buried roads and farmhouse kitchens, and fields and fences, and ripped up trees and carried them away. Just over the fell from us the lake rose ever higher, and out of it flowed a river that grew in power with every passing minute. Flood warnings began to sound downstream, and to flash on computer screens across half of northern England. And still the rain kept hammering down.

People began to fear for the old Pooley Bridge, with its arches, and they stopped cars passing over it. The brown tide of pressure built and built, and then the old bridge crumbled and was swept away as if it had been made of biscuit. Downstream the water began to rise into fields that were usually safe, rising around the cattle and sheep. Farmers tried to move their livestock out of the danger areas. Friends of ours went with their sheepdogs to gather their flocks away from the muddy torrents. The sheep stood up on a strip of slightly higher ground surrounded by water. A shepherd knows in his stomach how this goes: five times out of ten they will act sensibly and can be helped to safety; but five times out of ten they will get spooked and dive into the water and be swept away. Life and death reduced to a simple deadly gamble. Shepherds can easily be drowned too, and dogs. Some shepherds will leave their sheep to use their own sense, hoping they survive the worst on the higher ground.