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

farm lose money have turned out to be the very things that did all the damage. We are moving towards a farming system which produces food with the minimum of artificial inputs. Sadly it means earning money away from the farm when we have to. This new way of thinking about our farm doesn’t replace my original dreams or sense of identity; it just adds layers of interest to it.

In truth, we are in part returning to an older type of farming life – one of sweat, blood and hard work. The work becomes seasonal and physical once again and revolves around being there and seeing things and getting our hands dirty. It isn’t a recipe for an easy life. Farmers in the past worked extremely hard and had to be eternally vigilant. It was a tough old game and doesn’t fit with any economic principle of minimizing work and maximizing productivity. A farmer’s focus shouldn’t be about spending the minimum amount of time on the land. We should be present on the land constantly, understanding and utilizing its rhythms and processes better, and caring for it in a more hands-on way.

Our new farming life means we have less power and control. We are engaged once more in the old tussle with nature and we often lose. Last winter I tried to minimize the medicines and antibiotics I used on the animals, and when a severe blizzard came late in the spring my sheep suddenly became ill and coped very badly with the howling wind and biting cold. They had, unbeknownst to me, been carrying flukes in their livers – a parasite that uses a tiny freshwater snail as its host for part of its life cycle and then is eaten by sheep on the grass and damages their intestines and livers. This whole process is invisible, but when the long winter put my sheep under severe pressure – when they were lean and tired – they began to struggle, pneumonia set in, and several became ill and died. I knew that if I had treated them with one of the powerful drugs for killing flukes we might have avoided this. Sometimes stepping away from these things feels like naivety and takes a heavy toll. If the past had been easy we would not have abandoned it quite so readily. When your children are ill, you want the best medicines, and my attitude is the same for my animals. But we will try and keep only native breed animals that are adapted to our land, and select them to manage with the minimum use of chemicals and drugs.

~

My father drilled into me, in the months before he died, that I didn’t have to fight the whole world. In his last fifteen years he attained a kind of wisdom that perhaps he hadn’t always had (or that I hadn’t always valued). He’d learned that it was all right to step back sometimes and take a breath, and do something different if it paid better, or made more sense. It is OK to admit that you don’t know, or that you might have been wrong previously. That pragmatism is perhaps my father’s most useful legacy. He and my grandfather didn’t do all the things I am doing, because in their eras it wasn’t expected of them. I can respect their good sense, and their work, without copying their every move like some kind of religion. They responded to the ages they lived and worked in, and so must I.

~

It took me a long while to accept the full extent of Lucy’s plans for river conservation. Her big idea was to shift the stream that ran through our best hay meadow to a more natural channel a few hundred yards away, in order to create new ponds and wetland areas. It seemed to me that it would take too much land and spoil our meadow, and undo too much of the work of the past. So initially I said no, and we settled on some less ambitious changes. But over the years I have learned more about wilder rivers and accepted we can work around them – and I changed my mind. I asked Helen, and my children, and they said we should do it because it was right.

This summer the diggers came: three men from a local construction company with a digger, a dumper and various other machines. They are a bit sceptical about using their machines to make a field ‘worse’, and think this plan is the kind of lunacy only college-educated people could come up with. But they have got into the spirit of it and have dug scrapes and ponds, and a twisting and turning channel for the river (the route identified by satellite-modelling of the flooding). Then they filled in the old straightened channel. Now that’s been done, they have begun proudly to create the ponds and scrapes that are even more ambitious than the plans we had. Finally, it will all be fenced off for occasional cattle grazing so that the remaining meadow can work as a lambing pasture, and newborn lambs won’t be able to get into the becks and drown.

We are making plans to plant willow strips and alder and hazel on the riverbanks. Helen says I like ‘planting beaver food’ and that before we are old these saplings may be chewed off by those returning furry river engineers. Time will tell. I once thought such reintroductions were madness, but my views have softened. The more I learn, the more it makes sense for beavers to manage the wettest bits of our valley someday instead of me with an axe and a spade. My cattle and sheep can graze around a wilder river.

I am taking my father’s advice to adapt to change whenever I can and become open to new possibilities. It is not my job to fight every little change in the world.

~

When we come out of the house after supper, the ewes and