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

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In recent years, I have come across many farmers who are working hard to address the problems Rebanks identifies, whether in restoring soil fertility, improving animal welfare or encouraging wildlife to flourish. Now around one in five people there is hungry – still far too many, but an improvement on the not-so-distant past.

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. Rebanks is eloquent - scenes of mud and guts are interspersed with quotes ranging from Virgil to Schumpeter, Rachel Carson to Wendell Berry . English Pastoral is a joy to read and extremely moving - a book which should be read by every citizen.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. This book can be approached at several differing levels: as a history of food production and farming in the uplands of Britain, as a fascinating insight into a precarious livelihood on the margins of economic production, or as simply an engaging tale of life in the Lake District beyond the tourist trail. James Rebanks combines the descriptive powers of a great novelist with the pragmatic wisdom of a farmer who has watched his world transformed.

An eloquent, well-informed, and practical Lake District shepherd was a welcome addition to any conversation. A lament for lost traditions, a celebration of a way of living and a reminder that nature is 'finite and breakable. 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. The bigger farms in the area, with their factory-like sheds and large herds of “engineered” cattle, were already ahead of the game.

The traditional pastoral is about retreat into an imagined rural idyll, but this confronts very real environmental dilemmas. 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. While the title of the book, English pastoral, evokes an expectation of a bucolic lifestyle, the reality is somewhat different as the author makes clear. Four generations of his family building on centuries of their farming in the Cumbrian Fells gives us a poetic, practical, raw and almost miraculously detailed picture of this ancient way of life struggling to survive and to be reborn.

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. He clearly sees that the farm and this way of life have been passed to him, and there is a duty, not just to carry on as before, but to improve the holding and secure a viable enterprise which could be handed on.

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 layout and structure of the book reflect an urgency to explain the dilemma to a wide audience in a compelling but also straightforward way. 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.

He brings together real evidence for the changes which are already underway and could be the basis for a sustainable foundation for both the landscape and the communities who provide stewardship for the land. In terms of what he has to say, if not the style of saying it, much of Rebanks’s critique of modern farming could have been written by a well-informed green activist, although Rebanks doesn’t evince much enthusiasm for the current fashion for rewilding. Its beauty is not only in the writing but in what is behind it: a gentle and wise sensibility that is alive to the human love affair with the land and yet also intimately cognisant of our collective and systematic cruelty towards it.The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. 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. But it is also uplifting : Rebanks is determined to hang on to his Herdwicks, to keep producing food, and to bring back the curlews and butterflies and the soil fertility to his beloved fields. To earlier generations of farmers, the idea that nature is vulnerable would have “seemed like hippy or communist propaganda”.