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. In the meantime, farmers elsewhere were chopping down woodlands, draining marshes, destroying the microbiology of the soil and banishing nature. If you want a detailed analysis of how we could bring about the sorts of changes that he and many of us would like to see, you will be better served by Dieter Helm’s Green and Prosperous Land. He's refreshingly realistic about how farmed and wild landscapes can coexist and technology can be tamed.

What a terrific book : vivid and impassioned and urgent --and, in both its alarm and its awe for the natural world, deeply convincing. The challenge then becomes how can these livelihoods across upland Britain be maintained in the future. It is a book full of love: of his grandfather, of his children and of the Lake District valley where he lives and farms .The traditional pastoral is about retreat into an imagined rural idyll, but this confronts very real environmental dilemmas. He and his wife, Helen, a quiet pillar of strength, have planted over twelve thousand saplings and created new hedgerows. And we’re so addicted to cheap food, however dubiously produced, that we spend only a third as much on it as people did in the 1950s.

We should bear this in mind when Rebanks describes the last forty years of farming as ‘a radical and ill-thought-through experiment’. 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.Instead of abandoning large areas of farmland to nature, Rebanks argues, we need to make productive farms better places for wildlife. The author sets out a vision and moves well away from the traditional farming memoir to explain why this lifestyle of an upland family farm, dependent on traditional breeds of Swaledale and Herdwick sheep, will need to change and why this is important to all of us including those who live far away from the fells of Cumbria.

However, such is the sweeping nature of his polemic that there is a danger some readers will come away from the book assuming all modern farming is environmentally destructive. Removing sheep from these fells in favour of trees, or reducing headage numbers making the business of shepherding unviable, would set in motion a chain of consequences which would alter both the landscapes and the communities. English Pastoral is a joy to read and extremely moving - a book which should be read by every citizen.Often, these areas, including the area described by the author, coincide with locations of high value for nature conservation and tourism where there is a demand for public access. Rebanks didn’t get on with his father and chose to spend his spare time helping out on his grandfather’s farm rather than his father’s.

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. Rebanks is at his best when focusing on his home patch rather than railing against economists, supermarkets and cheap food. I think, genuinely, this is the best book I've read this year, and one of the most important books of recent years. This final section is perhaps the most lyrical of the three, and the description in the last few pages of an encounter at dusk with a barn owl hunting across his pasture land is as fine a piece of nature writing as one could hope for. In 1974, when Rebanks was born and I first made my way up the River Nile, after spending a month hay-timing on a farm in the Yorkshire Dales, over half of the population in sub-Saharan Africa was malnourished.James Rebanks combines the descriptive powers of a great novelist with the pragmatic wisdom of a farmer who has watched his world transformed. Our land is like a poem,” he says, and rapturous metaphors become his way of both honouring and conserving nature: the tails of redstarts “like little triangular wedges of freshly cut mahogany”, “copper-bronze beech leaves, wind-brittle and crunchy like plastic crisp packets under foot”, the mist below the fells “like a milky ocean”, curlews wheeling round “in giant fairground-ride loops”, cobwebs hanging from rafters “like tangled pairs of women’s tights”, an owl hunting back and forth “like a ball rolling from one side of a glass jar to the other”, a mare in labour with one of the legs of her foal “pushing up jagged beneath the taut skin as if she had swallowed a stepladder”. 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. 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.