The Times Magazine 19what farming has been in Britain but, also, the
story of what it could become. For Rebanks
wants to change the way Britain – and, indeed,
much of the western world – farms, by
returning to the methods we used just two
generations ago. He is now farming largely
as his grandfather did.
He tells me of a friend who has followed
all the modern farming recommendations:
creating big fields, using artificial pesticides
and fertilisers and mechanising everything
so efficiently that he has laid off most of his
workers and can work the farm virtually
on his own.
“He turned around to me and said, ‘I’m
not enjoying it any more,’ ” Rebanks says. “He
said, ‘I want to jack it in.’ Modern ‘go like hell’
farming is incredibly stressful.”
As he points the quad bike up the hill,
back towards the barn, the contrast between
Rebanks and his friend is obvious.
“Since I’ve changed the way I farm, I’ve
never enjoyed my farming life more,” he says.
But Rebanks’s ability to rethink farming
beliefs comes from a wholly unexpected
source: Twitter.
“I stumbled into it by accident,” he says
later. We’re in an outbuilding that doubles as
his writing room and classroom for visiting
schoolchildren.
Rebanks has been on Twitter as
@herdyshepherd1 since 2012. Initially
anonymous, he intended to chronicle what life
was like on a Lake District farm: in 2014 he
showed his ram’s testicles being inspected by a
fellow farmer (“With tweets like this, I feel like
I’ve enriched British culture. Who else tweets
about sheep testicles?”) and in 2015, he live-
tweeted one of his sheepdogs giving birth to
ten puppies. Quickly hitting 14,000 followers,
he became a cult hit for those who enjoyed
tweets from Kim Kardashian and Justin
Bieber being interspersed with pictures of
a particularly satisfying crop of hay.
As is the way of things, a book deal
followed: 2015’s unexpected hit, A Shepherd’s
Life, which won fans as diverse as Alan
Bennett and Nigel Slater. In it, Rebanks
described, in achingly lovely prose, his life
growing up in the Lake District and how he
failed at school then essentially “blagged” his
way into Oxford, where he scored a double
first in history. He was so homesick for the
hills that he would rise at dawn and “pretend
shepherd” in the parks of Oxford; after his
degree he returned to farming as quickly
as he could.
In a blog for The Atlantic in 2013 Rebanks
explained that his motivation for tweeting was,
“To defend the old in my quirky, and probably
misguided, way. To let people [in cities] feel
like they knew a farmer.”
But he soon realised the unexpected twist
that social media delivers. You sign up wanting
people to listen to you and end up listening
to other people instead. As the book was
published, and then sold in its thousands, he
eventually gained another 116,000 followers.
“Before I knew it, I’d be in these
conversations with people going, ‘What do
you do this for? Why the hell are you using
pesticides? If we know that synthetic fertilisers
are bad for soil, then why are you using
them?’ Because I’m nerdy, I didn’t get
defensive. I went, ‘Hang on, maybe they’ve got
a point? Get me the book on soil! I’m going to
google “soil health”. I’m going to learn about
microbiology.’ I’m that guy. I’ll go away and
learn about it. Actually, I’m worse than that- I’ll spend a year learning about soil.
“And that’s when I went, ‘Ah – I went on
Twitter to tell these people they didn’t know
what they were talking about. But actually
they were f***ing right.’”
Rebanks’s new book, English Pastoral, has
the opportunity to be quietly revolutionary, if
other farmers read it. He knows that farmers
are, generally, “quiet socially conservative”
people, who live in the most rural, isolated
areas. The conversations that have been going
on about how destructive modern, industrial
farming is tend to come from people who live
in cities, “and who think farmers are tossers
who voted for Brexit, and ruined all the
nature”, he says.
“And that’s unfair because your average
farmer thinks it’s their job to produce food
as cheaply as possible, in as big a quantity as
possible. That’s just what they’ve been told.
And from their point of view, you’ve then
got all these arseholes on Twitter going,
‘What about nature? You’ve dug up all the
hedgerows,’ but they’re still going to the
supermarket and buying the cheapest shit
available. So farmers are in a bind.”
It’s a bind that Rebanks hopes to help them
with, for he has written a book that puts his
money where his mouth is. English Pastoral
tells the story of how he inherited a failing
farm, flocks and herds and turned the business
around by largely returning to the farming
methods his grandfather used. He has, for
want of a better word, rewilded huge tracts
of his 300-acre farm: brought back the
traditional, local sheep and cattle that
thrive on these bleak hills; dispensed with
pesticides and artificial fertilisers; given
over unproductive scrubland to brambles and
willow; rebedded his streams so that they
meander over gravel beds again, and planted
thousands of trees on hillsides that were
cleared of them decades ago.
The result, which I spend all day exploring
with Rebanks, is a place that bursts with life:
the newly winding streams have salmon
and trout; the barns have owls; the lake has
dragonflies and sandpipers; the satisfying cow-
pats are tunnelled by dung beetles; larks sing
out from the hills, and yet, Rebanks says, “Last
year was the best year we’ve had, financially,
for five years and I’ve got more time now than
I ever did. It’s easier this way.”
Rebanks worries that he might be “out
of step with my own community” with the
book – “I’m slightly further down the road
than they’ll be comfortable with. I’m not a
politician. I’m not a member of the Farmers’
Union” – but a friend urged him to write it.
“Because if we do this America free trade
agreement, after Brexit, that will be the worst
lurch towards disaster there has been for a
century or more. They call American farming
the most efficient in the world, but Iowa and
Indiana have the most ecologically disastrous
farming on Earth. It’s a desert there. No
birdsong. No life. You keep using all these
toxic chemicals – will you beat nature in
the long run? No. All these chemicals
ultimately fail. The threat to farmers and
the environment is so great that we should
all be jumping into each other’s arms.”
Then he says something surprising: “You
know, farmers are desperate to be loved.
They’re really hurt by people saying, ‘You’ve
trashed this. You’ve trashed that.’ They want
to see how they can earn a decent return from
their land from doing something good rather
than something bad. Can they all do what
I’ve done? Probably not. But could you
persuade everyone in this valley to put
willowy scrub in their marshy bits, build
ponds, plant hedgerows and make things
20, 40, 60 per cent better for nature? Yes.”
This week, someone from the government
rang Rebanks to ask for his advice. Who
knows whether they’ll take it?
I leave Rebanks’s farm reluctantly at 6pm.
On the train back down to London, the further
south I go, the larger the fields. The hedgerows
disappear, the gigantic combine harvesters
appear, the grass becomes the unholy blue-
green that is the mark of artificial fertiliser
and the skies gradually empty of birds. Two
worlds, two futures, two choices. As I look at
the red clover I took from Rebanks’s meadows,
pressed between the pages of English Pastoral,
I hope we pick the right one. nEnglish Pastoral: An Inheritance by James
Rebanks is published by Allen Lane (£20)‘PEOPLE THINK FARMERS VOTED FOR BREXIT AND
RUINED ALL THE NATURE. AND THAT’S UNFAIR’