As winter approaches and gardening activities ramp down somewhat, I wanted to write about a couple of books I’ve read recently that I think have some useful lessons for gardeners seeking to use more nature-friendly methods. They’re also an amazing read, a fascinating story of a farming tradition that’s trying to modernize while remaining true to its past.
James Rebanks is a shepherd in the Lake District in northwestern England. The Lake District is a mountainous region – in the local dialect, mountains are “fells” – of about a thousand square miles, roughly the land area of Rhode Island, surrounded on three sides by the Irish Sea. Tourism is now the main industry in the Lake District, but agriculture, in particular shepherding, remains vibrant and widespread. In 2017 the Lake District became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in recognition of its “continuing distinctive agro-pastoral traditions based on local breeds of sheep including the Herdwick, on common fell-grazing and relatively independent farmers.”
This is a mouthful. Fortunately for us, in The Shepherd’s Life and English Pastoral Rebanks writes bluntly and vividly to relate his upbringing in a Lake District farming family and how he and his family balance traditional shepherding practices with the constraints of the modern world.
The Shepherd’s Life is straightforwardly autobiographical. Rebanks was born in 1974. He grew up on a small farm owned by his grandfather and maintained by both his grandfather and father. He was, in his own telling, an indifferent student at best, preferring to spend his time and energy on farm work. Shepherding was a central activity of his family’s farm, but really the farm grew a little of anything that was likely to generate income and feed livestock: cattle, eggs, hay, barley.
Rebanks left school at 16, glad to dedicate himself to his family farm. The basic rhythm of the work would probably have looked familiar to a medieval shepherd, or even to a Viking invader a thousand years ago. In the summer, sheep mostly graze on commonly-held land in the fells, with occasional roundups for shearing or medical care. In autumn, farm auctions are the main activity. Sheep are judged before they’re sold, and the competition is fierce for the best ram (“tup”). Herdwick sheep have white faces, and it’s an open secret that shepherds can spend hours plucking unwanted black strands from their show tups. Winter is long, wet, windy, and cold. Sheep stay on fields at the foot of the fells, eating hay and grain grown over the summer. Snow can be deadly, but Herdwick sheep are hardy; in a pinch, they can survive by eating their own wool.
Spring, of course, brings lambing season. In easily the best few lines of The Shepherd’s Life, Rebanks tells of helping a ewe to deliver. Normally lambs emerge toes first, followed by the front legs and then the head – but suffice it to say, sometimes they need help assuming this position. A few moments later the lamb is nursing, none the wiser. Later, he coaches his daughter, six years old, as she delivers a lamb herself.
A challenging life, to be sure, but it wasn’t all a slog. His grandfather had taught him to leaven the everyday labor of farm work in a cold, rainy climate with brief observations of natural beauty and harmony: a sunset (or equally likely a sunrise), a leveret (baby hare), a fox (“Reynard”), salmon swimming up the streams (“becks”) to spawn, the birds feeding on earthworms in a newly “ploughed” field.
Midway through The Shepherd’s Life comes an enjoyable plot twist. It’s common for young farmers to spend time off the farm; sometimes the farm needs extra income, sometimes there’s conflict between older and younger farmers. Rebanks and his father increasingly butted heads after Rebanks left school and developed stronger opinions about how to manage the farm. Reading became his escape at the end of the work day. His mother was “bookish” and had inherited a substantial library from her own father, a grammar school teacher. Rebanks tore through this library and anything else he could read; at one point he nicks a book used for decoration in the local pub.
After a few years Rebanks tried school again. He’d realized he enjoyed learning; meeting his future wife might have increased his motivation. Rejected from night school because he’d failed his final exams in his teens, he talked his way into the class anyway. His teachers told him he was university material and eventually the idea took hold. He won admission to Oxford and graduated four years later with an “honours” degree (two firsts, to be precise) in history.
Rebanks then – and this is the plot twist – returned to his family farm. After foot-and-mouth disease wiped out his family’s flock in 2001, he focused on breeding Herdwicks. At the same time, his university degree led him to a “desk job” as a consultant, helping local communities as far away as southern China to balance tourism with preservation of cultural heritage. Both are full-time jobs.
In English Pastoral, Rebanks movingly describes this effort to balance the traditional and the new. Farming practices changed enormously between the 1980’s and the early 2000’s. Put simply, productivity came to matter more than anything else: food quality, the environment, living conditions for animals. Productivity was boosted in two ways: larger scale and increased use of inputs like pesticides, herbicides, artificial fertilizers, and grain feed. Neither is feasible for a family farm with a limited income.
Nevertheless, Rebanks and his family tried to keep up. They pulled down ancient hedges and stone walls to make plowing more efficient. They brought in new practices like silage – fermented hay that’s more nutritious than dry hay because it’s more easily digested – and “improved” sheep breeds that put on weight faster. They used herbicides to keep weeds out of their fields. They added chemical nitrogen fertilizers to grow more grass.
And it worked – from a certain point of view. The farm churned out more sheep, more cattle. But are these the right quantities to measure? Higher productivity didn’t result in higher income. One example: the waste from silage-fed cattle is more acidic – and, shall we say, more liquid – than waste from cattle fed on hay. In the past, farmers saved the manure and straw bedding from cattle overwintered in barns (“byres”). They called it “muck” and let it compost a bit, then spread it on their fields as fertilizer. But the acidic waste – “slurry” – from silage-fed cattle only reduced their fields’ productivity. The solution: buy more nitrogen fertilizer. The new practices gave with one hand but took with the other.
The environmental degradation was harder to quantify but equally obvious. Rebanks notes that birds stopped following the tractor when he plowed: no more earthworms – a sure sign of degraded soil. The birds were fewer in number too. Rebanks realized that the hedgerows he and his father had removed were in fact rich habitats for birds: fieldfares, pipits, redstarts, wrens. Why so much emphasis on birds? Birds eat flies, and flies are serious pests of sheep. The solution: insecticides, and more time spent treating infected sheep.
Rebanks eventually determined to stop, or at least minimize, his use of modern industrial farming methods. Interestingly, one key step was to rebuild the farm’s fences and hedgerows. This allowed him to rotate his sheep from field to field, grazing for a day or two, then letting the grass recover. Feeding the sheep primarily with grass meant less need for silage and the plowing, fertilizers, and herbicides used to produce it.
Rebanks is open that the rebuilding required grants from a local conservation organization. This might seem hard for a “relatively independent farmer” to swallow. But in reality, farmers in the Lake District have always had a strong ethic of communal action. His books are full of stories of neighbors working together to bring sheep out of the fells, or finishing a harvest, or repairing fences, or loaning tups with desirable traits for breeding. If the benefits extend beyond the farm, why not?
This, I think, is what we mere gardeners can learn from Rebanks’s books: we can try to see our gardens – vegetable and landscape – as part of a larger world. Put another way, our decisions matter. We can:
• Build healthy soil to reduce erosion and the need for fertilizers.
• Employ integrated pest management (IPM) principles to minimize pesticide and herbicide use.
• Plant trees, perennials, and heirloom vegetables that are adapted to the local environment – and that can handle a warming climate.
• Remove invasive plants.
Like the fell shepherds, we can work with nature rather than trying to fight or control it.
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The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape. (Flatiron Books, ISBN 9781250060266, 2015)
English Pastoral: An Inheritance. (Allen Lane, ISBN 9780241245729, 2020) (Published in North America as Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey. Custom House, ISBN 9780063073272.)
