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James Rebanks Biography

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“We drove down the highway, past shabby farmsteads with flaking paintwork and rotting wood, past tumbling-down tobacco barns cut through with shards of sunlight. Past abandoned cars and rusting farm machinery, and black cattle standing in paddocks next to farmhouses. Past towns that seemed half-abandoned, with boarded-up shops and houses with Confederate flags in their windows and 'VOTE TRUMP' signs on the front lawn. Shutters were closed and leaves gathered on the porch; churches with billboards promised redemption for drug addicts. Flakes of snow fell but didn't settle. Our friend drove us around the country in his white pick-up truch with his sheepdog in the back and hisred toolbox and wrenches in the footwell. He told us about his people, past and present, and introduced us to farmers who were holding on. They all told us the same thing: America had chosen industrial farming and abandoned its small family farms, and this was the result - a landscape and a community that was falling apart. They showed us fields of oilseed rape that were full of weeds because they were now resistant to the herbicides that had been overused. They spoke of mountains ripped open for minerals, and rivers polluted, the farming people leaving the land or holding on in hidden poverty. And the worse it got, the more people seemed to gravitate to charlatans with their grand promises and ready-made scapegoats to focus all their anger on.”

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Book:Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey
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“Our land is like a poem, in a patchwork landscape of other poems, written by hundreds of people, both those here now and the many hundreds that came before us, with each generation adding new layers of meaning and experience. And the poem, if you can read it, tells a complex truth. It has moments of great beauty and of heartbreak. It tells of human triumph and failings, of what is good in people and what is flawed; and what we need, and how in our greed we can destroy precious things. It tells f what stays the same, and what changes; and of honest hard-working folk, clinging on over countless generations, to avoid being swept away by the giant waves of a storm as the world changes. It is also the story of those who lost their grip and were swept away from the land, but who still care, and are now trying to find their way home.”

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“As farmers we now have to reconcile the need to produce more food than any other generation in history with the necessity to do that sustainably and in ways that allow nature to survive alongside us. We need to bring the two clashing ideologies about farming together to make it as sustainable and as diverse as it can be.”

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“The idea that we, our fathers and mothers, might be proud, hard-working and intelligent people doing something worthwhile, or even admirable, seemed to be beyond her. For a woman who saw success as being demonstrated through education, ambition, adventure and conspicuous professional achievement, we must have seemed a poor sample. I don't think anyone ever mentioned "university" in this school; no one wanted to go anyway - people that went away ceased to belong; they changed and could never really come back, we knew that in our bones. Schooling was a "way out", but we didn't want it, and we'd made our choice. Later I would understand that modern industrial communities are obsessed with the importance of "going somewhere" and "doing something with your life". The implication is an idea I have come to hate, that staying local and doing physical work doesn't count for much.”

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Book:The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District
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“The whole landscape here is a complex web of relationships between farms, flocks and families. My old man can hardly spell common words, but has an encyclopaedic knowledge of landscape. I think it makes a mockery of conventional ideas about who is and isn't 'intelligent'. Some of the smartest people I have ever known are semi-literate.”

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“Meidät oli lähetetty jonottamaan opinto-ohjaajan oven taakse ja saamaan häneltä ammattiapua tulevaisuutemme suhteen. Hän oli erittäin ylpeä tietokoneensa uraohjelmasta ja esitti minulle sarjan monivalintakysymyksiä. Naputti vastaukset yhdellä sormella. Haluatko työskennellä sisällä vai ulkona? Ulkona. Haluatko työskennellä eläinten vai ihmisten parissa? Jne. Kun tätä oli kestänyt varttitunnin, tietokone alkoi täristä ja sylkäisi pian paperin. Sen mukaan minusta pitäisi tulla "ELÄINTARHAN HOITAJA". Kuten isä asiasta kuullessaan totesi: "Jumalauta! Helvetin ääliöt." Sitten hän hytkyi naurusta eikä saanut sitä loppumaan millään.”

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“there are no winners here. The farming businesses who rule these fields have got so big they are entirely reliant on one or two monopolistic buyers who screw them on prices and can bankrupt them at will. The money flows off the land to the banks that finance the debt on which it is all built, to the engineering companies selling the tractors and machinery, the synthetic fertilizer and pesticide corporations, the seed companies and the insurance agents. And yet, judged solely as productive businesses, focussing on efficiency and productivity (and ignoring fossil fuel input and ecological degradation), these new farmers are amazing - the best farmers that have ever lived. In the year 2000 the average American farmer produced twelve times as much per hour as his grandfather did in 1950. And this amazing efficiency means the end for most farmers. In the UK, the number of dairy farmers has more than halved from more than 30,000 in 1995 to about 12,000 today. In turn, the number of dairy cows in Britain has halved in the past twenty years. The amazing productivity of the remaining farmers and super-cows in demonstrated in the simple fact that milk production has remained more or less stable.”

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“Muistan kuinka "ministeriön" (maatalousministeriön) virkamiehet tulivat puhumaan hänelle heinäpeltojemme "biodiversiteetistä" ja siitä, mitä he olettivat hänen tekevän kukkien ja lintujen hyväksi vastineeksi tukiaisista. He katselivat puolentoista tunnin ajan, miten hän nyökkäili kaikelle ja oli kaikesta samaa mieltä, minkä jälkeen he lähtivät pois ja minä kysyin, mitä he oikein tahtoivat. Hän sanoi: "Ei aavistustakaan... Tuon lajin pellejen kanssa pitää toimia niin, että vastataan kaikkeen kyllä, ja kun he ovat menneet, jatketaan vanhaan malliin.”

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