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”. The bigger farms in the area, with their factory-like sheds and large herds of “engineered” cattle, were already ahead of the game. Rebanks, by now a celebrated author, expected to be out of tune with his neighbours, but was gratified to find that many of the older generation also felt farming had gone badly wrong. Rebanks is eloquent - scenes of mud and guts are interspersed with quotes ranging from Virgil to Schumpeter, Rachel Carson to Wendell Berry . I see farmers starting to work together to make this place even better, finding ways to farm around wilder rivers.

Rebanks leaves no doubt that the question of how to farm is a question of human survival on this hard-used planet. 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. 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. He makes no bones about the hardness of the life and his frustration at having to earn money outside the farm to make ends meet. 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.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. The men and women had vanished from the fields; the old stone barns had crumbled; the skies had emptied of birds and their wind-blown song. He may have done this with his own money but most farmers are strongly influenced by the regime of annual payments. 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.

If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.I have never met anyone so roaringly, joyously in context and content as James Rebanks, belting around his farm in the rain .