24 July 2026
Within the pages of this book, time moves by the rhythms a family's fell farm in the Lake District has always kept: sunrise and sunset, the turning of the seasons, the arrival of lambing and the return of the swallows. There is a recognition that the ticking of the clock has little use on land where the seasons, not the hour hand, set the pace. Or in other words were time abides by nature rather than humans. The Ancient Egyptians split the day into two twelve-hour segments; the Babylonians refined it further, giving us the sixty minutes and sixty seconds that still dictate the rhythm of modern urban life. It is a structure that never quite conquered farming communities, and Rebanks' book wears that indifference to the hour and the minute openly, setting the tone for an account far more interested in the slow arithmetic of soil than in the modern notion of “efficiency”.
That same farm, though, also measures a longer, less forgiving kind of time: before, during, and after. Before is the patchwork, mixed farming Rebanks' grandfather practised, inefficient by modern standards but rich in the biodiversity that inefficiency, it turns out, tends to produce. During is the reckoning: the mass mechanisation, monoculture and chemical dependency that swept through British farming in the second half of the twentieth century. After is the uneasy, unfinished business of undoing some of that damage, to soil, to rural communities, and to the ordinary consumer's understanding of where food actually comes from.
Rebanks is careful to note that farmers did not choose the During. Britain's post-war drive for food self-sufficiency, codified in the 1947 Agriculture Act, guaranteed farmers a price for what they grew and made maximum output the explicit aim of policy. Chemical firms spotted the opportunity at once. Through the 1950s, ICI and Fisons ran extensive advertising campaigns in the farming trade press urging ever heavier fertiliser use, at a moment when state policy and chemical-industry marketing were, in effect, pulling in the same direction. Once the new machinery of inputs and monoculture was running, the productivity it generated became self-sustaining in the worst sense: something farms now had to keep producing merely to survive, rather than a choice they were free to make each season.
Some perspective is useful here. Consumers in Europe and America now spend a smaller share of their income on food than at any point in recorded history, and that expectation of cheapness has kept the pressure on ever since. This is the uncomfortable question running beneath the book: how far do consumers' own demands, for volume, for low prices, for year-round availability, dictate the way land gets farmed? Rebanks' answer is unambiguous. Pushing for more and cheaper pushes farmers away from anything genuinely “sustainable and what will work long term”, and towards the treadmill he spent much of his adult life trying to step off.1
His proposed alternative is regenerative agriculture, though he is careful not to present it as something farmers can simply opt into. Lasting change, he argues, depends as much on shopping and voting habits as it does on trade policy and government spending that finally treats sound, regenerative farming as a “public good” rather than a private cost. He makes an equally persuasive case for buying locally: not merely to support farming communities, but because it forces the consumer to re-engage, to ask where their food came from and how, and in doing so close some of the distance that has opened up between rural producers and urban plates.2
What distinguishes English Pastoral from the standard nature-writing lament is its refusal to romanticise. Rebanks is honest that not all farmland can, or should, be returned to wilderness, and honest too that the system he is describing, farmer, consumer, retailer, regulator, only moves when all its parts move together. That interdependence or interconnection is the book's real subject: not a single villain to be defeated, but a set of incentives that need, collectively, to be rebuilt.
It is that argument, more than any single passage, that makes the book relevant to WildInvest's own work. Rebanks' fells are a long way from the landscapes WildInvest supports, but the underlying case travels well: that regenerative, harmonious land management is not a retreat from productive farming but its precondition. In tracing three generations of one Cumbrian family, Rebanks has written a history of British farming that doubles, quietly, as an argument for its future.
