growtogether book review?
Not quite but I’ve just finished reading English Pastoral by James Rebanks and felt his book is relevant to anyone that eats food …
James’ motivations to adapt and change his own farm and the wider farming community are many of the same motivations that began growtogether. He writes with more knowledge, more experience and gooder English than I have at my disposal so I figured I’d just share a bit of what he says.
James is a farmer based in the Lake District, where his family have lived and worked for over six hundred years. He writes on his youth growing up in a farming community, what that meant then and what it means now, the changes that have taken place in food production during his time and where that has taken us. He connects dots that are often hidden or unheard and he connects the reader/consumer to the effects of our everyday choices.
A review on the front of the book from Hisham Matar reads ‘A wonderful and urgent book, filled with the hard-earned eloquence of experience and the reflective temperament of a poet.’ I’ll leave the literary side of things but to agree that it is beautifully written. ‘Urgent’ is an apt word to describe what James writes about, food production as it is being pushed to it’s limits, or our planets limits, and it is becoming more and more apparent that it is (here comes that word again) unsustainable. Unsustainable is such a common word in our world now I worry it’s meaning is becoming overlooked. Maybe we all need to remind ourselves every time we hear it that unsustainable means there will come a point where we no longer have a choice to change, the thing that we are doing will not continue indefinitely however much we want it to.
The other thing that struck me about Hishams quote is the line ‘filled with the hard-earned eloquence of experience’, it made me immediately think of our suppliers, I could think of no better way to describe them.
Here’s photographic evidence of a very privileged (if slightly short lived) few minutes I had enjoying James Rebanks whilst Mason recharged his batteries in the sunshine. Technically this now counts as work?
“… I’ve come to see that the reality of being a farmer is anything but an escape from the world; it is often like being a slave to it. Everything that happens on a farm is affected by the era it exits in; it is shaped by a host of powerful external forces. We are dangled like puppets, pulled to-and-fro by invisible threads. Somewhere, just out of sight, those threads are connected to how you shop, eat and vote - as they always have been. But in the last fifty years we have let those strings be pulled by supermarkets and other large corporations until most farmers have been reduced to low-price commodity producers with very little bargaining power. We are struggling to face up to the ecological disaster this has created, at the same time as producing the cheapest food in history. And instead of addressing the structural problems of a food system in which almost all the power and the profit is taken by large corporations that care little for the health of citizens, farms or ecosystems, politicians offer inadequate, thinly spread subsidies, or ‘environmental payments’ to patch over its worst effects so that it can carry on.”
“… Our lamb and beef do not earn the premium that would compensate us properly for producing them in ways that are less efficient but good for wild plants, insects, birds and other animals. I see no prospect of this in an age when everything revolves around producing cheap food. Meat has been reduced to a pitifully low-priced commodity in supermarkets when it ought to be a thing that is respected and valued - even if it means eating less of it. Many British people have lost the taste (and cooking skills) for things that can be produced sustainably in their own landscapes.”
“… I now understand that farm is a once-wild place that was tamed for our purposes, part of an ecosystem that has often become broken or impoverished. Our fields are the coalface where we as a species meet the natural world. where our politics, our diet and our shopping choices shape the land, the wilder world around it, and even the climate. And we have often done great damage.
I have come to understand that farming, even in traditional ways, always has a cost for the natural world - it is usually a downgrade on what might be there if humans weren’t. But once we accept that, we can also see that good farmers do more than produce commodities: through benign inefficiency or good stewardship their farms can allow a great many wild things to live in and around them; holding water that would otherwise flow off the land and flood villages, towns and cities; and storing carbon that would otherwise alter the global climate. A good farm has a public value that transcends the pitiful price the farmer gets paid for his products.”
“…even good farmers cannot single-handedly determine the fate of their farms. They have to rely on the shopping and voting choices of the rest of us to support and protect nature-friendly, sustainable agriculture. They need government spending and trade policies to recognize that sound farming is a ‘public good’, a thing that needs encouraging and protecting.”
“The marginalization of farming in our national politics and culture is a tragedy … We won’t become a country of good farming by simply drifting along as we have been, letting big business become ever more powerful and insisting on ever cheaper food in their supermarkets and shops.
We have to take food much more seriously, not viewing it as a technical problem to be solved, but instead as something important in its own right, that enriches life. We need to think about how food was produced, and how our choices play out in fields somewhere. We were all responsible for the new industrial-style farming. We let it happen because we thought we wanted the sort of future it promised us. Now, if want a different kind of future we need to make some difficult decisions to make that happen.
We have spent too long listening to economists. They said we shouldn’t worry about local food because we had secure global supply chains. But even if that dubious claim were true (the world is much more volatile and vulnerable to human and natural crises than they admit), that isn’t why local food matters. We need local farming so that we can understand it and engage with it, and shape it to our values. That means a significant share of our nutrition should be produced locally so we can see it, participate in it, and question and challenge it when we need to. Food production is too important to be pushed out of sight and out of mind. Foodstuffs from anonymous distant global sources are rarely subject to our rules and regulations on welfare, environment or hygiene, or produced in line with our values. We are so used to being disconnected from the fields and the people that feed us that we have forgotten how totally weird this is from a historic perspective. We should not be strangers to the fields that feed us.”
“We need to keep unsustainably produced food out of our shops and markets; it cannot be allowed to undercut nature-friendly, high welfare farming. We must continue to produce lots of or food on British soil in order to avoid importing more from sterile, ruined landscapes like those of the American Midwest, or from land being cleared of pristine ecosystems like Indonesia and the Amazon.”
“The old social contract between farmers and society is now stretched to breaking point. We need a new deal, a new understanding, a new system, that brings farming and ecology together. And that requires dialogue, realism, trust and changing our behaviour as both farmers and consumers, and a willingness to pay the real price (in the shops or through our taxes) of food and good farming to make things as good as they should be.”
- James Rebanks “English Pastoral”
I think we need more people like James Rebanks, more people willing to communicate across social groups, explain, question and evolve their own practices.
Everything will not happen at once but we firmly believe small, individual, everyday choices will contribute to larger change. We are also aware that growtogether, especially in these early stages, will be far from perfect but we will continue to strive to learn and engage with the produce we are supplying, those that we are supplied by and those that we supply to. And we hope to continually do better - until we become the big corporation ourselves and then it’s all business business business, money money money!!!
Thanks for reading, hope it was worthwhile.
