When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God.
Leviticus 19: 9-10
On Canadian Thanksgiving weekend back in early October I listened to a CBC Sunday Morning interview with James Rebanks, a British farmer and author. I had been aware of Rebanks before but I was struck by his wisdom and solidity while listening to his voice.
The interview sent me on a search at our local library for Rebanks' recently published book, Pastoral Song: A Farmer's Journey. It is an honest, gritty lovesong for the hill country in which he was raised, a region where his family has farmed for hundreds of years. Sheep were and still are part of the farm, as are cattle, and since I was a shepherd of a different kind and intrigued by how people survive on the land I read the book and appreciated it -- he is an excellent writer.
The book doesn't paint an idyllic picture of pastoral landscapes as it acknowledges that modern-day farming is a "rock and a hard place" enterprise. We've come to expect relatively low prices for a huge variety of foods which show up in grocery stores from around the world. Larger scale, industrial style farming has pushed out many smaller holdings yet resulted in crippling debt for many, along with degradation of soil and water, in order to compete.
Rebanks learned a traditional way of farming as a boy alongside his grandfather, a patient and steadfast man whom he adored. His father was hardworking but often critical, overwhelmed by the endless tasks of each day, as well as struggling to know which path to take in working the land and raising animals as agriculture changed.
After time away from the farm to study at Oxford and engage in international work James has returned to the farm. Before his father's untimely death they became friends. They were brought together, in part, by their realization that industrial farming was a dead end, figuratively and literally.
Rebanks writes about being awakened to the importance of balance by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, a classic of the early 1960's. As he puts it:
I felt as though I had woken from a long coma. I had almost conditioned myself to exclude nature from the way I thought about the farm.I had begun to view my grandfather's way of farming with contempt, to pity my father's reluctance to modernize. But now I felt like a bloody foolm because my grandfather had been right to resist, and my father was right to instinctively distrust it all.
Rebanks still has to make a living on his farm and there will always be compromises to do so. Still he has begun to put in place practices which are in fact the old ways which allowed his forebears to farm in the area for so long. He is reestablishing hedgerows for birds and creatures. He is working with different environmental groups and government agencies to rewild the river which runs through his property. Even though he has to relinquish control over the land in some respects he is creating a more balanced approach to farming which may be the hope for the future, including his own children.
Even though he doesn't consider himself to be a conventionally religious person James quotes from the Older Testament book of Leviticus (see above) when he considers the moral and ethical code of those who came before him which was different from the "total war" on nature which is exploitation.
Let's pray that society as a whole wakes up from its collective coma for the wellbeing of Creation.
While I'm on the topic, check out Topsy Farms on nearby Amherst Island. They are folk who are addressing these issues with much the same sensibilities and we admire what they're up to. https://www.topsyfarms.com/
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