English Pastoral by James Rebanks

Author:James Rebanks [Rebanks, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141982588
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2020-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

~

My father wasn’t much of a churchgoer, but he believed in something similar. He thought that things should have limits and constraints. He believed in moderation and balance. And he died hating what had happened to farming. He had seen enough of it to know it had become a corruption of all he had loved and cared about. In the last decade of his life he had no time for its fucked-up logic. He was saddened by what it had done to families, rural communities, animals and nature. He lost interest in trying to keep up with the big farmers on our own land. He acted as if it was all a stupid game that he wasn’t interested in playing. So he looked after his own land, and just held on. He never got to see the new farming at its global extreme and wouldn’t have thanked you for the opportunity. But in the months after his death my wife Helen and I travelled to the American Midwest for the first time. Twenty years earlier I had seen something of the new farming emerging in Australia (enough to know what was coming) but I knew now that the Midwest was the logical conclusion of all that was happening. The efficiency endgame. My farming apprenticeship ended by seeing that future in its purest form.

~

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 the 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.

We had travelled to the heart of American farming country to stay with an old friend in Kentucky. It was winter and it felt like it might never end. We were made welcome in the white clapboard farmhouse that was full of books. We ate good simple food and talked about our families and our farms. But as hard as we tried to be cheerful, it felt as if we had stumbled into someone else’s grief. There was a sense of impending doom about the coming election results. This had once been a thriving landscape of small- and medium-sized farms. Now it felt like a landscape littered with ghosts and relics.

Our friend drove us around the county in his white pick-up truck, with his sheepdog in the back and his red 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

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