Pastoral Song Quotes

“The modern world worships the idea of the self, the individual, but it is a gilded cage: there is another kind of freedom in becoming absorbed in a little life on the land. In a noisy age, I think perhaps trying to live quietly might be a virtue. *”
― James Rebanks, Pastoral Song

“There is something about planting trees that feels good. If you have done it well, it will outlast you and leave the world a little richer and more beautiful because of your efforts. Planting a tree means you believe in, and care about, a world that will be there after you are gone. It means you have thought about more than yourself, and that you can imagine a future beyond your own lifespan, and you care about that future.”
― James Rebanks, English Pastoral: An Inheritance

“In a noisy age, I think perhaps trying to live quietly might be a virtue.”
― James Rebanks, Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey

“The truth is, a farm swallows you up, takes everything you have, and then asks for more. It is also an exercise in humility: you can’t do it alone.”
― James Rebanks, Pastoral Song

“Thankfully, my father never sent me to agricultural college. He was old-school and thought those places turned out people who knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing.”
― James Rebanks, English Pastoral: An Inheritance

“These people lived insular, often deeply private lives focused on their work. Their voices were rarely heard, because they sought no audience. Their identities were constructed from things that couldn’t be bought in shops. They wore old clothes and only went shopping occasionally for essentials. They held “shop-bought” things in great contempt. They preferred cash to credit, and would mend anything that broke, piling up old things to use again someday, rather than throwing them away. They had hobbies and interests that cost nothing, turning their necessary tasks, like catching rats or foxes, into sport. Their friendships were built around their work, and the breeds of cattle and sheep they kept. They rarely took holidays or bought new cars. And it wasn’t all work—a lot of time was spent on farm-related activities that were communal and more relaxed, or in the simple enjoyment of wild things. My grandfather called this way of life “living quietly.”
― James Rebanks, Pastoral Song

“Agricultural education is still overwhelmingly about change and innovation, and "disruption," not what is sustainable and what will work in the long run. From the modernizing perspective, the student in my hay meadow was right. The current economics of farming are such that almost no genuinely sustainable farming is profitable at present. Farming for nature is economic suicide. Produce meat at a greater cost than intensively produced chicken or pork and you are considered an anachronism on the supermarket shelf.
    I have to ignore my accounts in this bid for good husbandry and hope the rest of the world comes to its senses someday soon. Of course this is no basis for a sound system, but I decided years ago that if I had to work off the farm to top up our income, to enable me to look after our land properly, than I would. There is nothing new in having to adapt and earn a crust away from the farm. I know that if we are too proud, too stubborn, and too unbending, then we will be finished.”
― James Rebanks, Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey

“There were profoundly important questions about the potential effects of each new technology that it was nobody's job to ask or answer. There was no mechanism for farmers or ecologists to judge whether a technology or new farming practice was on balance a "good" thing or a "bad" thing, and we really didn't know when we had crossed the invisible threshold from one to the other.”
― James Rebanks, Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey

“Our leading agricultural colleges still churn out "business-focused" young farmers, fired up with productive zeal. Students are taught to be at the cutting edge of the new farming, applying science and technology to control nature. They are taught to think about the land like economists. They are taught nothing about tradition, community, or ecological limits. Rachel Carson isn't on the curriculum. Different colleges and courses elsewhere churn out young ecologists who know nothing about farming or rural lives. Education is divided by specialism, and sorts the young people into two separate tribes who can barely understand each other.”
― James Rebanks, Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey

“Thankfully, my father never sent me to agricultural college. He was old school and thought those places turned out people who knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing. In my early twenties, I remember telling him, admiringly, about the farm of a friend of mine that was doing lots of cutting-edge technological things, and he simply said, "Let's give them twenty-five years and see how they get on, before we get too carried away." Time was his test, not short-term profit or what was fashionable.”
― James Rebanks, Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey

“My grandfather seemed to have found a way to endure it through enjoying the wild things around him, and in taking pride at doing things right. He seemed to be saying to me: learn to see the beauty in mowing thistles, learn to enjoy the skill of the scythe, learn to tell stories or make people laugh so that even the toughest working days won’t break you.”
― James Rebanks, Pastoral Song

“They had, unbeknownst to me, been carrying flukes in their livers—a parasite that uses a tiny freshwater snail as its host for part of its life cycle and then is eaten”
― James Rebanks, Pastoral Song