"KEEPING THEIR SHEEP":

The months after my father's death were the hardest of my life. I had always wanted to be the farmer, the captain of the ship with my hand on the wheel, but the moment it happened it felt empty. The world seemed a dull shade of gray.

Beyond our little valley, people everywhere seemed to have gone insane, electing fools and doing strange things in their anger. England was divided and broken. Suddenly in those months I felt lost. It was as if I had been following in someone else's footsteps down a path, talking to them, reassured by them when the going got tough, and then they had disappeared. The farm was a lonely place--a poorer thing when it wasn't shared. And with every passing year farmers were becoming fewer and fewer, a vanishingly small and increasingly powerless share of the population. Our world felt fragile, like it might now break into tiny pieces.

The UN says that five million people move from rural communities to urban ones every month, the greatest migration in human history. Much of this took place two or three generations ago in Britain, the "first industrial nation." So ours is now one of the least rural societies on earth. The majority of people now live in towns and cities, and we tend to give little serious thought to the practical realities of farming, the vital moment when we come up against the natural world. And yet we are all still tethered to the land in a practical sense--our entire civilization relies on farming surpluses, which free most of us from growing our own food, allowing us to do other things. We are no longer the slaves of the "dark Satanic mills" of the industrial era, but millions of us are still reluctantly chained to desks in the soulless corporate offices that followed. They used to call England a "green and pleasant land" but in truth it was never entirely green, nor entirely pleasant.

It was a tough old place with almost every acre used by humans, but there was much in it that was good. And yet the truth is that the countryside that feeds us has changed. It is profoundly different from even a generation ago. The old working landscapes and the wildlife that lived in them have mostly disappeared, replaced by an industrial farming system that in its scale, speed, and power is quite unlike anything that preceded it. This new farming has proved to be both productively brilliant and, we now know, ecologically disastrous. The more we learn about this change, the more unease and anger we feel about what farming has become. Our society was created by this farming, and yet we increasingly distrust it.

This was a lousy time to inherit a farm. I was now solely responsible for making the decisions about how we managed my family's land. In the months after my father's death five years ago I began to feel a kind of despair. Our role was now being challenged and criticized as never before. Reports of bad news and scientific studies about the decline and loss of wild things on farmland became commonplace on the TV and radio. Rain forests were burned, rivers poisoned, soils eroded, and countless landscapes made sterile and bereft of nature. Anger filled the newspapers and the news. Being a farmer felt for the first time like something you were supposed to say sorry for. And with some sadness and shame I could see that there was truth in all this.

My new role wasn't heroic, as I had imagined it would be in my youth. It was just confusing and complicated, and fraught with doubts. Countless choices--some large and fundamental, and others tiny, incremental, and day-to-day--that would shape this little bit of England for better or for worse were now mine to make. It felt like a lot rested on my knowledge, or lack of it, and my values and beliefs. And I was suddenly aware how constrained my choices were, and how little I knew. I would have to work out how to make money from our land without wrecking it. I had inherited a complex bundle of economic and ecological challenges--and that, perhaps, was what it really meant to be a farmer. When we lose our way, it often pays to retrace the footsteps on our journey until we get back to familiar territory.

In those painful first months, my grandfather's farming became for me such a moment from which I could navigate through what had happened in order to understand what had gone wrong. I thought a lot about how he managed his land and cared about his animals and the natural world around him. I tried to understand afresh what it meant to be a farmer. I returned in memory to a day spent plowing a field in April, nearly forty years ago. Every detail was frozen in my head. Forty years doesn't sound long ago, but in farming terms it is like returning to the age of the dinosaurs.

Perhaps I would only discover old mistakes, or get a nostalgic sense of what that traditional farming was. But I returned to the past with a sense of hope, that it might hold some of the answers--and help me to work out what kind of farmer I could, and must, become.

What was great about my grandfather is that he looked like he belonged in his place in the world. Maybe not a very good dad to his son, but very kind to me. He knew the answer to anything I could conceivably ask about our land and this valley, more aware than other people - for example, he knew exactly where the foxes went under the wire fence, as he kept an eye out for fox hair. And he did something which I thought magical. While others ran around, unable to make things go as fast as they wanted, he'd be in a slow gear and yet get loads done. He seemed really smart and I admired smartness, despite having no interest in school. I tried to emulate him. I wanted to spend time stopping and really looking at things. [...]

After my grandfather died, when I was 17, my life revolved for 20 years around my father. It was quite tense and painful - we were different people and clashed quite a bit. But in the last 10 or more years of his life he either improved or I changed my perception. Without becoming overly soppy here - with that whole northern father and son thing - he ended up as my best friend. I was writing The Shepherd's Life when I found out he was dying of cancer and the manuscript changed. In my mind it became a letter to him. I wanted to tell his story, my story and say why I loved him. To my surprise, he was very proud of my book.

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