There was one day in each of the springs of my childhood when we moved the ewes and lambs from the fields around the house to land at the top of the farm. Neighbours, friends and sheepdogs as well as us kids were called on to help – the lively lambs would sometimes escape through fences or take wrong turns, needing to be rounded up or caught. Birds called all around us – bubbling curlews with their long-legged chicks running in the verges, a colony of arctic terns swooping above. In the earth of one of those fields, Dad found a sharpened stone tool, evidence of land worked for thousands of years.
Those days come to mind reading two books that challenge us to think again about farming – what it has come to mean and how it could be transformed. Sarah Langford’s Rooted, with its case studies of agriculture over the last few decades, makes me thankful I grew up on the type of mixed family farm far less common than it once was. George Monbiot’s Regenesis takes as its subject no less than the entire world’s food production system and dares to imagine a world largely free of farming as we have known it.
