English Pastoral: An Inheritance - The Sunday Times bestseller from the author of The Shepherd's Life

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He makes no bones about the hardness of the life and his frustration at having to earn money outside the farm to make ends meet. However, such is the sweeping nature of his polemic that there is a danger some readers will come away from the book assuming all modern farming is environmentally destructive. Alternatively, it can be taken as a challenge to both politicians and the public to think through how we map out a future for these landscapes and the people who live in marginal economic situations. James Rebanks combines the descriptive powers of a great novelist with the pragmatic wisdom of a farmer who has watched his world transformed.

The farmers were changing, too – managerial “shirt and tie” types driving round in Range Rovers became the norm. In recent years, I have come across many farmers who are working hard to address the problems Rebanks identifies, whether in restoring soil fertility, improving animal welfare or encouraging wildlife to flourish. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world were brought close to collapse, and how the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things were lost. Furthermore, if those who decide the allocations of the real and unreal are cruel, mad or colossally wrong, what then? Towards the end of this lyrical and passionate book, the farmer James Rebanks describes how he is moving towards producing food using the minimum amount of artificial inputs, such as chemical fertilisers.But in spite of it all, he would have no other life, as the sight of a barn owl at dusk or a meadow of wild flowers afford a moment of wonder that make it all worthwhile. Now around one in five people there is hungry – still far too many, but an improvement on the not-so-distant past. I can't remember a book I've wanted to press into people's hands more this year than this resonant, immensely thoughtful look back at three generations of a farming family . Since then, the author has become a frequent presence on radio, ranging from dedicated farming topics to general and very popular broadcasts on food, the countryside, and the environment.

Removing sheep from these fells in favour of trees, or reducing headage numbers making the business of shepherding unviable, would set in motion a chain of consequences which would alter both the landscapes and the communities.I see farmers starting to work together to make this place even better, finding ways to farm around wilder rivers.