Sarah Langford didn’t expect to write a book about farming. She is a lawyer and lives in the city. But she was the grandchild of farmers, and events led her and her family back into farming almost by accident. This book tells her story, along with the stories of other farmers at a time of profound change in the sector.
As the book describes, farming’s reputation has changed in recent decades. At the end of the Second World War Britain was intensely vulnerable when it came to food. Rationing went on for years into the peace, and farmers were incentivised to skill up, mechanise and increase production. They knew the difference they were making to the nation, and there was real pride in that role.
Those incentives persisted beyond their usefulness, morphing over the years into subsidy schemes and leading to over-production and dependence on fertilisers and fossil fuels. Production was all important, and ‘nature’ was something that needed to be sprayed and fenced out. Generations of farming later, there’s a divide between farming culture and an environmental agenda that looks suspiciously like it was written by city people who don’t know what they’re talking about. Now farmers are often seen as the enemy of progress, and even vilified by certain influential voices in the green movement.
As Langford describes, farming is indeed unsustainable, and in more ways than people might realise. It’s not environmentally sustainable, compacting the soil and bombing the life out of it with chemical inputs. Neither is it economically sustainable, with farmers in debt, constantly making a loss and operating on the edge of bankruptcy. That, in turn, makes it a socially and psychologically unsustainable profession. Farmers are leaving the profession in droves, and since it is an identity more than a profession, and since it is so closely tied to a particular place, this is a huge wrench. Suicide among farmers is alarmingly commonplace.
Rooted doesn’t describe this through trends and theory, but through people and their stories. If you want facts and figures, it won’t be hard to find books on farming in which men argue with other men about numbers. This one is about people. Chapter titles are just names: Tom, Rebecca and Stuart, Sam and George. All of these are farmers trying to navigate the change and finding their own alternatives through various forms of regenerative farming. We hear what changed their minds, the point at which traditional methods no longer made sense – another crop lost, a disease outbreak and a mass cull. We hear about opposition and scepticism, experimentation and a return to a more workable footing by working with nature rather than against it.
Because it’s fundamentally about people, my edition of the book is badly named. How Regenerative Farming can Change the World is a misleading subtitle. We don’t get to any kind of definition of regenerative farming until page 291. It’s certainly not about the world either, being strictly about the UK, and most specifically about a certain farm in Suffolk. The original title was Rooted: Stories of Life, Land and a Farming Revolution, which reflects the content so much better.
Then again, I probably wouldn’t have read the book with that subtitle. I’d have expected lots of leaning on fences and running hands through soil (of which there is plenty here), which is all fine but not what I’m after. I was looking for a book about regenerative farming when I bought Rooted and this isn’t what I wanted, but I’m nevertheless glad I read it. It humanises a debate that often polarises around theories and absolutes, and that’s vitally important. It makes room for empathy and compassion for ordinary people under immense pressure.
Because they live closer to the land than anyone, and manage 70% of Britain’s land, there’s no sustainable future that doesn’t include farmers. Making them the enemy of environmentalism is deeply counter-productive. Without naming any names, if you’ve felt yourself drawn into arguments between competing visions of farming’s future, then Sarah Langford’s book is the antidote. Grounded, human, full of resilience and courage, and hopeful about the possibility of a new way of farming:
“All it takes is someone to be brave enough to start and soon the ideas will roll out to their neighbours, and their neighbours, and their neighbours, onwards in waves until there is non one left able to say ‘that won’t work here’, because it already has.”
- Rooted is available from Earthbound Books UK
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