Rooted by Sarah Langford; Regenesis reviews by George Monbiot - how to fix farming

There was a day in each of the springs of my childhood when we moved the ewes and lambs from the fields around the house to land on top of the farm. Neighbors, friends and sheepdogs as well as us children were called for help - the live lambs sometimes escaped through fences or took wrong turns, needing to be herded or caught. Birds were screeching all around us – curlews with their long-legged chicks running in the aisles, a colony of arctic terns swooping overhead. In the dirt of one of these fields, Dad found a sharp stone tool, evidence of land that had been worked for thousands of years.

These days me come to mind when reading two books that challenge us to rethink agriculture – what it has become and how it might be transformed. Sarah Langford's Rooted, with her case studies of farming over the past decades, makes me grateful to have grown up on the much less common type of mixed family farm than it once was. George Monbiot's Regenesis takes as its subject nothing less than the global food production system and dares to imagine a world largely free of agriculture as we have known it.

"My grandfather Peter," writes Langford, "was a hero who fed a starving nation. Now his son Charlie, my uncle, is seen as a villain, blamed for the environmental disaster and with a legacy no one knows about. From Langford's immediate family, we travel across England, meeting dairy farmers crushed by the low prices supermarkets pay for milk, disillusioned pig farmers turning to mixed farming and small organic farmers. The stories are often frustrating and heartbreaking: stories of declining incomes, BSE, foot and mouth disease and Covid. Langford is brilliant at explaining the impact of complex economic forces on individuals. The book e st absorbing, compassionate and should have an uplifting effect.

We follow Langford as she unexpectedly finds herself managing her husband's family's arable farm in the Suffolk. They are replanting hedgerows, reclaiming old field names, going organic, introducing new crop rotations, planting trees and wildflowers, extending field margins and bringing in grazing animals. They see the land begin to prosper and meet other farmers doing similar things. This type of “regenerative agriculture,” she writes, “is more than just growing food...it is a movement that can heal not only ecological but also social ills.” Here, livestock grazing can benefit soil health and biodiversity – and communities.

Since my childhood in the 1980s, curlew numbers have decreased and the colony of arctic terns disappeared completely. As a farmer's daughter and environmentalist, I find myself in the middle of what is often a fierce culture war over how to respond to climate change and biodiversity loss and what that means for the future of our earth. . Langford and Monbiot represent two different sides of this battle. However, they are in close agreement on many of the major issues, such as soil depletion, market pressures, and industrialization that cause suffering for livestock, wildlife, and farmers.

Regenesis conveys a sense of urgency in the face of these challenges and has enormous reach. Monbiot thinks globally, looking beyond these shores to the poorest countries that feel the impact of climate change and economic pressures most deeply.

His arguments well documented are often revealing. It draws surprising links between, for example, soybeans grown in South America and the British chickens it is fed, illustrating the concept of 'ghost acres' - the area, outside of its own land, that a farm needs to work.