The Art of Manliness - Rooted Living in a Shallow Age — A Shepherd’s Guide to the Good Life

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.540 In a world that often feels dominated by technology and constant change,

00:00:15.360 it's easy to forget that some people are still living by the rhythms of ancient traditions.

00:00:20.160 James Rebanks, an author and shepherd, is one of them. And in today's episode,

00:00:23.860 he shares what following a way of life that has endured for thousands of years can teach us about

00:00:28.400 modern life and the things that matter. James offers a glimpse of the often ignored and

00:00:32.740 misunderstood world of pastoral life in England's Lake District, which isn't just about working

00:00:36.800 with sheep and cattle, but maintaining a deep connection to past generations, a commitment

00:00:40.720 to community, and a sense of purpose. He takes us through the life of a fell shepherd, where the

00:00:45.480 timeless values of hard work, seasonality, stewardship, and stillness still get lived out

00:00:50.660 day to day. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash shepherd.

00:00:58.400 All right, James Rebanks, welcome to the show.

00:01:09.760 Thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure.

00:01:12.240 So you are a shepherd in the Lake District of the United Kingdom. It's one of the mini

00:01:17.460 hats you wear. For those who aren't familiar with this area, can you describe it for us

00:01:21.660 and not just the landscape, but the culture of it?

00:01:24.160 Yeah, sure. So if you knew the place that I live from English literature, which lots of

00:01:29.520 people around the world do, it's probably the most written about place in England, but

00:01:33.960 nearly all of the writing about it was written by sort of middle class or upper middle class

00:01:39.240 poets who believed that in the 19th century, they discovered where we lived. And it was this

00:01:45.020 sort of lovely mountainous place with hobbit-like innocent people in it who they could write about 1.00

00:01:53.040 to their heart's delight. And they made it very famous. And they made it a sort of central,

00:01:57.520 the Lake District's a sort of central pillar of the English romantic imagination, if you

00:02:01.480 like. We love the place. It's got lakes, it's got mountains. And that's what people thought

00:02:06.500 it was, or lots of people think it is. But I'm actually a son of a native, and there's

00:02:10.980 no goddamn way that those poets discovered it, because my people and lots of other people

00:02:14.880 have been here for thousands of years. And I think, and sort of many of those people, 0.96

00:02:19.660 that it has its own culture. And it's a very rural, pastoral culture about shepherding and

00:02:26.380 having cattle and grazing the mountains and managing the forests. And all of the things

00:02:33.260 that are in the background of those poems or those paintings of the 19th or 20th century

00:02:37.240 was basically built by my people, my ancestors. So yeah, it's a mix of things, really. Some people

00:02:43.680 think it's the most English part of England, because of that romantic poetry. I think it's

00:02:48.040 the least English part of England. I think it's the most Scandinavian part. So we have 1.00

00:02:52.740 our own dialect and our own way of thinking. And a lot of that, maybe we'll return to it

00:02:57.420 later in the conversation. A lot of that is quite recognizably Scandinavian. And we know

00:03:01.820 from the history that the valleys where my family and many other families live and work

00:03:06.180 were effectively settled or culturally changed quite heavily by the Vikings a thousand years

00:03:11.400 ago. So it's, yeah, it was one of the poorest places in England for a very long time, quite

00:03:16.920 disconnected. We'd have some similarities for Americans with places like Appalachia. So

00:03:23.060 places that are notionally poorer, that other people might say were backwards. But if you're

00:03:28.300 actually from there and you know the truth, you know that there's a really rich, deep cultural

00:03:32.580 heritage there. And many special things survive in those places because of their isolation and

00:03:38.420 their sort of cultural defiance. Is that a fair way of putting it? I hope I'm being fair 0.58

00:03:42.760 to Appalachia.

00:03:43.940 No, that sounds about right.

00:03:44.940 So my American friends laugh and say I'm a hillbilly.

00:03:48.900 And one of, I guess one of those famous writers, Beatrix Potter, lived there and wrote about it.

00:03:54.340 Yeah, absolutely. So Beatrix Potter, who lots of people listening to this will know from the

00:03:59.220 Peter Rabbit books and all those beautiful children's books. She came on a wave of sort of romantic

00:04:05.000 enthusiasm with her family in the early 20th century. They came to this place. They read

00:04:10.420 those books and poems. But to her very great credit, she gets really interested in the people

00:04:16.560 of the place and the shepherds and the other people. So as a girl, she's seeing them and

00:04:21.060 she's wondering what their lives are like. And later on, she went on to be this amazing

00:04:25.760 businesswoman as well as writer. And she did clever things like she franchised the children's 1.00

00:04:31.700 toys that were sold of Peter Rabbit, made loads of money. And what did she do with that money? 0.65

00:04:35.720 She started buying farms in our valleys to protect them from developers and to try and 0.77

00:04:41.380 preserve the way of life that I'm part of with my sheep. And in a slightly sort of secondhand

00:04:45.960 kind of way, became part of that world. But I think she's brilliant. And she preserved a lot

00:04:51.700 of the farms that I now do business with. A lot of the farms I now go to, these beautiful

00:04:57.360 little stone farmsteads at the bottom of the mountains, often painted white with whitewash

00:05:01.760 with lovely stone barns on the end of them. Just those absolutely beautiful. When you imagine

00:05:06.560 the north of England and those beautiful little cottages, she saved some of the best stuff.

00:05:11.520 So people have been there for over a thousand years. How much has life changed for the families,

00:05:18.580 the natives that have been there for a long time farming in the Lake District?

00:05:22.440 So we know from the early accounts, basically when the posh people and the writers and the painters

00:05:26.960 turned up about 200, 250 years ago, we know that this was an incredibly impoverished place

00:05:32.520 and had such a strong dialect. They thought that people were speaking Norwegian. They often

00:05:37.560 had beards and looked like Vikings. And the isolation of this place had preserved sort of

00:05:43.860 lots of very special things. So the big transition is after that. So we know it was very much its

00:05:50.960 own place with its own culture. Then within a few decades, with the coming of the railways and

00:05:56.640 all that sort of stuff, we have lots and lots of people start to come here. And from then on,

00:06:00.940 people like my family look like they played a kind of game with two sets of rules. They carry on doing

00:06:07.240 what they do, working on the mountains with the sheep and the cattle. But they learn how to play

00:06:11.600 the tourism game as well. And they learn how to take people up mountains as guides. They learn how to

00:06:17.800 cater for whatever these strange urban people from the south of England want.

00:06:21.580 And that's resulted, I mean, the stats are crazy now. So we're talking about 13 valleys,

00:06:27.260 quite small valleys in the north of England. There are 43,000 people live here, most of them in three

00:06:32.300 small towns. About 300 families like mine manage the farmed landscape, the cultural landscape,

00:06:38.200 and 21 million people a year come to visit. So we're in this place with an incredibly dense

00:06:45.620 amount of tourism happening to us. And that's had some negative effects, but maybe one of the

00:06:50.500 positive effects is it's enabled some of those little farms and their ancient traditions to carry

00:06:55.060 on. So basically you have small farmers learning how to hustle and make some money from tourism so

00:06:59.660 they can keep going with this. And you said some of that was a thousand years old. Actually,

00:07:04.260 some of it's at least four and a half thousand years old. Some of it may go back to the settling

00:07:08.060 after the last ice age, 8,000 years ago, maybe.

00:07:10.840 Wow. Before we get into shepherding, let's talk a bit more about your background because your life

00:07:16.020 has straddled this ancient world, the Lake District, in the modern world. You studied at Oxford. How did

00:07:22.780 that happen?

00:07:24.340 So I'm a funny hybrid creature. I met a sociologist once and he said I was good at switching codes.

00:07:32.480 So my two codes are basically, I'm from this old-fashioned farming family. I grew up doing what

00:07:37.600 we do. I had a grandfather that was very sort of ancient and oldie worldie. And I thought I wanted 1.00

00:07:43.280 to be just like him. The reality was I was growing up in the 1980s and 90s and you couldn't be just

00:07:49.120 like him. You had to go to school, maybe go to college, do other things. I left school at 15

00:07:53.800 with no qualifications. I sort of bummed out of school because I thought that was an act of loyalty

00:07:58.120 to my people so I could go back and work on the farm. I did that for nine years, basically working

00:08:02.260 for minimum wage. And then I met a young woman who, called Helen, who became my wife, who's still my

00:08:07.680 wife. And she sent me back to school. She noticed that I was really bookish. She sent me back to

00:08:12.300 the local city to evening classes for basically workers that were doing their education. And I

00:08:19.620 got an amazing teacher there and he said I should apply to go to Oxford University. And I said,

00:08:24.120 well, I haven't even got any school qualifications. And he persuaded me to do it anyway. And they kind

00:08:29.140 of picked me up as a bit of a nobody. It was a little bit like, in a funny way, it was a little

00:08:33.140 bit like Good Will Hunting, the movie. They sort of spotted me, picked me out of what I was doing.

00:08:38.160 And I went there. And ever since, I've had a very strange double life where some people think I'm

00:08:43.600 clever and urbane and my own people think I'm a farmer.

00:08:47.520 So what did you study while you were at Oxford?

00:08:49.560 I studied history, modern history for the first three years. And then I won a scholarship and I

00:08:54.160 did a year where I studied modern American history. So you can hit me up with questions

00:08:58.980 about the Lincoln-Douglas debates or the Vietnam War or the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

00:09:05.340 And I can hopefully remember some of that. And what have you done with your degree?

00:09:09.860 So part of me at that time, because I thought the farm was going to spit me out. I thought we

00:09:13.360 were going to go broke and we're going to lose it. And I had to have another hustle. So I thought

00:09:17.740 maybe another hustle was to be a historian. But I actually couldn't stay away from home a minute

00:09:23.640 longer. So my wife and I went home to take on the farm, try and give it a future. But I've never

00:09:29.160 really stopped sort of being a historian of my own landscape, speaking about the past of my own

00:09:34.220 people. And I realized somewhere along the way on that journey that I thought somebody else must

00:09:40.040 have written the book that explained my people. It couldn't be enough that the poets and painters

00:09:43.560 had done all the cultural work. And then I realized after a while that had to be me. I was the strange

00:09:49.540 hybrid creature that could do it. So I wrote a book called The Shepherd's Life, which changed my life 1.00

00:09:55.000 really. It was just about who we were as a people and tells the story of my father and my grandfather

00:09:59.260 and the people that I grew up among. And that book went kind of crazy. And yeah, a million books or so

00:10:06.660 later, I'm talking to you. I've had a very strange experience. Well, let's talk about shepherding in the

00:10:13.040 Lake District. I thought it was really fascinating. You get into the details, the day-to-day, what the seasons

00:10:17.640 of the life were like, and you do a type of shepherding that's called fell shepherding. What is fell

00:10:24.380 shepherding? Okay, so fell is Norwegian. They basically call a mountain a fjell. And so it's

00:10:30.800 basically mountain farming. I really am a hillbilly. And what does it mean? Well, it's a kind of farming

00:10:35.880 that's lots of places in developing countries would recognize, but not many farmers in the modern world

00:10:40.980 would recognize. So we have one of the largest areas of common land in Western Europe in our mountains.

00:10:47.040 And common land is places where if you're a qualified commoner, which means you own land in that area and you

00:10:52.820 farm it, you have rights to take a certain number of sheep, cattle, ducks, grazing animals to the

00:10:58.560 mountains. And you farm the mountains in common with your neighbors and colleagues. And so that's

00:11:05.020 what we do. So in the next couple of days, we're going to go to the mountains, about 10 of us with

00:11:09.640 about 25 sheepdogs on foot. We're going to gather 10 flocks of sheep, some of which will be mixed from

00:11:16.240 the mountain. It'll take two days. My daughter will go with me because she's got good dogs and lots of my

00:11:21.300 neighbors. And we'll work as a community to bring the sheep down from those mountains to the penfold 0.97

00:11:27.040 or the hospital, the place where we sought them. And we'll sort them into the separate flocks and

00:11:32.200 bring them down to our little farms in the valley bottom a few miles below to do the shearing, to get

00:11:37.080 the wool off. And then in the next month, they'll go back to that mountain. The crazy part of this is

00:11:42.020 that the sheep teach their daughters which part of the mountain to live on. There's a word called 0.72

00:11:45.760 hefting or hefted, another Viking word. And it means that these sheep always have to go back

00:11:51.220 to the mountain each spring with their mothers, every generation of daughters until they know

00:11:56.380 their place on the mountain. And they don't, there's no fences, but they don't go crazy and

00:12:00.240 leave in different directions. They live on a particular part of the mountain where my sheep

00:12:04.220 have been hefted for maybe a thousand years. And it's one of the few farming systems in the

00:12:09.720 world where when you look at the cattle or the sheep on the mountain, you can know that

00:12:15.140 they are exactly the same genetic flock or herd that's been there since the first domesticated

00:12:20.760 animals went up there. It's crazy. We're doing work on a mountain which people did maybe four and a

00:12:25.980 half thousand years ago in the same way. That's crazy. You described like how it differs from most

00:12:30.620 shepherding. If you were in the United States and you were going across the plains, you might just see

00:12:34.780 a flock of sheep in a plot of land. This sounds like it's more organic. I don't know. It's, it's,

00:12:42.760 there's sort of a natural rhythm you have to fall into to do this type of shepherding.

00:12:47.260 Yep. So one thing this system teaches you very quickly is that you're not special. You're just

00:12:52.500 the latest person doing that work in the way that it's always been done for thousands of years and

00:12:57.780 somebody will do it after you and you have to do it the way it's done because you're working with

00:13:02.020 other people. You have to do it on the dates when it's done and you have to do it in the way that

00:13:06.060 the mountain allows. You can't do some flashy new farming technology. It's just not going to work in

00:13:10.040 that place. But there's probably something I need to explain, Brett, before we go any further.

00:13:14.140 When I got interested in America, I realized that you have, because of cowboys and stuff,

00:13:19.420 you have like a very proud or macho culture to do with cows in American farming. But sheep farmers, 0.99

00:13:26.740 I think in American culture, sort of slightly effeminate. I was watching some of the Yellowstone

00:13:30.960 stuff recently and sheep farmers are sort of like a sort of plague of peasants that come in and over 1.00

00:13:37.160 graze places. And it's not as kind of macho or good as being a cattle farmer. That's not like that

00:13:42.760 where we live. So the farming for a very long time has been about the sheep primarily with the cattle

00:13:47.780 in the background. And to be a shepherd here is like one of the proudest things, the most high

00:13:53.000 status things you could be in the indigenous culture of this place is a shepherd. So when my

00:13:58.180 grandfather said he was a shepherd, he literally looks anybody in the face and there's no deference,

00:14:03.160 there's no fear. He doesn't think he's better than people, but he's absolutely sure in his mind,

00:14:07.640 he's no worse than anybody else. Yeah. The manliness of shepherds reminds me of this study

00:14:12.780 that this anthropologist did back in the seventies on shepherds who live on the island of Crete. He

00:14:18.620 published his book, it's called The Poetics of Manhood. And these Cretan shepherds, they had this

00:14:24.780 really strong culture of manliness. There's a celebration of bravado, boldness, improvisation

00:14:31.700 was highly valued, but a lot of proving their manhood involved stealing sheep from other

00:14:38.240 people's flocks. You had to demonstrate courage and daring that way. So they had a coat of honor,

00:14:43.620 but they're also kind of roguish, you know, kind of figures. And it's interesting that the

00:14:48.200 perception of shepherds have differed across time and culture, you know, from Greece to the Bible.

00:14:54.160 Sometimes they've been seen as kind of sneaky, cunning outsider types, but it seems like more often

00:14:59.880 it's been seen as a trustworthy, respected, noble profession.

00:15:05.360 Oh yeah. This, this is a very proud, very honest tradition. And actually one of the things about

00:15:10.400 farming common land on the mountains together is that honesty and integrity become the defining

00:15:15.920 things that you aspire to as an individual, because if you're gathering a mountain and you

00:15:21.000 have opportunities to steal other people's sheep. So in our culture, you would bend over backwards to

00:15:26.500 avoid even looking like that could happen. If a sheep comes down from the mountain that hasn't

00:15:31.160 been claimed, the shepherds on my fell, our mountain would argue about giving it to each other rather

00:15:38.320 than taking it themselves to avoid the perception that they might be people that grab more than their

00:15:43.100 fair share, that might be willing to take something that wasn't theirs. And there was a fascinating case

00:15:48.600 around here about 10 years ago where there was a sheep farmer who's basically not a good egg,

00:15:53.740 had been stealing other people's sheep. And that was amazing because the, the whole shepherding

00:15:59.340 community, once they realized this, turned their back on this person and refused to deal with them,

00:16:04.720 refused to do business with them. And they had to stop farming in that place. They couldn't sell

00:16:09.040 their sheep. They couldn't do anything. The shepherd just turned their backs on the ring when the

00:16:12.320 livestock came to like the sale yard. And they were sending a very clear message. We don't steal.

00:16:16.960 We don't do that. We don't do dirty on each other. We're in this together. And if you're going to play

00:16:21.980 fast and loose with the rules, you're not part of this. So there's a kind of old Testament

00:16:25.980 absolutism about that. There's no way back.

00:16:28.740 Yeah. It's an honor culture.

00:16:30.040 Yeah. It's an honor culture and quite a tough one. Like you're meant to do the work well.

00:16:34.220 You're meant to work hard. So we've been shearing the sheep to get the wool off recently. And

00:16:37.520 I'm getting a little old for that now. I'm 50, but a lot of the young people in this valley

00:16:41.560 are doing that work and they still admire hard work and keeping going and sweating and like

00:16:47.160 having proper sort of true grit. I know that's a little bit old fashioned now, but

00:16:50.840 you kind of earn your, earn your spurs. I guess you'd say by doing that work and doing it well

00:16:56.560 and by having good sheep dogs and being decent with other people, the being a good person's part

00:17:02.400 of it too. That's your reputation that you trade on, on the mountains.

00:17:05.420 So you mentioned sheep dogs. What makes for a good sheep dog?

00:17:08.920 So different things. There's different kinds actually. So a lot of people will know the English

00:17:13.200 border collies, like the black and white ones. They're very good at what we would call

00:17:16.940 field work. Like sometimes you see on the TV, they'll do that creeping around thing and

00:17:21.120 they use their eyes a lot and they're sort of creeping like a fox or a coyote or something.

00:17:25.520 That's cool. That wins competitions. But on the mountains, the fell shepherds here, like

00:17:29.500 a different kind of dog, like a half-bred dog. And what they're looking for is stamina. Sometimes

00:17:33.800 they want a dog that barks like an Australian Kelpie or a hunter way, and they're looking for

00:17:39.160 stamina. So with all due respect to the border collies, they can get pretty tired after maybe

00:17:44.100 an hour or two's work. But some of the cross-bred or specialist-bred mountain dogs can work for

00:17:49.760 five, six hours, maybe even in hot weather. And so that's much more about stamina. And

00:17:54.300 also, like I have a really good friend called Joe Weir that's got brilliant dogs for working

00:17:59.580 in the mountains. Better than mine, but don't tell him. He won't be listening to this.

00:18:03.260 But he can stand on one mountain, send his dogs down into the valley, up the other side of

00:18:07.600 the mountain. And on a whistle or using their own brains, they can bring a flock of sheep

00:18:12.120 down from the mountain that you're looking at across the abyss between you. And like,

00:18:16.160 he doesn't even think that's that remarkable. But behind his back, we're all looking at each

00:18:20.220 other going, what is that? That's like ninja level shepherding. None of us can do that.

00:18:26.440 And then the other part of that is, I don't know what the equivalent would be, being in

00:18:30.900 America, maybe being a cowboy, something like there's a freedom which comes with working in

00:18:35.780 the mountains, freedom from all the BS that happens down below the real, the rest of the

00:18:40.220 world. And it's like infectious. So if you meet like their fell shepherds, these people

00:18:44.840 that spend a big part of their summer of the year working in the mountains, that you've

00:18:49.420 never met people more obsessed with like what they do. Like they love it. Like there's no

00:18:53.600 drudgery involved. They think they're the freest people on earth doing the work that they love

00:18:58.400 with the dogs that they love, working with the sheep that they enjoy working with. And yeah,

00:19:03.180 if you tell those people that they should go and get a job that pays three times as much

00:19:06.480 money in the valley bottom, they just look at you like you're crazy. Like what would I want to do

00:19:09.900 that for?

00:19:11.100 Something you do in your book, A Shepherd's Life, you do a great job of describing the seasonality

00:19:16.040 of a shepherd. Tell us about the seasonality. What does a year look like for a shepherd?

00:19:21.240 So everything we do is absolutely dictated by the seasons and the dates. So I said earlier in this

00:19:27.620 podcast that I was going to the mountain in a couple of days time, that how it actually works is

00:19:31.780 the oldest shepherd on the mountain will tell me that we're going to the mountain, probably about

00:19:36.000 nine or 10 o'clock in the evening. And he'll tell me we're going four o'clock the next morning.

00:19:39.860 Try juggling that with a 21st century job like I did for a while. But everything has to be done

00:19:45.600 when it's done. You can't shear sheep out of season. You can't lamb them out of season. So

00:19:50.980 everything's happening at a time for a reason. So we lamb our sheep in April after the last frost and

00:19:55.920 snow so that they can go to the mountain in May, so that they can be in the mountain with their lambs,

00:20:01.320 hefting them and teaching them to live there until high summer when they come down again for the

00:20:05.360 shearing. They'll go back until the autumn when they come down so we can sell the male 0.69

00:20:09.400 lambs. And then they'll go back with their daughters until into winter. And then there's

00:20:13.200 a point, depending on the mountain, some stay up there all winter, some come down for the

00:20:17.520 winter. And around that is a whole bunch of other cultural activity. Like we have these

00:20:21.680 shepherd's meets and these shows where we're competing to see who has the best sheep, the

00:20:25.660 best flock. They all happen the day after all of those jobs are done at certain times of

00:20:30.200 year. And like my story, my schooling story was really that I grew up in that world and

00:20:35.780 I loved it. And I thought that was our culture. I thought everybody knew about it. I thought

00:20:39.480 they respected it. I thought everyone knew that was a great way to live. And I was amazed

00:20:43.820 when I went to school like 15 miles away at the local secondary school or high school, the

00:20:49.520 teachers didn't know anything about this. They thought I was an idiot because I wanted to 0.98

00:20:52.820 be a shepherd and they didn't understand that that was dignified or proud or you might want 1.00

00:20:56.960 to do it. They wanted you to go to college. They wanted you to leave. And I was just so

00:21:01.380 confused by these conflicting messages for one from my family and then another from school.

00:21:06.620 And I've never really shaken that. Everywhere I go around the world, I'm always looking for

00:21:11.220 those people like us. I'm like, okay, I don't want the official narrative. I want to know

00:21:15.880 like, where are the people that do the work? Where are the ordinary people here? And what do

00:21:19.420 they think they're doing? What does their life look like? And I think it's been a gift for

00:21:24.080 my family. Really? Okay. I've done some funny, some funny things away from home,

00:21:27.840 like going to Oxford university and writing the books, but I'm still who I always was. I'm still

00:21:32.920 that kid that is a little suspicious of schooling, a little suspicious of the contempt that some of

00:21:39.480 the modern world holds us in, because I honestly don't think we live better than some of my friends

00:21:43.800 who are shepherds. I'm not sure our values have improved. There's lots of things about it that I,

00:21:48.740 I hold onto very firmly. We're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

00:21:53.360 And now back to the show. I imagine one thing that modern people, when they might look at

00:22:01.060 your family and the people who live in the Lake district, they're like, I don't get that. It's,

00:22:05.300 it does sound very repetitive. And I think a lot of modern people find that repetitiveness

00:22:09.740 unbearably boring. I think we put a premium on novelty. What do you think the virtues of

00:22:15.620 repetitiveness are? And like, what do you think non-shepherds can learn from shepherds about that?

00:22:19.340 I guess the first thing that's flashing through my mind is the people who go to work at nine o'clock

00:22:24.700 in the morning, every morning in a car, a queue in the traffic, go into an office and sit with 0.90

00:22:29.680 the same three people who don't experience the weather, who have some jerk off for a boss telling 0.96

00:22:34.860 them what to do. And half the work's meaningless. Like that's not repetitive. I think loads of the 0.91

00:22:40.040 modern world's very, very repetitive and it feels meaningless to lots of people. But yes,

00:22:44.540 there is a cyclical sort of seasonal nature to our work, but it's always changing. Like an hour

00:22:49.800 before I came to talk to you, I had two bulls, two bulls escaped from a paddock. And I can tell

00:22:55.580 you, I had a very exciting half an hour while I got them off the road and got them back into where

00:22:59.200 they should be and fix things up. And two hours before that, I was talking to a young shepherd.

00:23:04.080 He was telling me about some, some things that they were doing. And later on today, I'm going to be

00:23:08.160 working with my daughter doing some other work and the weather's changing every five minutes.

00:23:12.960 And the office I'm in is like the most beautiful place in England with the mountains and the clouds

00:23:17.660 and the light changing. Repetitive isn't the word I would think of. And I sure as hell, I've tried the

00:23:23.320 other thing. I've worked in offices in London and other stuff when I was young. And I quite happily

00:23:28.400 take my granddad's deal any day of the week. Yeah. It sounds like the repetitiveness might be

00:23:32.260 repetitive on the big scale, but every day it's changing. It's going to change day to day.

00:23:37.440 Yeah, totally. And there's also very good fortune involved in it. You get to live in a beautiful

00:23:42.400 place. You get to work with your family. I love, I'm never far from my children or my wife.

00:23:46.900 I get to work with my community. I get to do something that's meaningful to me. I get to do

00:23:51.480 the work that my father and grandfather did. Every time I build a wall or mend a wooden fence or

00:23:56.820 something, I'm mending something that my granddad built or my dad built. That to me is absolutely

00:24:01.740 laden with love and significance and meaning. It doesn't even feel like work loads of the time to me.

00:24:07.100 Yeah. It sounds like it gives you a way to just situate yourself in the world

00:24:11.360 that a lot of modern people don't have.

00:24:13.940 I think so. And that's not the fault of lots of people in the modern world. Lots of people

00:24:18.260 listening to this. Not everybody's lucky enough to have a family that somehow managed to hold on

00:24:21.860 on a farm. And I have loads of friends that live in cities and have more modern lives than me. And

00:24:27.160 they find other great ways to have meaning, right? This is not the only way to have meaning. You can

00:24:31.520 have meaning by being a teacher in a high school, right? Or being a nurse and caring for sick

00:24:35.920 people, there's so many, many, many ways of having meaning or sort of rooting yourself in things that

00:24:41.060 matter. But to me, I think we have like this crazy narrative in our society that being a farmer,

00:24:46.580 particularly a small farmer or producing food somehow isn't anachronistic or doesn't matter. I

00:24:51.040 believe the exact opposite of that. I passionately believe that we're not the last of anything.

00:24:55.780 We're holding on because this matters, because it's still significant. And we're increasingly

00:25:00.740 learning that the food that we all eat has a massive impact on our bodies, on our mental health.

00:25:06.440 I think anybody that grows food in any way, shape or form, whether they're urban, rural, whatever,

00:25:11.820 I think they're heroes. I don't mean that I am. I think generally people that produce food are doing

00:25:17.340 something of really high social value and cultural value. And we've somehow got seduced by a culture that

00:25:23.520 says, being a sports star or a billionaire or a big mouth politician, that these are the things that

00:25:30.480 we should respect and give high status to. And I don't believe that at all. I admire teachers and

00:25:36.020 nurses and farmers and people that do real things, if I'm honest. Something I was struck by as I was

00:25:40.480 reading A Shepherd's Life was the timescale that farmers live by in the Lake District. You're not just

00:25:47.080 thinking in terms of quarters or years. You're thinking in decades and even centuries. How does

00:25:53.740 that long timescale thinking change the way you make decisions? Well, like the little farm that

00:25:58.800 we're on at the moment, we have 200 acres that we own. We farm about 700 acres in total. But that's

00:26:04.960 been a multi-generational project, which is very humbling. It isn't just a commercial asset that

00:26:09.340 belongs to me and my wife. The rest of my family have an interest in it. It's their legacy as well.

00:26:13.960 So I have to respect that. And when I'm changing things on the farm, I'm thinking, whoa, like this

00:26:18.840 is not just mine. This is something that my father devoted his entire working life on until he died

00:26:24.880 of cancer 10 years ago. And this was my granddad's lifetime achievement as well. And I think that

00:26:31.200 keeps you small in a good way that you think, okay, and I've got kids, like my 17-year-old daughter

00:26:36.580 wants to be a farmer. I'm thinking, okay, I've got a kind of honor what I was inherited. I've got to

00:26:42.480 try and hand it on in a way that works for her. And I think there's an argument that that makes you

00:26:47.180 smaller and less significant that we should. But I don't believe that at all. I think we're

00:26:52.120 more significant when we're part of these flows of people and part of communities.

00:26:56.100 Yeah. It sounds like you're taking a stewardship mindset to your work.

00:26:59.220 Yeah. 100%. So we're obsessed on our farm with mending and building soil. We've changed the way that

00:27:05.300 we graze using modern science to be more regenerative grazers. We've restored habitats. We've

00:27:10.940 planted 40,000 trees on the farm. We've created wetlands. And at the same time, we're managing

00:27:16.480 to breed some of the best livestock in the two breeds that we had. So I think we're definitely

00:27:22.440 farmers. We take that really seriously on the livestock side, particularly. But I think we can

00:27:26.880 be stewards of the landscapes as well. And the truth is, we did some damage over the generations.

00:27:33.920 We didn't get everything right. The farmers didn't everywhere. They've had a cut. What we've done

00:27:38.720 has had a cost. But we're working to undo that damage, make it better. So we can look anybody

00:27:44.340 in the face and say, no, no, we're good stewards of this place. Like, look at what we're doing or

00:27:48.720 come and help us to do it better.

00:27:50.940 So I know farming can be filled with devastating setbacks. I have a friend who his family's

00:27:56.920 involved in farming. They do ranching. But then one of the things they did, they grew some hemp in

00:28:02.140 Oklahoma. And they planted, I think, like six figures worth of seeds. And then we had this

00:28:08.820 freak flash flood storm that hit the area. All got washed out. And it was just, they just saw

00:28:15.500 $100,000, $200,000 worth of work just... Have you had to deal with any of those sorts of setbacks

00:28:21.440 in your work?

00:28:22.920 Yeah. So in 2001, we, I guess people listening to this might have heard about it on the news.

00:28:28.060 In 2001, there was this thing called foot and mouth disease, like an epidemic that broke out. And

00:28:32.260 my grandfather's flock of sheep on one of the farms that we had at that time were taken out as part of

00:28:37.660 a government call. And yeah, there was 60, 100 years worth of our family's work was involved in

00:28:45.240 those sheep and they were killed, basically taken out. So yeah, I've seen the ups and the downs of the

00:28:51.320 whole thing. And yeah, farming's tough, right? It's trying to create order and productivity and

00:28:59.200 food and useful things out of nature. And nature's often got other ideas. And I've just tried to be

00:29:05.780 honest about that in my books. I've tried to talk about the toughness of it, the goodness of it,

00:29:09.580 the ups, the downs, and the kind of journey you go on as well. So yeah, I'm very, very, very proud of

00:29:16.320 our farm because I think it represents both my wife and I's work and my kids work for the last 10,

00:29:20.940 15, 20 years, but also my dads, my granddads, a whole bunch of other people. And I mean, one of

00:29:26.460 my great heroes these days is Wendell Berry, your great agrarian radical writer from Kentucky. And

00:29:32.380 I think Wendell's right. I think we need more farmers, not less. I think we need to care about

00:29:37.140 farming and food way more. We need to shop more thoughtfully, eat more thoughtfully. Not because you

00:29:42.440 owe me anything or Wendell anything, but because we'd have a better society, we did take food and

00:29:47.820 farming more seriously and put it more centrally in our culture. How did you bounce back from that

00:29:52.720 big setback where you saw centuries of work just get eliminated? I would just be like, I'm just going

00:29:58.780 to go into a hole and just curl into the fetal position. So what do you do? Like what any practical

00:30:03.920 advice there? Well, we sort of did that too. Like there's a moment where I went and cried in the

00:30:10.040 shadows. And there's a moment where my dad disappeared for a couple of hours and was broke.

00:30:14.100 And then you get up the next morning and start to rebuild, right? Little steps. And we have,

00:30:20.040 and I think that teaches you something too, which is, and it isn't just farming. You can see it all

00:30:23.780 around us in the world where people experience really terrible things. We're way more resilient

00:30:28.840 than we think we are. We can cope with remarkably bad moments, can't we? Remarkably bad things happening

00:30:34.180 to us and the people around us. And we can keep going.

00:30:37.120 Just get to work. It's all the only thing you can do.

00:30:40.000 I think so.

00:30:40.600 Yeah. So farming can be a very precarious way to make a living. It's gotten more expensive,

00:30:45.060 but sometimes the money you make from your work is going down or stayed the same. How have you guys

00:30:51.260 made it work? What have you, what sorts of changes have you made to make your way of life continue?

00:30:57.700 So we've made a lot of changes, particularly in the last 10 years since my dad died. Actually,

00:31:01.520 we, I think my default setting when I was young was one of sort of pride and defiance. I was going to do

00:31:07.060 what my grandfather had done come hell or high water, even if I had to have like an off-farm job.

00:31:12.040 I've mellowed a lot on that. I think we can adapt, we can change, we can flex way more than that. So in

00:31:17.440 the last 10 years, we've been very, very influenced by lots of Americans, actually. Two Americans that

00:31:24.460 have had a massive impact on me are this guy called Dr. Alan Williams, who's an amazing teacher

00:31:29.640 about regenerative ag, about grazing cattle and sheep in ways that build productivity,

00:31:34.460 that save you a lot of money. We've eliminated synthetic fertilizer, pesticides, a lot of the

00:31:41.200 inputs. So we've actually turned our farm around from being a loss-making thing to a profitable thing.

00:31:46.480 And then another guru and friend of mine, who's an amazing guy from Missouri, is called Greg Judy,

00:31:51.620 and I've been out to his farm. I don't know if you know Greg, but what an amazing guy. He probably

00:31:56.560 single-handedly has had the biggest impact on our farm of anybody. And we managed to build a grass-only

00:32:02.080 pasture-based system with cattle and sheep that's making money at the moment and is making our farm

00:32:07.260 better. We're improving land, making land more productive and abundant. And to be able to do

00:32:11.760 something that's good for nature and good for my family and doesn't cost me money anymore

00:32:15.940 has been exciting. And what's more, I probably never felt healthier eating the food out of that

00:32:22.620 system. Because like I said earlier, we're learning that you are what your food eats.

00:32:27.620 If you're eating beef that's from a system that has healthy soil and healthy pastures,

00:32:32.000 that's full of the small traces of, but very good stuff that works in your gut makes you healthier,

00:32:37.720 makes you have better mental health, etc. And it's the same with vegetables. Even if you don't eat meat,

00:32:42.120 you should want to eat from a healthy soil. So we've got into this mad food system where everything's

00:32:46.920 in plastic and everything's presented to you on a shelf. And they'll tell you all sorts of

00:32:51.920 comfortable lies about stuff that you probably shouldn't be really eating. And I think we need

00:32:56.640 to eat real food from real farms. And we're going to need a lot of farmers, a lot of really, really

00:33:01.040 good farmers and land managers to make that happen.

00:33:04.120 Yeah, I know about Greg Judy. I have a friend here in Tulsa. He grew up in a rural part of Oklahoma,

00:33:09.140 came to Tulsa, started a business, very successful, sold it. And then he moved back to the country

00:33:14.460 and he started to raise Dexter cattle. And he's been going to Greg Judy's things to learn how to

00:33:20.520 how to do that in a regenerative way. Yeah, it's just mind blowing stuff like just to give you one

00:33:26.540 tiny example of it. We now know that when you manage pastures long, allow yourself to have deep roots

00:33:32.240 and lots more diversity in those pastures, you're something like 20 to 40% more productive of biomass.

00:33:37.540 Now, any farm or land manager listening to it should be like, whoa, hang on a minute,

00:33:40.900 there's a way to be 20 to 40% more productive of biomass. But that's what we're doing. We're

00:33:45.560 doing on a farm. And it's people like Greg Judy who've experimented or listened to the science

00:33:52.980 and just wrap their heads around this thing about how we increase the energy flows from the sun into

00:33:57.540 our ground through green plants. Often indigenous cultures, particularly Native American cultures,

00:34:02.880 often knew this stuff intuitively or they'd worked it out practically. We're now getting the

00:34:07.240 science to back this up about just how you graze cows in the most effective way and also makes you

00:34:13.560 more resilient and fills your fields with birds, insects, all the rest of it. So we've been grappling

00:34:18.160 with how to be loyal to our culture, loyal to what my grandfather and father did, but give it the tweaks

00:34:23.460 it needs to survive for us to thrive.

00:34:25.980 So you talk about in your latest book, The Place of Tides, that you started feeling kind of an

00:34:33.320 Inuit and kind of burnout about, it wasn't about farming. It was just about life. And then you had

00:34:38.760 this opportunity to go work for a season with these women in Norway called the Duck Women. This was 0.91

00:34:47.900 fascinating. I did not know this culture existed at all. Give us some background. Who are the Duck

00:34:53.700 Women? And what do they do? So I'm sure it sounds a very long way away from America, but basically 0.50

00:34:59.520 the birds that winter on my land in the spring leave. They go back to up the coast of Northwest

00:35:06.780 Europe. They pass some little islands on the coast of Norway. And I got a chance to go there in 2012

00:35:11.780 as part of some of the work I was doing. And I met this amazing woman who lived out on the rocks and

00:35:17.080 told me what she did. And I was like, how can this be a job? She basically worked with wild

00:35:23.220 eider ducks. And when I say worked with them, she dried seaweed like hay with a fork on the shore.

00:35:29.340 She gathered stones and she would build stone huts for them to nest in. And she would put the nesting 0.98

00:35:34.200 material in them, making these dry seaweed nests. All because her ancestors had done this for over a

00:35:39.980 thousand years. And all to encourage a massive population of eider ducks doing that thing on her 0.99

00:35:47.280 island. And she would protect them from predators, from otters and other things. And the purpose of this

00:35:51.480 was when the ducks take their ducklings back to the sea, when they've hatched, they leave behind

00:35:56.460 lots of their chest feathers. They're down, eider down. And her people's culture is that they look 0.98

00:36:03.340 after the ducks, make them incredibly abundant by caring for them. And then they turn the eider down

00:36:08.440 into duvets and other things that you can sell to people and have this incredibly, very sort of

00:36:15.400 parallel culture to my shepherding culture. This very proud culture where they can make something

00:36:20.700 out of nothing in this really almost inhospitable wilderness. So they live in these little wooden

00:36:25.840 houses out at the edge, on the edge of the Arctic Circle. And I was able to go out there with her for

00:36:31.340 a spring, shadow this woman and to write about her life and her work and who these people were and how

00:36:36.640 they saw the world. And yeah, it was a little bit like my own culture, but also very different because

00:36:42.500 we're a long way from the sea where I farm. How did living on this remote island, because

00:36:48.220 this is incredibly remote. You take a boat out there, there's no running water, there's no

00:36:53.140 electricity. How did living on this remote island, doing this work of getting these nests ready for

00:36:58.460 these ducks, how did that, it seemed like it shifted your mindset. It kind of resetted you in a lot of ways.

00:37:04.600 It totally resetted me. And that was partly the place and those things you've just described,

00:37:08.900 the isolation from things. It was also her, just this incredibly, I've never met anybody more

00:37:14.860 determined, more simple in a good way, more happy and convinced that what they were doing was

00:37:20.680 meaningful and good. And I've never met anybody more tuned into the little things. Like this is a

00:37:25.900 woman that could get great joy and happiness from watching the tides coming and going of watching what

00:37:31.840 the seabirds were doing. And it was partly her work, but she just tuned into the world around her,

00:37:36.540 relatively simple place. The sort of rocky places on the edge of the coastal shelf of Norway.

00:37:41.980 But the word you used is the right one. For me, it was a reset because although I've just been

00:37:46.260 telling you about my shepherding life, the truth is I've been juggling two lives for a very long part

00:37:51.000 of mine. A sort of modern jobs, writing books, doing Twitter, telling people about what we do,

00:37:57.280 doing podcasts, doing interviews. I'd got a bit burned out with doing all the stuff that normal

00:38:02.100 modern people do, I guess, or a version of it. And I hadn't just been a shepherd for a long time.

00:38:08.660 And that stuff, when I was on this island with this woman called Anna, I realized how manic that's

00:38:14.700 making us. Like I read this thing the other day about like the tech bros don't let their kids go

00:38:19.060 anywhere in their social media. They know, they know this stuff makes us manic. It makes us addicted

00:38:24.760 to screens where we're constantly searching for stimuli, where none of us can just sit anymore.

00:38:30.780 None of us just can talk anymore. None of us can enjoy a sunset anymore. We have to film it. We have

00:38:35.000 to tell people. And we're all massively angsty about the bad news hitting us from all around the world.

00:38:41.640 And what I got on that island with that woman was that that isn't how we used to live. We evolved to 0.96

00:38:47.920 live in quite simple places, not be that overstimulated, to care about the coming and going of the

00:38:54.380 daylight, to care about things like the tides or the wind, to notice what the birds are doing. And

00:39:00.400 okay, lots of us have, the reality is lots of us have got to live in the modern world. We're going

00:39:04.800 to pay our mortgages, we're going to pay for our school fees, whatever it might be. But I think what

00:39:09.200 I got from being on the island was just a reminder that I came from people like that. And even I had

00:39:14.540 lost my way and become manic and overstimulated. And what I've been working on ever since is just

00:39:21.240 slowing it the hell down. Like, we don't need to do all of that stuff all the time.

00:39:28.180 So yeah, just trying to, at times, get back to the simplicity of the things that really matter,

00:39:33.600 the meal with my family around the table, what my seven-year-old boy is telling me,

00:39:37.660 going to the mountain with my two daughters to bring the sheep back, listening to my elderly

00:39:41.780 neighbors while they tell me stories for the hundredth time about how to gather the mountain.

00:39:45.420 whatever, whatever it is that I, I think, I think a lot of the stuff that makes life good

00:39:51.520 lies in those things, right? And in our families, the food we eat, the simple stuff, it's not about

00:39:57.980 all the flashy stuff that they want to sell us. It really isn't. And, and, and it doesn't cost much

00:40:04.200 either. Like we're talking about stuff that most people can do. We can turn our phones off in the

00:40:09.640 evening. We can stop watching the TV. We can go, no matter how urban our surroundings, we can go out

00:40:16.300 and we can find some, some, a butterfly or whatever it is, some birds or something just to fill up that

00:40:22.420 part of us again. I think we can do it. I know most of our listeners are probably non-farmers. 0.99

00:40:26.660 They're not shepherding. They've got nine to five jobs in the suburbs, et cetera. What do you think

00:40:31.880 non-farmers can learn from shepherds about embracing tradition and taking a long game approach to life?

00:40:37.760 I think, I think some of it we've already said, it's the, whatever the context of your life,

00:40:43.740 we all have different lives. Some of us are luckier than others. Finding a way to connect

00:40:47.420 to things that are real or things that give you joy or things that is really important. And for me,

00:40:53.340 that's natural things, but it could be other things. And then I think the other thing I've got

00:40:57.640 very much from the people I came from is not to be at all embarrassed or ashamed about what you come

00:41:02.700 from. And, and I think the modern world is implicitly telling us a lot of the time, Oh,

00:41:09.020 just forget about that stuff that your family did. Like, forget about that. Like, come on over here

00:41:13.540 where we consume more stuff and you can get richer. And I, I would hope I could maybe urge people to

00:41:19.460 rethink that a little bit. I think maybe what's more important is to think about our communities and

00:41:24.300 our traditions and our, the ways that we've lived in the past to think about what's good in that and

00:41:29.180 maybe, and what's bad in it too, what we need to hold on to, what we need to let go of. And yeah,

00:41:35.060 I, I think building, well, I spent some time with an amazing American woman called Robin Wall Kimmerer,

00:41:41.180 which lots of your listeners will have heard of. She wrote a book called Braiding Sweetgrass.

00:41:44.820 And I asked her what her life advice would be to anybody. And she said, raise a garden,

00:41:49.660 raise a family and raise a ruckus. And I think that's a great catchphrase. I think that's where my

00:41:55.020 settings are at the moment. I'm going to focus on bringing my family up. I'm going to focus on

00:42:00.020 growing food because I think that's my, my use for everybody else. And I think there's a lot of

00:42:04.680 craziness going on in the world that's making us unhealthy, making us miserable, taking us in the

00:42:09.440 wrong direction. I'm going to raise as much trouble as I can through the books and other things. I'm going

00:42:13.800 to fight the things and I'm going to fight for the things I care about. And the books are part of

00:42:18.180 that. Um, but yeah, I, I think people are better than we've become at times at the moment. And

00:42:24.220 we need to remember that and look for the good in each other and help each other. I think.

00:42:28.440 Well, James, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your

00:42:31.360 books and your work?

00:42:33.040 So, uh, yeah, there's the three books. There's the shepherd's life,

00:42:35.960 there's pastoral song and the place of tides. I also do quite a lot on social media, on Instagram and,

00:42:40.720 uh, on X, my handle on there is at Herdy shepherd, and you can sort of follow what we're doing on the

00:42:45.720 farm and what's going on in our lives. And yeah, a lot of people seem to enjoy following that. And

00:42:50.560 yeah. And we also, uh, every July, we also do a thing for farmers called a grazing school where

00:42:56.240 people can come and learn about the habitat restoration and the grazing work that we do.

00:43:00.040 And yeah, maybe some of the people listening to this managed land and they'd like to come to that

00:43:03.520 in the future. So yeah, get in touch with us.

00:43:05.680 Fantastic. Well, James Rebrank, next time has been a pleasure.

00:43:08.160 Thank you for having me. Um, I've got to tell you one last thing though, Brett.

00:43:11.500 Yeah.

00:43:12.200 In our family, when I came back from the Island, I started to be much more

00:43:15.600 aware about how men behave sometimes good, sometimes bad. And me and my son, Isaac,

00:43:20.240 who's 13, we have a joke. Uh, we'll say things like, are you a manly man? And he looks back at

00:43:25.120 me and sticks his chest and says, I'm a hell of a manly man. So, um, they're all tickled pink that

00:43:29.740 I'm on the, uh, art of manliness podcast. So thank you for having me.

00:43:32.800 Oh, I love that. That's awesome. My guest, it was James Rebanks. He's the author of the book,

00:43:37.740 a shepherd's life, as well as his latest book, the place of tides. They're both available on

00:43:41.220 amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Make sure to check out our show notes at

00:43:44.220 aom.is slash shepherd. We find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.

00:43:55.500 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website

00:43:59.260 at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives and make sure to sign up for a new

00:44:02.900 newsletter. It's called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It's a great way to support

00:44:07.320 the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it's Brett McKay.

00:44:11.440 Remind us how to listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - August 05, 2025

Rooted Living in a Shallow Age — A Shepherd’s Guide to the Good Life

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