Rooted Living in a Shallow Age — A Shepherd’s Guide to the Good Life
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Summary
In a world that often feels dominated by technology and constant change, it s easy to forget that some people are still living by the rhythms of ancient traditions. James Rebanks, an author and shepherd, is one of them. And in today s episode, he shares what following a way of life that has endured for thousands of years can teach us about modern life and the things that matter.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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In a world that often feels dominated by technology and constant change,
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it's easy to forget that some people are still living by the rhythms of ancient traditions.
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James Rebanks, an author and shepherd, is one of them. And in today's episode,
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he shares what following a way of life that has endured for thousands of years can teach us about
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modern life and the things that matter. James offers a glimpse of the often ignored and
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misunderstood world of pastoral life in England's Lake District, which isn't just about working
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with sheep and cattle, but maintaining a deep connection to past generations, a commitment
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to community, and a sense of purpose. He takes us through the life of a fell shepherd, where the
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timeless values of hard work, seasonality, stewardship, and stillness still get lived out
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day to day. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash shepherd.
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So you are a shepherd in the Lake District of the United Kingdom. It's one of the mini
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hats you wear. For those who aren't familiar with this area, can you describe it for us
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and not just the landscape, but the culture of it?
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Yeah, sure. So if you knew the place that I live from English literature, which lots of
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people around the world do, it's probably the most written about place in England, but
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nearly all of the writing about it was written by sort of middle class or upper middle class
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poets who believed that in the 19th century, they discovered where we lived. And it was this
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sort of lovely mountainous place with hobbit-like innocent people in it who they could write about
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to their heart's delight. And they made it very famous. And they made it a sort of central,
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the Lake District's a sort of central pillar of the English romantic imagination, if you
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like. We love the place. It's got lakes, it's got mountains. And that's what people thought
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it was, or lots of people think it is. But I'm actually a son of a native, and there's
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no goddamn way that those poets discovered it, because my people and lots of other people
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have been here for thousands of years. And I think, and sort of many of those people,
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that it has its own culture. And it's a very rural, pastoral culture about shepherding and
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having cattle and grazing the mountains and managing the forests. And all of the things
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that are in the background of those poems or those paintings of the 19th or 20th century
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was basically built by my people, my ancestors. So yeah, it's a mix of things, really. Some people
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think it's the most English part of England, because of that romantic poetry. I think it's
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the least English part of England. I think it's the most Scandinavian part. So we have
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our own dialect and our own way of thinking. And a lot of that, maybe we'll return to it
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later in the conversation. A lot of that is quite recognizably Scandinavian. And we know
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from the history that the valleys where my family and many other families live and work
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were effectively settled or culturally changed quite heavily by the Vikings a thousand years
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ago. So it's, yeah, it was one of the poorest places in England for a very long time, quite
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disconnected. We'd have some similarities for Americans with places like Appalachia. So
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places that are notionally poorer, that other people might say were backwards. But if you're
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actually from there and you know the truth, you know that there's a really rich, deep cultural
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heritage there. And many special things survive in those places because of their isolation and
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their sort of cultural defiance. Is that a fair way of putting it? I hope I'm being fair
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So my American friends laugh and say I'm a hillbilly.
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And one of, I guess one of those famous writers, Beatrix Potter, lived there and wrote about it.
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Yeah, absolutely. So Beatrix Potter, who lots of people listening to this will know from the
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Peter Rabbit books and all those beautiful children's books. She came on a wave of sort of romantic
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enthusiasm with her family in the early 20th century. They came to this place. They read
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those books and poems. But to her very great credit, she gets really interested in the people
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of the place and the shepherds and the other people. So as a girl, she's seeing them and
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she's wondering what their lives are like. And later on, she went on to be this amazing
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businesswoman as well as writer. And she did clever things like she franchised the children's
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toys that were sold of Peter Rabbit, made loads of money. And what did she do with that money?
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She started buying farms in our valleys to protect them from developers and to try and
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preserve the way of life that I'm part of with my sheep. And in a slightly sort of secondhand
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kind of way, became part of that world. But I think she's brilliant. And she preserved a lot
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of the farms that I now do business with. A lot of the farms I now go to, these beautiful
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little stone farmsteads at the bottom of the mountains, often painted white with whitewash
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with lovely stone barns on the end of them. Just those absolutely beautiful. When you imagine
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the north of England and those beautiful little cottages, she saved some of the best stuff.
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So people have been there for over a thousand years. How much has life changed for the families,
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the natives that have been there for a long time farming in the Lake District?
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So we know from the early accounts, basically when the posh people and the writers and the painters
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turned up about 200, 250 years ago, we know that this was an incredibly impoverished place
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and had such a strong dialect. They thought that people were speaking Norwegian. They often
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had beards and looked like Vikings. And the isolation of this place had preserved sort of
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lots of very special things. So the big transition is after that. So we know it was very much its
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own place with its own culture. Then within a few decades, with the coming of the railways and
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all that sort of stuff, we have lots and lots of people start to come here. And from then on,
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people like my family look like they played a kind of game with two sets of rules. They carry on doing
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what they do, working on the mountains with the sheep and the cattle. But they learn how to play
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the tourism game as well. And they learn how to take people up mountains as guides. They learn how to
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cater for whatever these strange urban people from the south of England want.
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And that's resulted, I mean, the stats are crazy now. So we're talking about 13 valleys,
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quite small valleys in the north of England. There are 43,000 people live here, most of them in three
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small towns. About 300 families like mine manage the farmed landscape, the cultural landscape,
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and 21 million people a year come to visit. So we're in this place with an incredibly dense
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amount of tourism happening to us. And that's had some negative effects, but maybe one of the
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positive effects is it's enabled some of those little farms and their ancient traditions to carry
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on. So basically you have small farmers learning how to hustle and make some money from tourism so
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they can keep going with this. And you said some of that was a thousand years old. Actually,
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some of it's at least four and a half thousand years old. Some of it may go back to the settling
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after the last ice age, 8,000 years ago, maybe.
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Wow. Before we get into shepherding, let's talk a bit more about your background because your life
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has straddled this ancient world, the Lake District, in the modern world. You studied at Oxford. How did
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So I'm a funny hybrid creature. I met a sociologist once and he said I was good at switching codes.
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So my two codes are basically, I'm from this old-fashioned farming family. I grew up doing what
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we do. I had a grandfather that was very sort of ancient and oldie worldie. And I thought I wanted
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to be just like him. The reality was I was growing up in the 1980s and 90s and you couldn't be just
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like him. You had to go to school, maybe go to college, do other things. I left school at 15
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with no qualifications. I sort of bummed out of school because I thought that was an act of loyalty
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to my people so I could go back and work on the farm. I did that for nine years, basically working
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for minimum wage. And then I met a young woman who, called Helen, who became my wife, who's still my
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wife. And she sent me back to school. She noticed that I was really bookish. She sent me back to
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the local city to evening classes for basically workers that were doing their education. And I
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got an amazing teacher there and he said I should apply to go to Oxford University. And I said,
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well, I haven't even got any school qualifications. And he persuaded me to do it anyway. And they kind
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of picked me up as a bit of a nobody. It was a little bit like, in a funny way, it was a little
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bit like Good Will Hunting, the movie. They sort of spotted me, picked me out of what I was doing.
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And I went there. And ever since, I've had a very strange double life where some people think I'm
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clever and urbane and my own people think I'm a farmer.
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So what did you study while you were at Oxford?
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I studied history, modern history for the first three years. And then I won a scholarship and I
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did a year where I studied modern American history. So you can hit me up with questions
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about the Lincoln-Douglas debates or the Vietnam War or the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
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And I can hopefully remember some of that. And what have you done with your degree?
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So part of me at that time, because I thought the farm was going to spit me out. I thought we
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were going to go broke and we're going to lose it. And I had to have another hustle. So I thought
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maybe another hustle was to be a historian. But I actually couldn't stay away from home a minute
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longer. So my wife and I went home to take on the farm, try and give it a future. But I've never
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really stopped sort of being a historian of my own landscape, speaking about the past of my own
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people. And I realized somewhere along the way on that journey that I thought somebody else must
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have written the book that explained my people. It couldn't be enough that the poets and painters
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had done all the cultural work. And then I realized after a while that had to be me. I was the strange
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hybrid creature that could do it. So I wrote a book called The Shepherd's Life, which changed my life
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really. It was just about who we were as a people and tells the story of my father and my grandfather
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and the people that I grew up among. And that book went kind of crazy. And yeah, a million books or so
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later, I'm talking to you. I've had a very strange experience. Well, let's talk about shepherding in the
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Lake District. I thought it was really fascinating. You get into the details, the day-to-day, what the seasons
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of the life were like, and you do a type of shepherding that's called fell shepherding. What is fell
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shepherding? Okay, so fell is Norwegian. They basically call a mountain a fjell. And so it's
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basically mountain farming. I really am a hillbilly. And what does it mean? Well, it's a kind of farming
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that's lots of places in developing countries would recognize, but not many farmers in the modern world
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would recognize. So we have one of the largest areas of common land in Western Europe in our mountains.
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And common land is places where if you're a qualified commoner, which means you own land in that area and you
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farm it, you have rights to take a certain number of sheep, cattle, ducks, grazing animals to the
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mountains. And you farm the mountains in common with your neighbors and colleagues. And so that's
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what we do. So in the next couple of days, we're going to go to the mountains, about 10 of us with
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about 25 sheepdogs on foot. We're going to gather 10 flocks of sheep, some of which will be mixed from
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the mountain. It'll take two days. My daughter will go with me because she's got good dogs and lots of my
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neighbors. And we'll work as a community to bring the sheep down from those mountains to the penfold
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or the hospital, the place where we sought them. And we'll sort them into the separate flocks and
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bring them down to our little farms in the valley bottom a few miles below to do the shearing, to get
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the wool off. And then in the next month, they'll go back to that mountain. The crazy part of this is
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that the sheep teach their daughters which part of the mountain to live on. There's a word called
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hefting or hefted, another Viking word. And it means that these sheep always have to go back
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to the mountain each spring with their mothers, every generation of daughters until they know
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their place on the mountain. And they don't, there's no fences, but they don't go crazy and
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leave in different directions. They live on a particular part of the mountain where my sheep
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have been hefted for maybe a thousand years. And it's one of the few farming systems in the
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world where when you look at the cattle or the sheep on the mountain, you can know that
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they are exactly the same genetic flock or herd that's been there since the first domesticated
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animals went up there. It's crazy. We're doing work on a mountain which people did maybe four and a
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half thousand years ago in the same way. That's crazy. You described like how it differs from most
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shepherding. If you were in the United States and you were going across the plains, you might just see
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a flock of sheep in a plot of land. This sounds like it's more organic. I don't know. It's, it's,
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there's sort of a natural rhythm you have to fall into to do this type of shepherding.
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Yep. So one thing this system teaches you very quickly is that you're not special. You're just
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the latest person doing that work in the way that it's always been done for thousands of years and
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somebody will do it after you and you have to do it the way it's done because you're working with
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other people. You have to do it on the dates when it's done and you have to do it in the way that
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the mountain allows. You can't do some flashy new farming technology. It's just not going to work in
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that place. But there's probably something I need to explain, Brett, before we go any further.
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When I got interested in America, I realized that you have, because of cowboys and stuff,
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you have like a very proud or macho culture to do with cows in American farming. But sheep farmers,
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I think in American culture, sort of slightly effeminate. I was watching some of the Yellowstone
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stuff recently and sheep farmers are sort of like a sort of plague of peasants that come in and over
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graze places. And it's not as kind of macho or good as being a cattle farmer. That's not like that
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where we live. So the farming for a very long time has been about the sheep primarily with the cattle
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in the background. And to be a shepherd here is like one of the proudest things, the most high
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status things you could be in the indigenous culture of this place is a shepherd. So when my
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grandfather said he was a shepherd, he literally looks anybody in the face and there's no deference,
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there's no fear. He doesn't think he's better than people, but he's absolutely sure in his mind,
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he's no worse than anybody else. Yeah. The manliness of shepherds reminds me of this study
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that this anthropologist did back in the seventies on shepherds who live on the island of Crete. He
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published his book, it's called The Poetics of Manhood. And these Cretan shepherds, they had this
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really strong culture of manliness. There's a celebration of bravado, boldness, improvisation
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was highly valued, but a lot of proving their manhood involved stealing sheep from other
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people's flocks. You had to demonstrate courage and daring that way. So they had a coat of honor,
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but they're also kind of roguish, you know, kind of figures. And it's interesting that the
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perception of shepherds have differed across time and culture, you know, from Greece to the Bible.
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Sometimes they've been seen as kind of sneaky, cunning outsider types, but it seems like more often
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it's been seen as a trustworthy, respected, noble profession.
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Oh yeah. This, this is a very proud, very honest tradition. And actually one of the things about
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farming common land on the mountains together is that honesty and integrity become the defining
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things that you aspire to as an individual, because if you're gathering a mountain and you
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have opportunities to steal other people's sheep. So in our culture, you would bend over backwards to
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avoid even looking like that could happen. If a sheep comes down from the mountain that hasn't
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been claimed, the shepherds on my fell, our mountain would argue about giving it to each other rather
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than taking it themselves to avoid the perception that they might be people that grab more than their
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fair share, that might be willing to take something that wasn't theirs. And there was a fascinating case
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around here about 10 years ago where there was a sheep farmer who's basically not a good egg,
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had been stealing other people's sheep. And that was amazing because the, the whole shepherding
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community, once they realized this, turned their back on this person and refused to deal with them,
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refused to do business with them. And they had to stop farming in that place. They couldn't sell
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their sheep. They couldn't do anything. The shepherd just turned their backs on the ring when the
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livestock came to like the sale yard. And they were sending a very clear message. We don't steal.
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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
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fast and loose with the rules, you're not part of this. So there's a kind of old Testament
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Yeah. It's an honor culture and quite a tough one. Like you're meant to do the work well.
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You're meant to work hard. So we've been shearing the sheep to get the wool off recently. And
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I'm getting a little old for that now. I'm 50, but a lot of the young people in this valley
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are doing that work and they still admire hard work and keeping going and sweating and like
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having proper sort of true grit. I know that's a little bit old fashioned now, but
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you kind of earn your, earn your spurs. I guess you'd say by doing that work and doing it well
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and by having good sheep dogs and being decent with other people, the being a good person's part
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of it too. That's your reputation that you trade on, on the mountains.
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So you mentioned sheep dogs. What makes for a good sheep dog?
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So different things. There's different kinds actually. So a lot of people will know the English
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border collies, like the black and white ones. They're very good at what we would call
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field work. Like sometimes you see on the TV, they'll do that creeping around thing and
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they use their eyes a lot and they're sort of creeping like a fox or a coyote or something.
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That's cool. That wins competitions. But on the mountains, the fell shepherds here, like
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a different kind of dog, like a half-bred dog. And what they're looking for is stamina. Sometimes
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they want a dog that barks like an Australian Kelpie or a hunter way, and they're looking for
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stamina. So with all due respect to the border collies, they can get pretty tired after maybe
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an hour or two's work. But some of the cross-bred or specialist-bred mountain dogs can work for
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five, six hours, maybe even in hot weather. And so that's much more about stamina. And
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also, like I have a really good friend called Joe Weir that's got brilliant dogs for working
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in the mountains. Better than mine, but don't tell him. He won't be listening to this.
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But he can stand on one mountain, send his dogs down into the valley, up the other side of
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the mountain. And on a whistle or using their own brains, they can bring a flock of sheep
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down from the mountain that you're looking at across the abyss between you. And like,
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he doesn't even think that's that remarkable. But behind his back, we're all looking at each
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other going, what is that? That's like ninja level shepherding. None of us can do that.
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And then the other part of that is, I don't know what the equivalent would be, being in
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America, maybe being a cowboy, something like there's a freedom which comes with working in
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the mountains, freedom from all the BS that happens down below the real, the rest of the
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world. And it's like infectious. So if you meet like their fell shepherds, these people
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that spend a big part of their summer of the year working in the mountains, that you've
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never met people more obsessed with like what they do. Like they love it. Like there's no
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drudgery involved. They think they're the freest people on earth doing the work that they love
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with the dogs that they love, working with the sheep that they enjoy working with. And yeah,
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if you tell those people that they should go and get a job that pays three times as much
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money in the valley bottom, they just look at you like you're crazy. Like what would I want to do
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Something you do in your book, A Shepherd's Life, you do a great job of describing the seasonality
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of a shepherd. Tell us about the seasonality. What does a year look like for a shepherd?
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So everything we do is absolutely dictated by the seasons and the dates. So I said earlier in this
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podcast that I was going to the mountain in a couple of days time, that how it actually works is
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the oldest shepherd on the mountain will tell me that we're going to the mountain, probably about
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nine or 10 o'clock in the evening. And he'll tell me we're going four o'clock the next morning.
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Try juggling that with a 21st century job like I did for a while. But everything has to be done
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when it's done. You can't shear sheep out of season. You can't lamb them out of season. So
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everything's happening at a time for a reason. So we lamb our sheep in April after the last frost and
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snow so that they can go to the mountain in May, so that they can be in the mountain with their lambs,
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hefting them and teaching them to live there until high summer when they come down again for the
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shearing. They'll go back until the autumn when they come down so we can sell the male
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lambs. And then they'll go back with their daughters until into winter. And then there's
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a point, depending on the mountain, some stay up there all winter, some come down for the
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winter. And around that is a whole bunch of other cultural activity. Like we have these
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shepherd's meets and these shows where we're competing to see who has the best sheep, the
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best flock. They all happen the day after all of those jobs are done at certain times of
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year. And like my story, my schooling story was really that I grew up in that world and
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I loved it. And I thought that was our culture. I thought everybody knew about it. I thought
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they respected it. I thought everyone knew that was a great way to live. And I was amazed
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when I went to school like 15 miles away at the local secondary school or high school, the
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teachers didn't know anything about this. They thought I was an idiot because I wanted to
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be a shepherd and they didn't understand that that was dignified or proud or you might want
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to do it. They wanted you to go to college. They wanted you to leave. And I was just so
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confused by these conflicting messages for one from my family and then another from school.
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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
00:22:29.680
the same three people who don't experience the weather, who have some jerk off for a boss telling
00:22:34.860
them what to do. And half the work's meaningless. Like that's not repetitive. I think loads of the
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
00:24:13.940
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
00:27:50.940
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
00:28:22.920
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.
00:30:40.600
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
00:34:25.980
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
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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
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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
00:42:33.040
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
00:43:05.680
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.
00:43:12.200
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.