# Pastoral Song  ## Metadata - Author: [[James Rebanks]] - Full Title: Pastoral Song - Category: #books ## Highlights - The unbreakable law of the field was sustaining soil health and fertility - Tags: [[blue]] - And in place of an old patchwork landscape full of working people, diverse farm animals, and crops, with lots of farmland wildlife, a blander, barer, simpler, denatured, and unpeopled landscape had emerged. - Tags: [[blue]] - The economists are wrong. Farming is a business unlike any other because, crucially, it takes place in a natural setting and affects the natural world directly and profoundly. - Tags: [[blue]] - We need to put farming and nature back together, not drive them further apart. - Tags: [[blue]] - The idea that land must be either perfectly wild or perfectly efficient and sterile is unwise and blinding; it is a false and unsustainable simplification. - Tags: [[blue]] - Just as marginal farming gains over the past fifty years incrementally squeezed nature out of our fields, the process can be reversed. - They say that old wheelwrights planted, felled, and stored apple trees in a three-generation cycle, so that their grandsons would have sufficient matured trees, and dried wood of the right kind, from which to make the hard wheel hubs they needed.