Can a tiny life be meaningful?For this Thanksgiving Day episode of Reversing Climate Change, join us for stories about food, family, connection, and love.Ross reaches across the pond to speak with Helen Rebanks, farmer, shepherd, and author of The Farmer's Wife: My Life in Days. She is the wife of another farmer, James Rebanks, author of The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape, and Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey, and each of them are personally prominent in the books of the other!From the serene and rugged Lake District in England, Helen shares the unique experience of life on their family farm, emphasizing the intrinsic value of domesticity amid the prevailing focus on individualism in modern society.Learn how Helen views regenerative shepherding methods, such as mob grazing, and their collaborative harmony with nature. What role does she believe local, organic, regenerative, traditional, and sustainable agriculture can play in empowering farmers as heroes in the fight against climate change?Helen's insights extend to the realm of cooking and food production, advocating for a departure from the industrial food system. What power do consumers, especially parents, hold in influencing the food industry and shaping a more sustainable future?
Tune in for a glimpse into a tiny life, and to discover the importance and value of the mundane.
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Resources
The Farmer's Wife: My Life in Days by Helen Rebanks
The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape by James Rebanks
Farm Carbon Toolkit
Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey by James Rebanks
Helen on Instagram
Michael Pollan
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change. Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m one of the co-founders of Nori and I’m the director of creative and marketing here. Today I have with me Helen Rebanks, author of The Farmer’s Wife: My Life in Days. Thanks for being here, Helen.
Helen Rebanks: So thanks so much, Ross. Good to connect across the pond.
Ross Kenyon: Across the pond with a very serious delay, because you are on a farmstead in the Lake District and I imagine you probably are not wired for super-fast Internet where you are.
Helen Rebanks: No, I’m recording in the end of our sheep shed, in a little like apartment we rent out now and again. And it’s — we’re in the Lake District, yes, which is the northwest of England. We have — we’re in a little valley and have a satellite system for broadband on the end of the sheep shed.
Ross Kenyon: I think that’s the first time that collection of words has been said on the podcast. I’m always happy to break new ground like that. I really enjoyed the books of your husband, James Rebanks, The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape, as well as Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey. I think they’re really fascinating books about returning to the old ways of being a shepherd and what that means for both our lived experiences and the quality of our lives, and also about food ways and what has changed with industrial agriculture. And then you wrote this book. I think if you didn’t tell me that they were connected books, I almost wouldn’t know, because so much of it is about domestic life. They seem a little bit different.
Helen Rebanks: In a way, they quite are. They are different. They’re of the same story, of course they are. We’re a family farm, a team here. We work together and everything we do on this small farm is interconnected. But I have a very different story to tell to James, in that I wanted to shine a light on sort of the, as you say, the domestic life that I lead here on the farm as a farmer’s wife, that is often ignored in this modern, crazy busy, look-at-me world celebrating the individual all the time. And my life is very much of supporting, running the family, doing all the background jobs, all the little hidden, what seem insignificant jobs, but actually the glue that holds everything together.
And I think an awful lot of people still live these lives, but they were trying to escape them somehow. But I’ve looked at it slightly different in the book and through my life of — I really want to value that work that I do, and other people do the same thing. And there’s an awful lot of women still doing this. And it’s just — it was stories about food, family, connection, love, healthy food from the soil, how we look after the animals on the farm. And I wanted to share all of that and add to the conversation my tiny voice into this.
Ross Kenyon: You said that so much better than I, and why wouldn’t you? It’s your story. You have a couple moments that relate to that too. You’re at a party at one point and someone describes your life as being tiny. You also talk about the importance of things being mundane, which I learned just means of the world at its root. And it’s a celebration of that. And I think people — I mean, your husband’s story is interesting too, right? He’s a shepherd, grown up farm boy, and he gets miracled into Oxford and has a sort of literary career that is unexpected from where he came from, but ultimately returns to the roots, which is, you know, quote unquote a tiny life. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be meaningful, or perhaps the most important thing many of us could do.
Helen Rebanks: Oh, absolutely, yeah. So we’ve been together a long time. So I’ve been on this journey with James since when I met him when I was 18. And we really knew early on together that throwing it in together and supporting each other the best way we could was the way of building our future. And we didn’t quite know what that looked like. But he had a real passion and a dream to hold on to this ancient family farm, and that was a real struggle at times financially, and, oh gosh, in family systems, with succession issues, with other family being involved in the farm. And I just threw it all in with him and I was like, life is better when you’re around. And he was the same with me. And we just kind of figured it out together to try and make a life here.
And that took us down to Oxford together for, oh, say, four years. We lived down there. And for me, I always thought I wanted to escape the farm life and escape that kind of — gosh, the chores and the routine. I mean, my parents and grandparents, they just worked so hard from morning till night. It was a slog. And I thought that life isn’t really for me, and here I am living it. So I mean, yeah, I’m falling into it now, both feet. But when I lived in Oxford with James, I tried different jobs as I graduated with a fine arts degree, and nothing was really sitting well with me. In a world that was chasing money and things and material things, there wasn’t a sense of community around.
It wasn’t till we came back and got married and I realized how much we needed both of our families, and they got involved in helping set up our wedding. And it was a very handcrafted wedding, in a field next to my parents’ farm, in what was a marquee. Sounds fancy, but it was a big tent that we decked out and made pretty with lots of flowers and bits and pieces. And we needed both families involved to make that what it was, which is a celebration of us coming together and making a life here. And then I became a mum, and again, gosh, you know, that’s huge transformation, going from just your two selves that gets the world thinking you can do anything, to needing family around to help support you. I mean, it does take a village to raise a child, doesn’t it?
And now we have four, and that just is incredibly — I’m incredibly lucky to be able to say that, and that our families have supported us and helped us, and we live close to them, and we’ve made choices along the way to live like we do now. And it’s not a modern sort of setup really. It’s not — it just looks really traditional, old-fashioned. But it actually works. I mean, he’s got a set of skills here. I’ve got a set of skills here. We bring them together. We’re stronger together. I’m just thinking about, you know, the journey we’ve been on together. And that was part of creating the book in the last couple of years for me, that I wanted to do something artistic, creative, put together my recipes and stories from my life so that our children could see what mum was all about, really, as much as what dad was about. And that the outside work — the inside work in the home is every bit as important as the outside.
Ross Kenyon: So much of your early story — I struggled in the intro trying to explain the feeling that I got out of it. But I picked up a lot of melancholy and desire and uncertainty about the path that you had. And it seems motherhood was the calling that started to bring you back to appreciating and maybe reverencing this part of life that is so commonly neglected, that you’re trying to celebrate and say, actually, there’s a lot of honor to accept this role, freely chosen, even though you might have opportunities in the big city, but who cares about that? In some ways, the main job, the stereotypical job, the job that everyone expects everyone to do, to stay in their hometown and take over the family farm — that’s a good thing to do, and that’s OK. Am I right, by the way? Am I picking up on those feelings from you?
Helen Rebanks: Yes, very much so, Ross. I think that that is the case. A lot of us go through our early 20s not having a clue which direction we’re going in, not really knowing what our life sort of calling is. And I’m still — I’m mid-40s, I’m still figuring things out. And I’d say to my younger self, hang in there and follow your curiosity with things. And certainly being alongside James while he’s been creating the books that he’s written has allowed me into a world like of reading texts and thinking about stories and words. And the journey we’ve been on on the farm has been creative as well.
We’ve had to figure out how to make a small hill farm sustainable and fit for purpose for the future, to earn us the living to stay here, and to be something that we’re incredibly proud of, that we can stand and say, you know, farmers, they’re not the bad guys of this whole climate change conversation that’s happening. Farmers can be heroes of it too. And I think it’s an incredibly exciting time to be farming. I love bringing the kids up here and they’re involved with every aspect of the farm, including the paperwork and the record keeping. We’re involving them in decisions and, you know, conversations about what we’re doing for the future and how we’re planning things. And that’s — I think that’s exciting.
Ross Kenyon: It is exciting. I have read so many books about farming and memoirs of farmers, and I think yours does the greatest job of disillusioning one that it is a slower life or more idyllic in the countryside. It seems a lot of your book is about difficulty and struggle, and it does not seem to be an easy life necessarily, compared to the city where maybe you have a small, easy-to-manage apartment. You go to your job, you come home, you’re done. It seems that your work is never done, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Helen Rebanks: No. Life is work and work is life. And I suppose it’s good to recognize that we do need a break from the farm, because everywhere we look around there was always — there’s always work to do and things to think about. But it’s fulfilling, it’s rewarding, it’s purposeful, it’s all of those good things. It’s out in nature. It’s connecting with the landscape and the wildlife around us and the livestock. And we run six Border Collie sheepdogs here, so I’ve had them out this morning. I’ve been to the fence, the cows — we have a herd of Belted Galloway cows. I was there before breakfast with our eleven-year-old son to move the electric fence, as James is away in Oslo this week.
So we all step in and pitch in to do the jobs to keep the place running, and I’m getting that dose of fresh air. And I mean, the wind was hitting me as I was on the quad bike — you do call it a four-wheeler. And it was raining this morning and the clouds then parted and there was the most stunning rainbow and the blue sky peeped through and it was just glorious. And I’m in all the autumn colors here, like the trees are changing. I just love it. It’s just magical and it’s extremely hard work. So it can be two things at the same time, can’t it?
It’s appreciating these things, and part of the story through the book for me, noticing the small things of daily life that we all need to, I think, appreciate so much more. You know, the smell of something warm as you come in and through the door to make you feel that’s great. You know, there’s some food cooking or some bread baking, or I don’t know, simple pleasures.
Ross Kenyon: I think it’s great to be reminded of the beauty of everyday things. It’s so easy to forget. I’ve talked about on the show before, Mary Oliver is a poet that I like coming back to. She always reminds me to — oh, you’re swooning. So clearly this is connecting with you, Mary Oliver.
Helen Rebanks: Exactly. I mean, my one wild and precious life — that is just. We’ve all got one, haven’t we? What are we going to do with it? And how are we going to live? How do we live to leave things for our children, to honor the world we’re living in, to be connected with each other? I feel sad when I think about the world as it is right now. And we’re almost more connected than we ever have been. You and I can speak across the world, can’t we, right now. But at the same time, our news feed is full of atrocities and sadness and devastation, and it’s so hard not to keep hold of like some positive threads sometimes, isn’t it?
Ross Kenyon: It absolutely is. I like that about your writing. And it is a very strong reminder that even if a life is quote unquote tiny — not saying that it is, because your life is both extraordinary, I mean, you’re part of a literary power couple, and you are, so you’re extraordinary — but also your life is extremely mundane and everyday and old. This is not something that’s new. Maybe there are parts of it that are new, some of the tech is new, but the life way is as old as the hills, essentially. And that’s OK. That’s a beautiful thing. And that reminder, I think, is something that we probably all need.
Helen Rebanks: Yeah. Well, I hope to share that with my books. And I think James has tried to do that as well with his. But, you know, sometimes we can chase modernity a bit too far down the wrong path, can’t we? And those reminders, just to step back from it and think, what are we doing here? Yeah. And how we live, as I said a minute ago, is really important to us. And I think stories and books are just a way of — once you open your world and share your story, you can connect with all sorts of people. And I’ve been so moved by the messages I’m getting from readers, from the book. Gosh, it’s amazing that I’m connecting with readers across the world that feel seen and heard in a book, that their lives hadn’t been represented necessarily before in a story.
And just — I mean, I described that mental juggle of things that I have to do every day, of whether it’s however small, school runs and swimming lessons and dogs to the vets or something, you know, what’s for supper? What am I cooking that day, how am I cooking it, and what’s rising to the top of my priorities without getting that overload of stress that we can all feel? So I quite often pause, quite often take myself off for a quick walk, have a bit of fresh air, recalibrate and think, none of this is too much. I’m going to reassess, and I’m also going to say no to lots of things. I’m going to opt out and choose the things that fit better into how we live and what we value.
Ross Kenyon: It becomes so easy to look at all of your chores as the things to get through so you can get back to your real life. I often have this with my son sometimes, where I might be cooking and I might be trying to treat this as dad’s alone time. And really I’m seeing a curious kid where I should be inviting him in, and I often do, but sometimes I just don’t have the heart for it. But this is not the thing to get through. This is the thing itself, and it’s so easy to forget.
Helen Rebanks: It’s really easy to forget, and sometimes it’s a lot quicker to do things ourselves than have a child hanging on our tail to try and get things sorted when you want to be quick. But I am a big fan of getting kids in the kitchen. You’ve hit on something that I’m really passionate about there, Ross, because feeding ourselves and understanding where our food’s coming from is so important. And I bang on about this quite a lot with the school system that we’ve got here. And I have regular emails back and forth about what’s on the menu for the school meals, or what are they doing in the — they have food technology lessons here. And that bothers me, in the title, because actually it’s cooking.
Let’s get back to cooking lessons, and let’s not have three — yeah, let’s not have three lessons: one to have a demonstration of how to make the thing, the next week they’re going to make the thing, and the third week they’re going to reflect or analyse and fill in lots of forms about how they could have done it better. And I’m like, that’s three weeks of — you could have been doing a huge range of dishes over three weeks instead of a fruit salad. Yeah, I love having the kids in the kitchen. And our eldest daughter’s just about to turn 18. She’s a chef in a local restaurant. She’s working full time, so she’s followed into the food side of things.
Our second daughter has worked in a butcher’s for a few shifts and is very proud of how she can package up all the different products and make it look super smart and labelled. And she’s — yeah, they’re involved in every aspect on the farm, as they all are really. But yeah, it’s great to get them involved in cooking for sure.
Ross Kenyon: Farther upstream from that, just about the food production itself, are you oriented against the industrial food system, or do you think this should be supplemental? How do you think we should be thinking about the food that we produce and consume?
Helen Rebanks: I think we’re up against it, aren’t we? Because it’s all around us, industrial food. We’re really up against it, and our heads are often quite full of all the demands that modern life has on us. Just making a living, for a start, and paying our bills is a major thing. And what is it now? We’re only spending — it’s heading to what, 7% of our income now on food, where it used to be about 33%. And I know for lower income families that is about 15%. So I mean, that we’re not spending as much on food as we used to has forced farmers into a situation where it’s ever cheaper, isn’t it? We’re squeezing everything on price and value, and then supermarkets are full of packaged goods that claim all sorts of things.
And I’m a big fan of Michael Pollan and keeping things absolutely simple. Let’s think about meat, fish, vegetables, some, you know, pulses and grains and good dairy. Let’s think about how our grandparents ate and cooked, and that’s pretty much how I run my kitchen. We produce lots of our own beef and lamb and get a local veg box delivered. Industrial food systems, they’re just — I don’t know, it’s huge. But I think we can all make a difference in how we shop and cook and eat, and we can ask questions when we go out. Where has that chicken in that sandwich come from? Let’s check on the packet if we have the time. But we also need legislation in place to get this stuff off our shelves that is damaging the environment.
It’s a big question, isn’t it? How do you solve it? For me, I didn’t think I had much of a voice in this. I started at the beginning saying, you know, my tiny contribution to this was actually quite important, in that I’m a mum. I’m the one responsible for buying the food in the family and shopping every, you know, every couple of days. Every three or four days I’ll pop and get some groceries. I’ve got quite a lot of power in my pocket, in my hands, of where I spend that food and what I consider purchasing for our family to eat. So I’m thinking, what’s going to give me good value but be nutritional for them? What’s going to fill them up and keep them healthy?
You know, I’ve got growing children here. It’s my priority to give them balanced meals. And I think the person — whoever, it doesn’t have to be the mum — it’s the person that’s responsible for that in the household has a huge job and a huge role to play in this climate conversation. It’s so important and we do have power. We can ask lots of questions and we can support our local butcher and we can go and get local vegetables, and we should be checking where the ingredients are coming from and look on the back of the packet, and it’s full of all sorts of chemical things. That’s not going to do our bodies any good. That’s going to have a huge knock-on effect on our health, and then a healthcare system picking up the pieces later down the line. Yeah, I mean, I’m just really passionate about keeping it really simple.
Ross Kenyon: It’s all very strong advice at the individual level. I’ve also seen things that are one step up from that, about school lunches and about government procurement. I grew up eating horribly processed calzones and hamburgers in a bag and stuff like that. One of my colleagues was talking about how she missed a thing called Tony’s Galaxy Pizzas, and I looked it up. I don’t think I ever had it, but I don’t know that much food is more processed than that, and I doubt it’s good for anyone — short term, medium term, long term. And it’s crazy to me that an institution that is ostensibly there to nurture children would not put more of an emphasis on that.
I think it’s starting to change too. I’ve also seen things like the school lunches in France that are incredibly fresh and the [unclear] local, and they’re not the way that we have. It doesn’t have to be this way. I think there are places that parents, even if you’re thinking of just the family level, could probably make a difference.
Helen Rebanks: Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. And I just was chatting to a friend who was going to Denmark as part of an organic milk visit, and she was talking about in the Danish local procurement, it’s all about local food getting into schools and hospitals and council offices, and organic food. And this shouldn’t be wildly expensive, this should be supported properly, and we should be caring about how we’re growing this food.
I’m all for people choosing whatever they want to eat. But my message would be, ask the question how it’s farmed to start with. Is this benefiting the land that we live on? Is it grown in a sustainable way? Is it regenerating things? Is it healthy, or is it coming from a monoculture? And I’ve gone off on a tangent there, haven’t I, Ross. But yeah, the leading people, that should be putting good food certainly in hospitals and schools. That should be baseline, shouldn’t it? Because food is medicine.
Ross Kenyon: It really boggles the mind to think about it in that way. Oh, go ahead.
Helen Rebanks: Yeah, sorry. No, no, so much to say. Exactly. Just that, you know, I think it can get tangled up to be too tricky. But for me and my family, keeping it local, thinking about what we can grow in our landscape should sustain us. And let’s not fly in things from all across the world, and let’s think about the soil first. And it’s becoming a bit more prevalent and a bit more understanding. People are just so up against it in the world we’re living in. And I think through the stories that I’ve tried to put in the book, it’s about connections. Making those connections and getting kind of a love for cooking back, and not seeing it as something to escape from. That it’s something — so many meals now are eaten in the car, aren’t they? Or on the hoof, or at the desk, or rushing around.
For me, a table — getting together around a table is absolutely vital, like as little or as often as you can. But do it as a family or as a partnership or with your friends, and share some food together that you know where it’s come from. And just explain what the food is that you’re having and talk about it. And just do some simple things like that around the table, because it’s going to taste better for a start. And then everybody’s going to be like, wow, that’s delicious. And then it just means it’s inspiring, isn’t it? That’s part of what I want to do as, you know, as farmers here and as storytellers, and opening our [unclear] life into memoir. And yeah, it’s important work, I think.
Ross Kenyon: Bringing people together in that way with regard to food is a good thing to do, I think, for its own sake as well. One of the — you don’t put it in so fine of a phrase here as I’m going to put it in. But I’ve said this on the show before, that I think for the vast bulk of humanity, the most important thing that they’re going to do is to raise a family and to be a good parent. And that’s one of those things that you have a fair amount of control over — some might even say total control over, if you accept that amount of responsibility. And being able to show up and be with your family could be — it might not be the most important climate thing you can do. But that isn’t everything either.
And that’s why this show has so much that is about Mary Oliver, tininess, domesticity. And that could also make a better world, even if the climate impact is not nearly as great. Then again, if you’re eating really climate positive food here — local, organic, animals that are well treated — that can definitely figure into this too. But even that core point, I think, is super neglected.
Helen Rebanks: It certainly is. And I think there was somebody — there’s a writer in the UK that did a bit of blurb for my book, and she said that sometimes we have a quiet power as parents in how we raise our children and the choice of food we put on the table. It is a quiet power. We do have it. And I’ve always recognized it and understood it, and I’ve sort of felt that society doesn’t value it and wants us to escape motherhood and domesticity. And all, you know, everything I was fed as a young teen and growing up was, yeah, escape it, get your kids into childcare, get off to work again as fast as you possibly can. And that didn’t sit well with me. I thought, I’ve got these wild and precious lives in my hands here. They’re relying on me entirely, on me.
And how we shape the future is how we bring up our children. And let’s bring them up to be kind, decent, honourable, caring, you know, citizens that can have conversations and look adults in the eye and understand nuance. And let’s have lots of brilliant time with them and enjoy their childhoods. And the world we’re living in seems to want us to kind of race through that — go faster, produce more, earn more, work harder — and then when you do get a holiday with them for a few days, you’re so exhausted you just all fall out anyway. I mean, let’s not live like that. That just doesn’t work for me, because it just felt wrong.
So I’ve always put it as a priority, and it has at times jarred with modern life. It’s made me feel small sometimes in get-togethers, or I don’t know, self-worth battles in my own head. You know, am I worthy enough? Am I doing the right thing by prioritizing this and not prioritizing myself sometimes, and putting their needs much higher on the list than mine? So the book is an exploration of that as well, as a woman kind of living, thinking about all of those things. And I do think that together we’re stronger. And sometimes it isn’t — it isn’t all rosy, it isn’t all brilliant, and it’s not all fair and balanced, but it’s sort of ups and downs of family life.
Ross Kenyon: It does not seem overly rosy, as I put it at the start of the show. It seems a life of difficulty, and that’s something that can be celebrated or appreciated for its own sake here too. You have stories in the book about hanging out with James, and he has big fancy pants colleagues who were talking about books and essays, and maybe they’re things that you don’t care about as much or haven’t read, and sometimes being made to feel — or maybe you just feel lesser as a result. I think a lot of that — I’m guilty of a lot of bookishness and referencing and, oh look at me, I’m smart, I’ve referenced things, and aren’t I cheeky and good. And I don’t know that it’s worth anything.
Ultimately, I think the things that you describe are often the real thing, and those other things are — if you’ve ever had marital difficulties or periods where you didn’t know if you were going to sustain as a family at all, you realize that all those other things are pure flash, and they don’t actually matter that much. And none of those ideas are going to attend your funeral. They don’t actually care about you. They’re disembodied thoughts, and it’s so easy to forget that.
Helen Rebanks: I’m totally nodding away, Ross. You’ve got it nail on the head there. It is easy to forget that, and we can get drawn into all sorts of different worlds and hype and ego and all that kind of nonsense. And for me, I’m very grounded. I think living a life on a farm certainly helps, you know. I’ll step out the sheep shed in a minute. It’s been raining solid for about, gosh, I don’t know how many days, but it’s muddy, my shoes, my boots have mud on them. I battle mud daily coming in and out of the house, and my arms are usually deep in a hot sink of soapy water washing up the next bowl of, you know, set of pans and cooking equipment and things. It is very grounding.
And it’s just — I think sometimes you don’t realize what you’ve got right under your nose. And I maybe thought from time to time my life wasn’t kind of exciting or interesting. And then I’ve shared the stories in the book, and then what I’m finding is the readers are going, this is my life too, and this matters. And yes, I agree with you, this matters. This stuff really holds things together. And I’m certainly enjoying the ride of the whole journey of publishing and putting it out there. I just talked to a friend at lunchtime and I said, one of the biggest things people are saying is, gosh, it’s so honest, Helen. It’s so honest, it’s so personal. Like maybe we’re not used to people just telling the truth about how it feels to just do ordinary things.
Ross Kenyon: No, we — yeah, I do not think that we are really any of that, Helen. This might be a little bit of a punt — I’m going to use some British lingo there. But have you followed the trend? I know you’re an artist, you appreciate aesthetics — the trend of minimalism. Have you noticed that being so popular in the last couple years?
Helen Rebanks: Yes. And I see a bit of this on Instagram here and there. Yes, I’m aware of it. Yes.
Ross Kenyon: Is there something connected to this? It’s like a sterility and a cleanness. It’s obviously opposed to sort of the coziness of the bric-a-brac farmhouse style that I imagine your home probably feels more like. But do you think that is a visual representation of what modern life wants us to be, which is sort of clean, simple, unattached? There’s almost no sentimentality to minimalism. It’s almost just — it’s blank on purpose. Is that — am I reading too much into it, or is there something there?
Helen Rebanks: I think there probably is something there, that we should all clean everything out, make it all pure and white and live these sort of clinical lives, that everything’s clean and we eat all these plants and it’s all very simplified. And real life is not like that. It’s messy, it’s smelly, it’s dirty, it’s — oh my goodness, it’s rich, it’s rewarding, it’s — life should be fun. And not let’s just — I have let go of having to keep everything neat and in order. I grew up in a house that was a bed and breakfast, so we had visitors coming into the farmhouse all the time. We used to have to keep it ever so neat and tidy and organized. And I live in much more sort of messy chaos now with four children. I am fighting an uphill struggle with the mess and all that that brings.
We all have different boots and shoes and coats and rain gear and swimming stuff on the side regularly. Wet towels dumped in a heap. I mean, life. This minimalism that you speak about — what that is, that’s not a real life. It’s not it. It doesn’t feature in my world. It’s maybe nice to flick on an image on Instagram that looks all perfect and it could be a calming room. Yeah, let’s declutter now and again and not have so much junk around. But we’re surrounded by books. We like art. We like music on. We like fun, laughter, dancing, family meals. And minimalism doesn’t fit in very well with that, for me.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, celebration of mud on your wellies probably doesn’t match that aesthetic. Or maybe it would be great contrast for Instagram, I’m not sure. Have you seen regeneration in your land, running animals through them and mob grazing? Does it seem like your experience with animal agriculture is a net positive for the land that you steward?
Helen Rebanks: Absolutely. We have changed our farming system from what would be described as set stocking, which is just open the gate and let the sheep in and — well, have them in a longer time and just have them everywhere. And what we’ve done is really focused on regenerative practices of mob grazing that you described. So they’re in for about three days in much smaller fields now, and we electric fence in any bigger fields. So we’re moving them through the pastures either every day or every two or three days. And we’re grazing a third, we’re trampling a third, and we’re leaving a third of that grass that’s there. Grasses, herbs, flowers — there’s all sorts in the fields now. And regeneration comes so quickly when you give land lots of rest.
So it’s all been about preparation going into winter, giving the ground lots of growing time, and we will out-winter all our cattle on this system and they’ll just move daily. So we’re moving the cows to the grass. We’re not bringing the grass into them in sheds. We’re not hauling, you know, making loads of silage and haylage through the summer anymore. We’re cutting the costs down. A lot of this has been around costs, input costs into the farm, and cutting that right back and working with nature, working with the sunshine and the rainfall, and just keeping it super simple and providing amazing habitats for wildlife around the farm as well.
So we’ve — gosh, I’m thinking about it — in the last about three to five years, we’ve planted 36,000 trees across the farm, hedgerows restored. We’ve re-wiggled rivers. We’ve now got 20-something ponds on the farm. There wasn’t any standing water beforehand. So we know all the science about wetlands being huge carbon sinks as well. It’s just been phenomenal to witness the changes. And they say build it and they will come. You know, like The Biggest Little Farm kind of story about all the nature coming around to the farm. It happens so quickly. It’s been magical.
The barn owls have come back because there’s long grass for the voles and the mice to scurry around and hide. We’ve got herons — grey herons come and they follow the sheep or the cattle through the fields and they’re looking for frogs in the grass. And we didn’t think herons were a particularly field kind of bird. We thought they would go round the wetlands and eat what was round the wet. They love to be in long grass because the sheep and cows disturb the frogs. There’s bird life all over the farm. We’ve got bird species that we haven’t seen that are on the Red List in the UK, because there’s just much more for them to eat because the grasses are longer. So there’s tons more insects, spiders, and we’ve got bats. Oh, I could go on. Just red squirrel. It’s just amazing.
So yeah, we’re working with nature, regenerating the farm, doing the mob grazing. It has all these knock-on effects for a healthier farm, a healthy ecosystem. It’s just a joy to live here and a joy to be part of it. Like I said before, it’s an exciting time to be farming.
Ross Kenyon: There’s a lot of diversity in what you’re growing and what you’ve described, but from my understanding of y’all’s books, the main operation is about breeding rams. Is that tups, as I am told that they’re called? Is that correct still?
Helen Rebanks: Yes, breeding tups. And also with the cattle, we’re into the breeding lines of those as well. So we will sell bulls and some breeding females going forward. We’ve been building a [unclear] herd over the last five years. And the older ewes that don’t go on to reproduce the next year — so we would cast, cast them off for meat. And then we would also select some of the younger male stock predominantly that don’t make the grade for breeding stock.
So our spare male lambs, for example, go to a local butcher who will finish them off, and the same for the bullocks. But they’re all raised on grass and they don’t have any medicines or treatments. A little bit for the sheep’s feet — that’s a situation we can’t quite shake off with the sheep here. But the cattle certainly have never had anything else other than a vaccination when they first, when they were young stock, which I’m incredibly proud of, you know. And they don’t have any bought feed into them, no grain and corn.
Ross Kenyon: Sheep have famously a large carbon footprint per kilogram of meat. Is it less when they’re raised this way, or are most sheep raised in more conventional concentrated animal feeding operation scenarios? Is that actually how they’re raised?
Helen Rebanks: Yeah, that’s the case. I mean, it’s not the case for ours, how we are now. I’m thinking about the sheep that go up onto our fell and graze on a real diverse pasture of herbs and grasses. They produce an incredibly healthy meat, and they’re not a problem for us climate-wise at all. They’re raising a lamb and they’re just incredibly good for the system that we’ve got here. It’s not a negative system. We’ve worked with Farm Tool — Farm Carbon Toolkit — and they came and audited us a couple of years ago, and it’s carbon neutral, the whole farm. So it’s working.
Ross Kenyon: It’s good to hear. I think when people think about the story of animal agriculture and climate change, the story that they’ve been told is pretty simple about, you just should not participate in it as a consumer. But I think if you add the regeneration part of the story in, and what animals can actually do to the land when they’re mimicking the prey-predator chasing and moving them frequently, it can create lots of additional benefits beyond just carbon that I think, if you just compare it to how animals are treated and managed in conventional agricultural systems — I think if you have to choose between that and veganism, it’s probably better for everyone to be a vegan.
But I also agree, you spent a lot of time talking about the amount of processing that goes into some of the more synthetic animal-ish products out there. I think people forget about that too. That’s highly — that’s monocropped, it’s pesticide. It’s not good for the environment. Compared to animal agriculture in the conventional system, it may be better for you and the planet. But if you stop there, you’re missing the more important point, I think.
Helen Rebanks: Yeah, and let’s not forget who the main culprit of climate change is: fossil fuels. Let’s just not forget that. It’s always like, we need to consider our diet. But, you know, 90% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions are from fossil fuels. And animal agriculture gets such a bad rap. It’s just, if it’s done properly and done right, and if farmers are supported to do it properly in regenerative ways, healthy ecosystems can handle it. We can pump carbon back into the soil, we can work with ecosystems, we can produce healthy food. It shouldn’t just be, you know, I’m trying to think of this, like it shouldn’t just be binary. That’s bad and that’s good. Plant-based is good and meat’s bad. No, not at all. It can be — we can have nature and farming, not two separate things. It’s all joined up.
Yeah. I mean, we’ve always adapted our landscapes to grow food. Indigenous people have done this for millennia. And let’s just think about what we’ve done to destroy things and try and work together to make it better by choosing better food from better farming.
Ross Kenyon: Helen, thank you so much for taking a risk on being on a show called Reversing Climate Change, putting you on the spot here to maybe quiz — you know, I really respect and love what both of you do. I think it’s an amazing story. I think anyone listening who likes the timbre of this conversation should clearly pick up The Farmer’s Wife: My Life in Days. Thanks for being here, Helen.
Helen Rebanks: Oh, thank you, Ross. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. It’s been a lot of fun. And it’s — yeah, I mean, none of us are too small to make a difference. That would be my message.
Ross Kenyon: A lovely sentiment to end on, and thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com, follow us on social media, and we will catch you next time.
