From this NPR profile:

James Rebanks is a farmer who shepherds sheep into pastures and words into books. He has a gift for capturing both the allure of his beautiful surroundings and his difficult work, and for articulating the complex, worrisome issues facing farmers today.

Pastoral Song, like his first bestselling memoir, The Shepherd’s Life, enchants with lush descriptions of England’s Lake District and Cumbrian hills, where Rebanks’ family has worked the land for 600 years. But it is more than a paean to fells (hills), becks (streams), and flocks. Inspired by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Rebanks’ new book urgently conveys how the drive for cheap, mass-produced food has impoverished both small farmers and the soil, threatening humanity’s future.

Rebanks hopes to help reverse this dangerous trajectory, not just by the environmental measures he has taken on his small family farm, but by using the bully pulpit of his books and popular Twitter account @Herdyshepherd1 to advocate for change. “How can we farm in ways that will endure and do the least harm?” he asks in this important — and frequently stirring — book.

Born in 1974, Rebanks is old enough to recall the old-fashioned, mixed rotational farming his grandfather taught him as a boy. He was lucky to grow up at a time when curlews and gulls soared overhead in abundance and “the hawthorn dikes around the barley fields frothed white with blossom and hummed with bees.” Such cherished childhood memories — like seeing a mare in labor, with the foal’s limb “pushing up jagged beneath the taut skin as if she had swallowed a stepladder” — have sustained him in difficult times.