Podcast #1,079: Rooted Living in a Shallow Age — A Shepherd’s Guide to the Good Life

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Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. 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 teaches about modern life and things that matter. James offers a glimpse of the often ignored and misunderstood world of pastoral life in England’s Lake District, which isn’t just about working with sheep and cattle, but maintaining a deep connection to past generations, a commitment to community, and a sense of purpose. He takes us through the life of a fell shepherd, where the timeless values of hard work, seasonality, stewardship, and stillness still get lived out day to day. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash shepherd. All right, James Rebanks, welcome to the show.

James Rebanks: Thank you for having me on. It’s a pleasure.

Brett McKay: So you are a shepherd in the Lake District of the United Kingdom. It’s one of the mini hats you wear. For those who aren’t familiar with this area, can you describe it for us? And not just the landscape, but the culture of it.

James Rebanks: Yeah, sure. So if you knew the place that I live from English literature, which lots of people around the world do, it’s probably the most written about place in England, but nearly all of the writing about it was written by sort of middle class or upper middle class poets who believed that in the 19th century they discovered where we lived and it was this sort of lovely mountainous place with hobbit-like innocent people in it who they could write about to their heart’s delight. And they made it very famous and they made it a sort of central, the Lake District’s a sort of central pillar of the English Romantic imagination, if you like. We love the place. It’s got lakes, it’s got mountains. And that’s what people thought it was or lots of people think it is. But I’m actually a son of a native and there’s no goddamn way that those poets discovered it because my people and lots of other people have been here for thousands of years. And I think, and so do many of those people, that it has its own culture and it’s a very rural pastoral culture about shepherding and having cattle and grazing the mountains and managing the forest.

And all of the things that are in the background of those poems or those paintings of the 19th or 20th century was basically built by my people, my ancestors. So yeah, it’s a mix of things really. Some people think it’s the most English part of England because of that romantic poetry. I think it’s the least English part of England. I think it’s the most Scandinavian part. So

Brett McKay: Interesting.

James Rebanks: We have our own dialect and our own way of thinking. And a lot of that, maybe we’ll return to it later in the conversation, a lot of that is quite recognizably Scandinavian. And we know from the history that the valleys where my family and many other families live and work were effectively settled or culturally changed quite heavily by the Vikings a thousand years ago. So it’s, yeah, it’s, it was one of the poorest places in England for a very long time, quite disconnected. We’d have some similarities for Americans with places like Appalachia. So places that are notionally poorer, that other people might say were backwards. But if you’re actually from there and you know the truth, you know that there’s a really rich, deep cultural heritage there. And many special things survive in those places because of their isolation and their sort of cultural defiance. Is that a fair way of putting it? I hope I’m being fair to Appalachia.

Brett McKay: No, that sounds about right.

James Rebanks: So my American friends laugh and say I’m a hillbilly.

Brett McKay: And one, I guess one of those famous writers, Beatrix Potter lived there and wrote about it.

James Rebanks: Yeah, absolutely. So Beatrix Potter, who lots of people listening to this will know from the Peter Rabbit books and all those beautiful children’s books. She came on a wave of sort of romantic enthusiasm with her family in the early 20th century. They came to this place, they read those books and poems. But to her very great credit, she gets really interested in the people of the place and the shepherds and the other people. So as a girl, she’s seeing them and she’s wondering what their lives are like. And later on, she went on to be this amazing businesswoman as well as writer. And she did clever things like she franchised the children’s toys that were sold with Peter Rabbit, made loads of money. And what did she do with that money? She started buying farms in our valleys to protect them from developers and to try and preserve the way of life I’m part of with my sheep. And in a slightly sort of secondhand kind of way, became part of that world. But I think she’s brilliant. And she preserved a lot of the farms that I now do business with. A lot of the farms I now go to these beautiful little stone farmsteads at the bottom of the mountains, often painted white with whitewash, with lovely stone barns on the end of them, just those absolutely beautiful. When you imagine the north of England and those beautiful little cottages, she saved some of the best stuff.

Brett McKay: So people have been there for over a thousand years. How much has life changed for the families, the natives that have been there for a long time farming in the Lake District.

James Rebanks: So we know from the early accounts, basically when the posh people and the writers and the painters turned up about 200, 250 years ago, we know that this was an incredibly impoverished place and had such a strong dialect they thought the people were speaking Norwegian. They often had beards and looked like Vikings. And the isolation of this place had preserved sort of lots of very special things. So the big transition is after that. So we know it was very much its own place with its own culture. Then within a few decades, with the coming of the railways and all that sort of stuff, we have lots and lots of people start to come here. And from then on, people like my family look like they played a kind of game with two sets of rules. They carry on doing what they do, working on the mountains with the sheep and the cattle, but they learn how to play the tourism game as well. And they learn how to take people up mountains as guides. They learn how to cater for whatever these strange urban people from the south of England want. And that’s resulted, I mean, the stats are crazy now.

So we’re talking about 13 valleys, quite small valleys in the north of England. There are 43,000 people live here, most of them in three small towns. About 300 families like mine manage the farmed landscape, the cultural landscape, and 21 million people a year come to visit. So we’re in this place with an incredibly dense amount of tourism happening to us. And that’s had some negative effects, but maybe one of the positive effects is it’s enabled some of those little farms and their ancient traditions to carry on. So basically you have small farmers learning how to hustle and make some money from tourism so they can keep going with this. And you said some of that was a thousand years old. Actually, some of it’s at least four and a half thousand years old. Some of it may go back to the settling after the last ice age 8,000 years ago, maybe.

Brett McKay: Wow. Before we get into shepherding, let’s talk a bit more about your background, because your life has straddled this ancient world, the Lake District, and the modern world. You studied at Oxford. How did that happen?

James Rebanks: So I’m a funny hybrid creature. I met a sociologist once and he said I was good at switching codes. So my two codes are basically I’m from this old-fashioned farming family. I grew up doing what we do. I had a grandfather that was very sort of ancient and oldie-woldie, and I thought I wanted to be just like him. The reality was I was growing up in the 1980s and 90s, and you couldn’t be just like him. You had to go to school, maybe go to college, do other things. I left school at 15 with no qualifications. I sort of bummed out of school because I thought that was an act of loyalty to my people so I could go back and work on the farm. I did that for nine years, basically working for minimum wage. And then I met a young woman called Helen who became my wife, is still my wife, and she sent me back to school. She noticed that I was really bookish. She sent me back to the local city to evening classes for like basically workers that were doing their education. And I got an amazing teacher there, and he said I should apply to go to Oxford University. And I said, well, I haven’t even got any school qualifications. And he persuaded me to do it anyway, and they kind of picked me up as a bit of a nobody. It was a little bit like, in a funny way, it was a little bit like Good Will Hunting, the movie. They sort of spotted me, picked me out of what I was doing, and I went there. And ever since, I’ve had a very strange double life where some people think I’m clever and urbane, and my own people think I’m a farmer.

Brett McKay: So what did you study while you were at Oxford?

James Rebanks: I studied history, modern history for the first three years, and then I won a scholarship, and I did a year where I studied modern American history. So you can hit me up with questions about the Lincoln-Douglas debates, or the Vietnam War, or the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and I can hopefully remember some of that.

Brett McKay: And what have you done with your degree?

James Rebanks: So part of me at that time, because I thought the farm was going to spit me out, I thought we were going to go broke and we’re going to lose it, and I had to have another hustle. So I thought maybe another hustle was to be a historian. But I actually couldn’t stay away from home a minute longer, so my wife and I went home to take on the farm, try and give it a future. But I’ve never really stopped sort of being a historian of my own landscape, speaking about the past of my own people. And I realized somewhere along the way on that journey that I thought somebody else must have written the book that explained my people. It couldn’t be enough that the poets and painters had done all the cultural work. And then I realized after a while that had to be me. I was the strange hybrid creature that could do it. So I wrote a book called The Shepherd’s Life, which changed my life, really. It was just about who we were as a people and tells the story of my father and my grandfather and the people that I grew up among. And that book went kind of crazy. And yeah, a million books or so later, I’m talking to you. I’ve had a very strange experience.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about shepherding in the Lake District because I thought it was really fascinating. You get into the details, the day-to-day, what the seasons of the life are like, and you do a type of shepherding that’s called fell shepherding. What is fell shepherding?

James Rebanks: Okay. So fell is Norwegian. They basically call a mountain a fjell. So it’s basically mountain farming. I really am a hillbilly. And so what does it mean? Well, it’s a kind of farming that lots of places in developing countries would recognize, but not many farmers in the modern world would recognize. So we have one of the largest areas of common land in Western Europe in our mountains. And common land is places where if you’re a qualified commoner, which means you own land in that area and you farm it, you have rights to take a certain number of sheep, cattle, ducks, grazing animals to the mountains. And you farm the mountains in common with your neighbors and colleagues. And so that’s what we do. So in the next couple of days, we’re going to go to the mountains, about 10 of us with about 25 sheepdogs on foot. We’re going to gather 10 flocks of sheep, some of which will be mixed, from the mountain. It’ll take two days. My daughter will go with me because she’s got good dogs and lots of my neighbors. And we’ll work as a community to bring the sheep down from those mountains to the penfold or the hospital, the place where we sort them.

And we’ll sort them into the separate flocks and bring them down to our little farms in the valley bottom a few miles below to do the shearing, to get the wool off. And then in the next month, they’ll go back to that mountain. The crazy part of this is that the sheep teach their daughters which part of the mountain to live on. There’s a word called hefting or hefted, another Viking word. And it means that these sheep always have to go back to the mountain each spring with their mothers every generation of daughters until they know their place on the mountain. And there’s no fences, but they don’t go crazy and leave in different directions. They live on a particular part of the mountain where my sheep have been hefted for maybe a thousand years. And it’s one of the few farming systems in the world where when you look at the cattle or the sheep on the mountain, you can know that they are exactly the same genetic flock or herd that’s been there since the first domesticated animals went up there. It’s crazy. Utterly. We’re doing work on a mountain which people did maybe four and a half thousand years ago in the same way.

Brett McKay: That’s crazy. You’ve described how it differs from most shepherding. If you were in the United States and you were going across the plains, you might just see a flock of sheep in a plot of land. This sounds like it’s more organic. I don’t know. There’s sort of a natural rhythm you have to fall into to do this type of shepherding.

James Rebanks: Yep. So one thing this system teaches you very quickly is that you’re not special. You’re just the latest person doing that work in the way that it’s always been done for thousands of years and somebody will do it after you. You have to do it the way it’s done because you’re working with other people. You have to do it on the dates when it’s done. And you have to do it in the way that the mountain allows. You can’t do some flashy new farming technology. It’s just not going to work in that place. But there’s probably something I need to explain, Brett, before we go any further. When I got interested in America, I realized that you have, because of cowboys and stuff, you have a very proud or macho culture to do with cows in American farming. But sheep farmers, I think in American culture, are slightly effeminate. I was watching some of the Yellowstone stuff recently, and sheep farmers are like a plague of peasants that come in and overgraze places. And it’s not as macho or good as being a cattle farmer. That’s not like that where we live. So the farming for a very long time has been about the sheep primarily, with the cattle in the background. And to be a shepherd here is one of the proudest things, the most high-status things you could be in the indigenous culture of this place is a shepherd. So when my grandfather said he was a shepherd, he literally looks anybody in the face and there’s no deference, there’s no fear. He doesn’t think he’s better than people, but he’s absolutely sure in his mind he’s no worse than anybody else.

Brett McKay: Yeah, the manliness of shepherds reminds me of this study that this anthropologist did back in the 70s on shepherds who live on the island of Crete. He published this book, it’s called The Poetics of Manhood. And these Cretan shepherds, they had this really strong culture of manliness. There’s a celebration of bravado, boldness, improvisation was highly valued. But a lot of proving their manhood involved stealing sheep from other people’s flocks. You had to demonstrate courage and daring that way. So they had a code of honor, but they’re also kind of roguish kind of figures. And it’s interesting that the perception of shepherds have differed across time and culture, from Greece to the Bible. Sometimes they’ve been seen as kind of sneaky, cunning outsider types, but it seems like more often it’s been seen as a trustworthy, respected, noble profession.

James Rebanks: Oh yeah, this is a very proud, very honest tradition. And actually one of the things about farming common land on the mountains together is that honesty and integrity become the defining things that you aspire to as an individual. Because if you’re gathering a mountain and you have opportunities to steal other people’s sheep, So in our culture, you would bend over backwards to avoid even looking like that could happen. If a sheep comes down from the mountain that hasn’t been claimed, the shepherds on my fell, our mountain, would argue about giving it to each other rather than taking it themselves to avoid the perception that they might be people that grabbed more than their fair share that might be willing to take something that wasn’t theirs. And there was a fascinating case around here about 10 years ago where there was a sheep farmer who was basically not a good egg, had been stealing other people’s sheep. And that was amazing because the whole shepherding community, once they realized this, turned their back on this person and refused to deal with him, refused to do business with them. And they had to stop farming in that place. They couldn’t sell their sheep. They couldn’t do anything. The shepherd just turned their backs on the ring when the livestock came to the sale yard. And they were sending a very clear message. We don’t steal. 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 fast and loose with the rules, you’re not part of this. So there’s a kind of Old Testament absolutism about that. There’s no way back.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it was an honor culture.

James Rebanks: Yeah, it’s an honor culture and quite a tough one. Like you’re meant to do the work well. You’re meant to work hard. So we’ve been shearing the sheep to get the wool off recently. And I’m getting a little old for that now. I’m 50. But a lot of the young people in this valley are doing that work. And they still admire hard work and keeping going and sweating and having proper sort of true grit. I know that’s a little bit old fashioned now, but you kind of earn your spurs, I guess you’d say, by doing that work and doing it well and by having good sheep dogs and being decent with other people. Being a good person is part of it too. That’s your reputation that you trade on in the mountains.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned sheep dogs. What makes for a good sheep dog?

James Rebanks: So different things. There’s different kinds, actually. So a lot of people will know the English border collies, like the black and white ones. They’re very good at what we would call field work. Like sometimes you see on the TV, they’ll do that creeping around thing and they use their eyes a lot. And they’re sort of creeping like a fox or a coyote or something. That’s cool. That wins competitions. But on the mountains, the fell shepherds here like a different kind of dog, like a half-bred dog. And what they’re looking for is stamina. Sometimes they want a dog that barks, like an Australian kelpie or a hunter way. And they’re looking for stamina. So with all due respect to the border collies, they can get pretty tired after maybe an hour or two’s work. But some of the crossbred or specialist bred mountain dogs can work for five, six hours, maybe even in hot weather. And so that’s much more about stamina. And also, like I have a really good friend called Joe Weir that’s got brilliant dogs for working in the mountains, better than mine, but don’t tell him. He won’t be listening to this. But he can stand on one mountain, send his dogs down into the valley, up the other side of the mountain,

And on a whistle or using their own brains, they can bring a flock of sheep down from the mountain that you’re looking at across the abyss between you. And he doesn’t even think that’s that remarkable, but behind his back, we’re all looking at each other going, what is that? That’s like ninja level shepherding. None of us could do that. And then the other part of that is, I don’t know what the equivalent would be in America, maybe being a cowboy or something like, there’s a freedom which comes with working in the mountains, freedom from all the BS that happens down below in the rest of the world. And it’s like infectious. So if you meet the fell shepherds, these people that spend a big part of their summer of the year working in the mountains, you’ve never met people more obsessed with like what they do. Like they love it. Like there’s no drudgery involved. They think they’re the freest people on earth doing the work that they love with the dogs that they love, working with the sheep that they enjoy working with. And yeah, if you tell those people that they should go and get a job that pays three times as much money in the valley bottom, they just look at you like you’re crazy. Like, what would I want to do that for?

Brett McKay: Something you do in your book, A Shepherd’s Life, you do a great job of describing the seasonality of a shepherd. Tell us about the seasonality. What does a year look like for a shepherd?

James Rebanks: So everything we do is absolutely dictated by the seasons and the dates. So I said earlier in this podcast that I was going to the mountain in a couple of days time, how it actually works is the oldest shepherd on the mountain will tell me that we’re going to the mountain, probably about nine or 10 o’clock in the evening, and he’ll tell me we’re going four o’clock the next morning. Try juggling that with a 21st century job like I did for a while. But everything has to be done when it’s done. You can’t share sheep out of season, you can’t lamb them out of season. So everything’s happening at a time for a reason. So we lamb our sheep in April after the last frost and snow so that they can go to the mountain in May so that they can be in the mountain with their lambs, hefting them and teaching them to live there until high summer when they come down again for the shearing. They’ll go back until the autumn when they come down so we can sell the male lambs. And then they’ll go back with their daughters until into winter. And then there’s a point depending on the mountain, some stay up there all winter, some come down for the winter. And around that is a whole bunch of other cultural activities like we have these shepherds meets and these shows where we’re competing to see who has the best sheep, the best flock. They all happen the day after all of those jobs are done at certain times of year.

And like my story, my schooling story was really that I grew up in that world and I loved it and I thought that was our culture. I thought everybody knew about it. I thought they respected it. I thought everyone knew that was a great way to live. And I was amazed when I went to school like 15 miles away at the local secondary school or high school, the teachers didn’t know anything about this. They thought I was an idiot because I wanted to be a shepherd and they didn’t understand that that was dignified or proud or you might want to do it. They wanted you to go to college. They wanted you to leave. And I was just so confused by these conflicting messages for one from my family and then another from school. And I’ve never really shaken that. Everywhere I go around the world, I’m always looking for those people like us. I’m like, okay, I don’t want the official narrative. I want to know where are the people that do the work? Where are the ordinary people here, and what do they think they’re doing? What does their life look like? And I think it’s been a gift for my family, really. Okay, I’ve done some funny things away from home, like going to Oxford University and writing the books, but I’m still who I always was. I’m still that kid that is a little suspicious of schooling, a little suspicious of the contempt that some of the modern world holds us in, because I honestly don’t think we live better than some of my friends who are shepherds. I’m not sure our values have improved. There’s lots of things about it that I hold on to very firmly.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. I imagine one thing that modern people, when they might look at your family, the people who live in the Lake District, they’re like, I don’t get that. It does sound very repetitive. And I think a lot of modern people find that repetitiveness unbearably boring. I think we put a premium on novelty. What do you think the virtues of repetitiveness are? And what do you think non-shepherds can learn from shepherds about that?

James Rebanks: I guess the first thing that’s flashing through my mind is the people who go to work at nine o’clock in the morning every morning in a car, queue in the traffic, go into an office and sit with the same three people who don’t experience the weather, who have some jerk off for a boss telling them what to do, and half the work’s meaningless. That’s not repetitive. I think loads of the modern world’s very, very repetitive and feels meaningless to lots of people. But yes, there is a cyclical sort of seasonal nature to our work, but it’s always changing. Like an hour before I came to talk to you, I had two bulls, two bulls escaped from a paddock. And I can tell you, I had a very exciting half an hour while I got them off the road and got them back into where they should be and fix things up. And two hours before that, I was talking to a young shepherd who was telling me about some things that they were doing. And later on today, I’m going to be working with my daughter doing some other work. And the weather’s changing every five minutes. And the office I’m in is like the most beautiful place in England with the mountains and the clouds and the light changing. Repetitive isn’t the word I would think of. And I sure as hell, I’ve tried the other thing. I’ve worked in offices in London and other stuff when I was young. And I’d quite happily take my granddad’s deal any day of the week.

Brett McKay: Yeah. It sounds like the repetitiveness might be repetitive on the big scale, but every day it’s changing. It’s going to change day to day.

James Rebanks: Yeah, totally. And there’s also very good fortune involved in it. You get to live in a beautiful place. You get to work with your family. I love, I’m never far from my children or my wife. I get to work with my community. I get to do something that’s meaningful to me. I get to do the work that my father and grandfather did. Every time I build a wall or mend a wooden fence or something, I’m mending something that my granddad built or my dad built. That to me is absolutely laden with love and significance and meaning. It doesn’t even feel like work loads of the time to me.

Brett McKay: Yeah. It sounds like it gives you a way to just situate yourself in the world that a lot of modern people don’t have.

James Rebanks: I think so. And that’s not the fault of lots of people in the modern world. Lots of people listening to this. Not everybody’s lucky enough to have a family that somehow managed to hold on a farm. And I have loads of friends that live in cities and have more modern lives than me. And they find other great ways to have meaning, right? This is not the only way to have meaning. You can have meaning by being a teacher in a high school, right? Or being a nurse and caring for sick people. There’s so many, many ways of having meaning or sort of rooting yourself in things that matter. But to me, I think we have this crazy narrative in our society that being a farmer, particularly a small farmer or producing food somehow isn’t anachronistic or doesn’t matter. I believe the exact opposite of that. I passionately believe that we’re not the last of anything. We’re holding on because this matters, because it’s still significant. And we’re increasingly learning that the food that we all eat has a massive impact on our bodies, on our mental health. I think anybody that grows food in any way, shape or form, whether they’re urban, rural, whatever, I think they’re heroes. I don’t mean that I am. I think generally people that produce food are doing something of really high social value and cultural value. And we’ve somehow got seduced by a culture that says being a sports star or a billionaire or a big mouth politician, that these are the things that we should respect and give high status to. And I don’t believe that at all. I admire teachers and nurses and farmers and people that do real things, if I’m honest.

Brett McKay: Something that was struck by as I was reading A Shepherd’s Life was the timescale that farmers live by in the Lake District. You’re not just thinking in terms of quarters or years. You’re thinking in decades and even centuries. How does that long timescale thinking change the way you make decisions?

James Rebanks: Well, like the little farm that we’re on at the moment, we have 200 acres that we own. We farm about 700 acres in total. But that’s been a multi-generational project, which is very humbling. It isn’t just a commercial asset that belongs to me and my wife. The rest of my family have an interest in it. It’s their legacy as well. So I have to respect that. And when I’m changing things on the farm, I’m thinking, whoa, like this is not just mine. This is something that my father devoted his entire working life on until he died of cancer 10 years ago. And this is my granddad’s lifetime achievement as well. And I think that keeps you small in a good way. That you think, okay, I’ve got kids. Like my 17-year-old daughter wants to be a farmer. I’m thinking, okay, I’ve got to kind of honor what I was inherited. I’ve got to try and hand it on in a way that works for her. And I think there’s an argument that that makes you smaller and less significant that we should. But I don’t believe that at all. I think we’re more significant when we’re part of these flows of people and part of communities.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it sounds like you’re taking a stewardship mindset to your work.

James Rebanks: Yeah, 100%. So we’re obsessed on our farm with mending and building soil. We’ve changed the way that we graze using modern science to be more regenerative grazers. We’ve restored habitats. We’ve planted 40,000 trees on the farm. We’ve created wetlands. And at the same time, we’re managing to breed some of the best livestock in the two breeds that we had. So yeah, I mean, we’re definitely farmers. We take that really seriously on the livestock side particularly. But I think we can be stewards of the landscapes as well. And the truth is we did some damage over the generations. We didn’t get everything right. The farmers didn’t everywhere. What we’ve done has had a cost. But we’re working to undo that damage, make it better, so we can look anybody in the face and say, no, no, we’re good stewards of this place. Like, look at what we’re doing. Or come and help us to do it better.

Brett McKay: So I know farming can be filled with devastating setbacks. I have a friend who his family’s involved in farming. They do ranching. But then one of the things they did, they grew some hemp in Oklahoma. And they planted, I think, like six figures worth of seeds. And then we had this freak flash flood storm that hit the area. All got washed out. And they just saw $100,000, $200,000 worth of work just poof. Have you had to deal with any of those sorts of setbacks in your work?

James Rebanks: Yeah. So in 2001, I guess people listening to this might have heard about it on the news. In 2001, there was this thing called foot and mouth disease, like an epidemic that broke out. And my grandfather’s flock of sheep on one of the farms that we had at that time were taken out as part of a government cull. And, yeah, there was 60, 100 years worth of our family’s work that was involved in those sheep. And they were killed, basically taken out. So, yeah, I’ve seen the ups and the downs of the whole thing. And, yeah, farming’s tough, right?

Brett McKay: Yeah.

James Rebanks: It’s trying to create order and productivity and food and useful things out of nature. And nature’s often got other ideas. And I’ve just tried to be honest about that in my books. I’ve tried to talk about the toughness of it, the goodness of it, the ups, the downs, and the kind of journey you go on as well. So, yeah, I’m very, very proud of our farm because I think it represents both my wife and I’s work and my kids’ work for the last 10, 15, 20 years, but also my dad’s, my granddad’s, a whole bunch of other people. And, I mean, one of my great heroes these days is Wendell Berry, your great agrarian radical writer from Kentucky. And I think Wendell’s right. I think we need more farmers, not less. I think we need to care about farming and food way more. We need to shop more thoughtfully, eat more thoughtfully. Not because you owe me anything or Wendell anything, but because we’d have a better society if we did take food and farming more seriously and put it more centrally in our culture.

Brett McKay: How did you bounce back from that big setback where you saw centuries of work just get eliminated? I would just be like, I’m just going to go into a hole and just curl into the fetal position. So what do you do? Any practical advice there?

James Rebanks: Well, we sort of did that too. Like there’s a moment where I went and cried in the shadows and there’s a moment where my dad disappeared for a couple of hours and was broke. And then you get up the next morning and start to rebuild, right? Little steps. And we have. And I think that teaches you something too, which is farming. You can see it all around us in the world where people experience really terrible things. We’re way more resilient than we think we are. We can cope with remarkably bad moments, can’t we? Remarkably bad things happening to us and the people around us. And we can keep going.

Brett McKay: Just get to work. It’s the only thing you can do.

James Rebanks: I think so.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So farming can be a very precarious way to make a living. It’s gotten more expensive, but sometimes the money you make from your work is going down or stayed the same. How have you guys made it work? What sorts of changes have you made to make your way of life continue?

James Rebanks: So we’ve made a lot of changes, particularly in the last 10 years since my dad died actually. I think my default setting when I was young was one of sort of pride and defiance. I was going to do what my grandfather had done come hell or high water, even if I had to have like an off-farm job. I’ve mellowed a lot on that. I think we can adapt. We can change. We can flex way more than that. So in the last 10 years, we’ve been very, very influenced by lots of Americans actually. Two Americans that have had a massive impact on me. This guy called Dr. Alan Williams, who’s an amazing teacher about regenerative ag, about grazing cattle and sheep in ways that build productivity, that save you a lot of money. We’ve eliminated synthetic fertilizer, pesticides, a lot of the inputs. So we’ve actually turned our farm around from being a loss-making thing to a profitable thing. And then another guru and friend of mine who’s an amazing guy from Missouri is called Greg Judy, and I’ve been out to his farm. I don’t know if you know Greg, but what an amazing guy.

He probably single-handedly has had the biggest impact on our farm of anybody. And we managed to build a grass-only, pasture-based system with cattle and sheep that’s making money at the moment and is making our farm better. We’re improving land, making land more productive and abundant. And to be able to do something that’s good for nature and good for my family and doesn’t cost me money anymore has been exciting. And what’s more, I probably never felt healthier eating the food out of that system because like I said earlier, we’re learning that you are what your food eats. If you’re eating beef that’s from a system that has healthy soil and healthy pastures, that’s full of small traces of but very good stuff that works in your gut, makes you healthier, makes you have better mental health, etc. And it’s the same with vegetables, even if you don’t eat meat, you should want to eat from healthy soil. So we’ve got into this mad food system where everything’s in plastic and everything’s presented to you on a shelf and they’ll tell you all sorts of comfortable lies about stuff that you probably shouldn’t be really eating. And I think we need to eat real food from real farms and we’re going to need a lot of farmers, a lot of really, really good farmers and land managers to make that happen.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I know about Greg Judy. I have a friend here in Tulsa. He grew up in a rural part of Oklahoma, came to Tulsa, started a business, very successful, sold it, and then he moved back to the country and he started to raise Dexter cattle and he’s been going to Greg Judy’s things to learn how to do that in a regenerative way.

James Rebanks: Yeah, it’s just mind-blowing stuff. Just to give you one tiny example of it, we now know that when you manage pastures long, allow yourself to have deep roots and lots more diversity in those pastures, you’re something like 20 to 40% more productive of biomass. Now, any farmer, land manager listening to it should be like, whoa, hang on a minute, there’s a way to be 20 to 40% more productive of biomass? But that’s what we’re doing. We’re doing it on a farm and it’s people like Greg Judy who’ve experimented or listened to the science and just wrapped their heads around this thing about how we increase the energy flows from the sun into our ground through green plants. Often indigenous cultures, particularly Native American cultures, often knew this stuff intuitively or they’d worked it out practically. We’re now getting the science to back this up about just how you graze cows in the most effective way and also makes you more resilient and fills your fields with birds, insects, all the rest of it. So we’ve been grappling with how to be loyal to our culture, loyal to what my grandfather and father did, but give it the tweaks it needs to survive, for us to thrive.

Brett McKay: So you talk about in your latest book, The Place of Tides, that you started feeling kind of an innui and kind of burnout about, it wasn’t about farming, it was just about life. And then you had this opportunity to go work for a season with these women in Norway called the Duck Women. This was fascinating. I did not know this culture existed at all. Give us some background. Who are the Duck Women and what do they do?

James Rebanks: So I’m sure it sounds a very long way away from America, but basically the birds that winter on my land in the spring leave, they go back to up the coast of Northwest Europe. They pass some little islands on the coast of Norway and I got a chance to go there in 2012 as part of some of the work I was doing. And I met this amazing woman who lived out on the rocks and told me what she did. And I was like, well, how can this be a job? She basically worked with wild eider ducks. When I say worked with them, she dried seaweed like hay with a fork on the shore. She gathered stones and she would build stone huts for them to nest in and she would put the nesting material in them, making these dry seaweed nests, all because her ancestors had done this for over a thousand years and all to encourage a massive population of eider ducks doing that thing on her island. And she would protect them from predators, from otters and other things. And the purpose of this was when the ducks take their ducklings back to the sea, when they’ve hatched, they leave behind lots of their chest feathers, their down, eider down. 

And her people’s culture is that they look after the ducks, make them incredibly abundant by caring for them, and then they turn the eider down into duvets and other things that you can sell to people and have this incredibly, a very sort of parallel culture to my shepherding culture, this very proud culture where they can make something out of nothing in this really almost inhospitable wilderness. So they live in these little wooden houses out at the edge, on the edge of the Arctic Circle. And I was able to go out there with her for a spring, shadow this woman and to write about her life and her work and who these people were and how they saw the world. And yeah, it was a little bit like my own culture, but also very different because we’re a long way from the sea where I farm.

Brett McKay: How did living on this remote island, because again, this is incredibly remote. You take a boat out there. There’s no running water. There’s no electricity. How did living on this remote island, doing this work of getting these nests ready for these ducks, how did that, it seemed like it shifted your mindset. It kind of resetted you in a lot of ways.

James Rebanks: It totally resetted me. And that was partly the place and those things you’ve just described, the isolation from things. It was also her, just this incredibly, I’ve never met anybody more determined, more simple in a good way, more happy and convinced that what they were doing was meaningful and good. And I’ve never met anybody more tuned into the little things. Like this is a woman that could get great joy and happiness from watching the tides coming and going, of watching what the seabirds were doing. And it was partly her work, but she just tuned into the world around her. Relatively simple place, these sort of rocky places on the edge of the coastal shelf of Norway. But the word you used is the right one. For me, it was a reset because, although I’ve just been telling you about my shepherding life, the truth is I’ve been juggling two lives for a very long part of mine, a sort of modern jobs, writing books, doing Twitter, telling people about what we do, doing podcasts, doing interviews. I’d got a bit burned out with doing all the stuff that normal modern people do, I guess, or a version of it.

And I hadn’t just been a shepherd for a long time. And that stuff, when I was on this island with this woman called Anna, I realized how manic that’s making us. Like I read this thing the other day about like the tech bros don’t let their kids go, anyway, no social media. They know, they know. This stuff makes us manic. It makes us addicted to screens where we’re constantly searching for stimuli, where none of us can just sit anymore. None of us just can talk anymore. None of us can enjoy a sunset anymore. We have to film it. We have to tell people. And we’re all massively angsty about the bad news hitting us from all around the world. And what I got on that island with that woman was that that isn’t how we used to live. We evolved to live in quite simple places, not be that overstimulated, to care about the coming and going of the daylight, to care about things like the tides or the wind, to notice what the birds are doing. And okay, lots of us have, the reality is lots of us have got to live in the modern world.

We’ve got to pay our mortgages. We’ve got to pay for our school fees, whatever it might be. But I think what I got from being on the island was just a reminder that I came from people like that. And even I had lost my way and become manic and overstimulated. And what I’ve been working on ever since is just slowing it the hell down. Like we don’t need to do all of that stuff all the time. So yeah, just trying to, at times, get back to the simplicity of the things that really matter, the meal with my family around the table, what my seven-year-old boy is telling me, going to the mountain with my two daughters to bring the sheep back, listening to my elderly neighbors while they tell me stories for the hundredth time about how to gather the mountain. Whatever it is, I think a lot of the stuff that makes life good lies in those things, right? In our families, the food we eat, the simple stuff. It’s not about all the flashy stuff that they want to sell us. It really isn’t. And it doesn’t cost much either. Like we’re talking about stuff that most people can do. We can turn our phones off in the evening. We can stop watching the TV. We can go, no matter how urban our surroundings, we can go out and we can find a butterfly or whatever it is, some birds or something, just to fill up that part of us again. I think we can do it.

Brett McKay: I know most of our listeners are probably non-farmers. They’re not shepherding. They’ve got nine to five jobs in the suburbs, et cetera. What do you think non-farmers can learn from shepherds about embracing tradition and taking a long game approach to life?

James Rebanks: I think some of it we’ve already said. It’s the whatever the context of your life. We all have different lives. Some of us are luckier than others. Finding a way to connect to things that are real or things that give you joy or things that is really important. And for me, that’s natural things, but it could be other things. And then I think the other thing I’ve got very much from the people I came from is not to be at all embarrassed or ashamed about what you come from. And I think the modern world is implicitly telling us a lot of the time, oh, just forget about that stuff that your family did. Like, forget about that. Like, come on over here where we consume more stuff and you can get richer. And I would hope I could maybe urge people to rethink that a little bit. I think maybe what’s more important is to think about our communities and our traditions and the ways that we’ve lived in the past, to think about what’s good in that maybe and what’s bad in it too, what we need to hold on to, what we need to let go of. And yeah, I think building… Well, I spent some time with an amazing American woman called Robin Wall Kimmerer, which lots of your listeners will have heard of. She wrote a book called Braiding Sweetgrass. And I asked her what her life advice would be to anybody. And she said, raise a garden, raise a family, and raise a ruckus. And I think that’s a great catchphrase. I think that’s where my settings are at the moment. I’m going to focus on bringing my family up.

I’m going to focus on growing food because I think that’s my use for everybody else. And I think there’s a lot of craziness going on in the world that’s making us unhealthy, making us miserable, taking us in the wrong direction. I’m going to raise as much trouble as I can through the books and other things. I’m going to fight the things, and I’m going to fight for the things I care about. And the books are part of that. But yeah, I think people are better than we’ve become at times at the moment. And we need to remember that and look for the good in each other and help each other, I think.

Brett McKay: Well, James, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your books and your work?

James Rebanks: So yeah, there’s the three books. There’s The Shepherd’s Life, there’s Pastoral Song and The Place of Tides. I also do quite a lot on social media, on Instagram and on X. My handle on there is at Herdy Shepherd, and you can sort of follow what we’re doing on the farm and what’s going on in our lives, and yeah, a lot of people seem to enjoy following that. And yeah, and we also, every July, we also do a thing for farmers called a grazing school where people can come and learn about the habitat restoration and the grazing work that we do. And yeah, maybe some of the people listening to this Managed Land and they’d like to come to that in the future. So yeah, get in touch with us.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, James Rebank, thanks for the time. It’s been a pleasure.

James Rebanks: Thank you for having me. I’ve got to tell you one last thing though, Brett.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

James Rebanks: In our family, when I came back from the island, I started to be much more aware about how men behave, sometimes good, sometimes bad. And me and my son, Isaac, who’s 13, we have a joke. We’ll say things like, are you a manly man? And he looks back at me and sticks his chest out and says, I’m a hell of a manly man. So they’re all tickled pink that I’m on the Art of Manliness podcast. So thank you for having me.

Brett McKay: Oh, I love that. That’s awesome. My guest today was James Rebanks. He’s the author of the book A Shepherd’s Life, as well as his latest book, The Place of Tides. They’re both available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Make sure to check out our show notes at awim.is slash shepherd. We find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AWIM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives. And make sure to sign up for our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay. Remind us all to listen to AWIM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.