Intro. [Recording date: June 7, 2023.]
Russ Roberts: Today is June 7th, 2023, and my guest is author and sheep farmer James Rebanks. Our topic for today is the life of the sheep farmer depicted in his first book, The Shepherd’s Life, which was published in 2015, but we may also get to his 2020 book, English Pastoral. James, welcome to EconTalk.
James Rebanks: Yeah, thank you for having me. Thank you for having me.
Russ Roberts: The Shepherd’s Life is an incredibly beautiful book about what it’s like to raise sheep, about what it is to be a son to a father, and the father to a daughter or a son, and what it is to be close to the land, and the course of daily life. It’s quite moving and it’s unbelievably informative for most of us who don’t know much about sheep farming. So, our goal today is to try to give listeners some idea of what that’s about.
And, I’m going to start with the fact that your family has been in the same general area, which is the Lake District of England, for a very long time. Tell me how long they’ve been there? What did that mean to you as a boy growing up, and what does it mean to you today as a man?
James Rebanks: Okay. So as I talk to you right now, I’m basically sitting in my barn. I’ve got a nice office in one end with a computer and windows ’round, but it’s basically an agricultural barn. And, I’m looking out over the valley where I live, which is Matterdale in the English Lake District. And, yeah, my family have been here for a very long time. We’ve got paperwork direct–my direct descendants were here to at least the early 1600s in the same very small village. We’ve got records of people with the same name 200 or 300 years before that. So, you’re, like, 600 years back in the 1420s.
But interestingly, journalists keep saying that my family turned up here in the 1420s. No, just that’s when the paperwork starts, the historic archive begins. So, it may well be that we were the kind of people that lived in this area for maybe a thousand years before that, maybe several thousand years before that. Who knows?
But, we were–and I had to research this when I started to think about writing my first book. When I looked into it, we were basically small farmers, almost peasant farmers, and we would bounce around between sometimes what looks like pretty horrible poverty. So, you can find the younger brothers and sisters in the work houses, like where the poor were sent. But in the good moments, I’m guessing the older brothers who got the farm under primogeniture–I think that’s what they call it–some of them were established farmers, and they get mentioned in other documents.
Like, there was a thing called the yeomanry in Britain, which is that the very large aristocrats want a sort of middle class bunch of tenant farmers to get on horses and fight with them when they need someone to fight. And, it looks like the more affluent members of my family became established farmers, and they occasionally did that and they would fight the Scots or they would put down riots of industrial workers or whatever that might be. It was very feudal, and we were bouncing around–not on the bottom rung, but just above that really, occasionally dropping off the ladder when things got bad.
So, what does that mean to me? Well, it would just be academic, I guess, but the work that I do on the farm–so, I’m a sheep farmer on the farm that my father and my grandfather lived on, not far from where we’ve lived for all of that period of time. And, it’s absolutely alive all around me. So, the work I do is a continuation of their work and a continuation of everybody’s work before me.
So, the flock of sheep I take to and from the mountain, we think–the sort of genetic science tells us that they’re at least a thousand years old. There’s some Viking sheep genetics in there, which means the same job I did last week of taking the sheep–the mother sheep, the ewes and lambs–to the mountain, that’s been done by somebody every single spring for at least a thousand years without any break. There’s no war, farming, any kind of big historical event that’s sufficiently damaging to stop that happening even once. So, that’s had to continue for the whole period, at least a thousand years, maybe four and a half thousand years.
So, it’s been absolutely about hanging on, and it’s absolutely alive. I can’t forget about it because it’s all around me. I pick a stone up to repair a stone wall or a stone dike, and it’s been picked up by somebody who is either one of my ancestors or somebody like us who did it before. I work with the sheep: it’s something that somebody’s done a thousand times before. And it’s, I think, a lot of modern thinking–and we can talk about this later–a lot of economic thinking that[?] centers on the individual and the individual’s happiness or the individual’s utility. And, I became more modern when I got into my twenties and had a slightly different life.
But, when I came back, what really struck me was: I’m not very important. Me, as an individual, I’m not very important. Yes, I’ve written some books and people want to focus on me as an individual, but really I’m in a very long chain of people. Hopefully a chain that stretches on far into the future. I’m quite insignificant. The sheep were there at least a thousand years before me. The mountain was there for millennia, forever before me. The work goes on in cycles. It makes you feel quite small.
But, I’m not crushed by that or disappointed by that. I find that good, really. I think it’s humbling in a good way. It reminds you just how small you are and that history and life and nature, these things are much longer lasting and much bigger than any of us.
Russ Roberts: But, I think in modern times, we’re encouraged to think of ourselves as a blank slate that we can write our own story on.
I’m an interesting case. I was born in Memphis, Tennessee. My family left there after a year. I grew up mostly in Boston, outside of Boston, Massachusetts. But, my parents were Southerners. They didn’t fit in. They had a thick southern accent. My friends made fun of them. And, here I am, crazily, in Israel: I came here at the age of 66, 2 years ago, to what is the Jewish homeland, a place where we have been for, off and on–mostly on, I think in smaller or bigger numbers–but, we’ve been here for 3000 years. And there’s something incredibly humbling, as you say, about realizing that you’re not a very big part of a very long chain.
But, you are part of a chain. And that creates, I think, for me, and I’m curious for you, a feeling of belonging that is otherwise missing, I think, in a great many ways in modern life, for at least the educated folks who fly to where the jobs are–say, with the highest pay or the most the most self-expression. That’s fine. And, I don’t have–it’s something tawdry about that. But something has been lost in our interest in cutting ourselves off from our roots, I would argue, and seeing ourselves as a blank slate. Do you feel that, or do you disagree?
James Rebanks: No, I do feel that. And, I’m always aware that although my family weren’t wealthy, there is a kind of privilege in having that sense of belonging. There is a kind of privilege to live on a farm in the Lake District, which has this long history.
The Industrial Revolution meant that most people lost that connection to a place. They were uprooted, they were taken to cities. So, I would never want to sound preachy or, as you say, sort of judging people down who don’t have what I have. But, yeah, I distinctly remember–and I wrote about it in my first book, The Shepherd’s Life–I distinctly remember being at secondary school where they thought that we were blank slates. And quite disappointing blank slates, because we were farm boys and girls or factory workers’ or hairdressers’ kids. And they thought that they wanted to imprint on the blank slates that we should leave: we should go to London, we should go to Oxford, we should go to Cambridge. Actually, they never mentioned those two places in my school. But the general idea was you were meant to leave and become somebody.
And, becoming somebody meant not being a worker, not being provincial or small-minded, not being yoked to the place and thinking that was the most important thing, but pursuing your own self-development, pursuing ideas, pursuing wealth, whatever it was.
But, it was always somewhere else. It was beyond the horizon in the place that the clever people went to.
And, I remember hearing this–and they sort of wanted that for me because in my moments where I did work hard at school, I was probably quite good at school. And they saw that. But I wouldn’t engage. And, for me, it was because they were asking me to do something that felt like a betrayal and also something that didn’t make sense.
So, they were implicitly saying to me, or I felt they were, that what my grandfather was–he was basically a sort of small peasant farmer or sort of small yeoman[?] farmer, maybe more accurately–that he wasn’t anything. He wasn’t a someone. He was a nobody.
And, I remember being enraged by this, because it’s both illogical and unfair–and blind. So, I would hang out with this old man who is my grandfather, and he was wise and clever. He knew all of the wildlife around him. He knew all the people in his community. He was respected. But it was somehow all beneath their gaze, beneath what they thought was important.
And, many years later when my life changed a little bit and I realized that maybe I could write something, write a book, I was sort of channeling that feeling. I wanted to tell the people that read books–I’m like, ‘Whoa, hang on a minute. Yeah, screw you.’ Slightly rude language. I wanted to push back against that and use whatever talent I had for telling a story to say, ‘No, you don’t see me.’
Like, I remember reading this–I think there’s a guy called Tzvetan Todorov[?] who writes about the conquest of South America. And, he said, ‘The conquistadors discovered the Americas, but they didn’t discover the Americans. They couldn’t see them. And, because they couldn’t see them, you can then, at its mildest, ignore them or overprint them with your own culture. At its worst, you can displace them, take their land, and ultimately kill.’ And, I think we see that all around the world.
And, my family luckily weren’t exposed to genocide, but they were sort of overridden in a cultural sense. So, anyone who knows about English culture will know that the Lake District is this iconic literary landscape that’s hugely important to the English, but it’s not the story of my people, who live in it. It’s a sort of middle class, poetic, romantic fantasy.
Russ Roberts: And of course, people who come visiting as tourists, see you and your family as players in a drama that they consider–as you’re suggesting–it’s a minor role. You just happen to live there. They’re glad you’re there in your cute outfits and your boots and your muck, but you’re there for–the waste[?] in a diorama in a museum, there would be people in native costumes and so on. And, there is certainly a lack of respect.
I can’t help but think of Adam Smith’s line in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, where he says, ‘Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely.’ And later he says, ‘The chief part of happiness is being beloved.’ And, he doesn’t mean romantic love. He means being respected, being seen as someone significant, mattering–a person to be honored.
And, Smith says there’s two ways to do that.
And, we’re recording this very shortly after the 300th anniversary of what we think is Smith’s birth. So, I’ll just throw that in. But, Smith says, ‘There’s two ways to matter. There’s two ways to be significant. One way is to be rich, famous and powerful, or one of those three. The other is to be wise and virtuous.’
Now, your grandfather was wise and virtuous. He wasn’t rich. He’s certainly not famous, certainly not powerful. And, that outside world that comes to the Lake District and looks at him, sees an uneducated man–as you suggested earlier–who has not really made anything of himself.
But, what you saw, as a boy, and what you write about beautifully in your books, is you saw a wise man, also a virtuous man–not always–he’s a human being of course. But a person who had a code, a very strong code, of how to treat animals, how to treat the earth; and how to treat your neighbors, and in return was respected deeply by his social circle.
It was a small social circle. He didn’t have a lot of followers on Facebook or Twitter. But he mattered, in his world.
And, I think what I hear you saying–which is very powerful–is that when you went out into the rest of the world, you realized that the rest of the world–you write about you went off to Oxford, which is a sweet story–but that world of Oxford, that intellectual world, did not respect the intense and deep knowledge that your grandfather had, because it wasn’t the kind of knowledge that Oxford cared about. And, that is really fascinating.
James Rebanks: So, I need to tell you something. So, you’re right, he didn’t have social media to have a mass global following. But, can I tell you something, which I’m very proud of? Despite no one ever hearing of my dad or my granddad who were both farmers, when they died they couldn’t fit everybody in the church. There’s like 450, 500 people turn up. And, some of that’s because they went to everybody else’s funeral. And, we have a very close community and it’s reciprocal. And, some of it’s just a very quiet respect from working people for other working people, or because he’s lived by a code. And as you say, it wasn’t perfect. I don’t think he was a particularly good husband. And, my grandfather may not have been a very good father. But in terms of somebody who lived in his community and lived by a certain code, yes, there’s a lot of respect there.
And, I think what really shocked me: when I got into my twenties and I started to read more, and I started to understand the wider world more–because circumstance threw me out into that world, really–was if you’re not in books, if you’re not in books particularly, but if you’re not in books and films and radio, you don’t exist in the modern mind. You are some[?] out with the culture.
And, as somebody who loved books, I latched onto that. I’m like, ‘Okay, there’s a way to change. If you want to be seen, you have to write the book.’ And, I spent nearly 10 years looking for somebody else having written the book. I kept going in bookshops saying, ‘Where’s the book about my granddad and about the people that do this work?’
And, Wordsworth and other people nearly did it. They were looking over at these people saying, ‘There’s something interesting here.’ But, they weren’t [?] that thing. They weren’t the son or the grandson of that shepherd.
So, yeah, it’s a fascinating thing. And, I have to say, I was very, very influenced and still am: I love lots of immigrant writers, people like John Fante in America who is, like, an Italian immigrant, or more recently people like Junot Diaz who are–I think they call it writing back against the dominant culture. It’s sort of fighting back against sort of colonial mentalities, fighting back against class, and just doing that with the power of story, really, saying, ‘You’re going to look at me. You’re going to look at my people.’ And, yeah, I have a huge amount of sympathy with people in all kinds of minorities or people who feel like they’re outside of the dominant culture and are fighting back culturally. That, to me, was very powerful, to realize you could do that.
Russ Roberts: Well, it’s clearly part of the tension in the political environment in today’s world. You have people who feel they’ve been marginalized by the elites, the experts, the educated classes–whatever you want to call it. It’s driving a lot of populism. Obviously it drove a lot of political change in the United Kingdom, the United States, and many other places.
Russ Roberts: But, let’s move on to–and I want to reference the episode we did with Megan McArdle on Roger Scruton’s book about home.
And, I think home is a thing that many modern educated people don’t have. You know–I suggested earlier–I didn’t feel at home in St. Louis, Missouri where I taught at Washington University. It’s a lovely town. It wasn’t my home: just where I happened to live for 14 years. Somewhat my home, because I raised–all my kids were born there, so it was kind of their home for a while. But, that connection that you have is really obviously very rare in that magnitude. But, you don’t need it to go back to even 1600, I think, for many people to feel it. You want to add something?
James Rebanks: Yeah, I do, really. Isn’t what you’re talking about–I know it happens all around the world, but it feels to me like a particularly American experience. So, the American historic experience was, your home isn’t the most important thing because there’s stuff wrong with it–they’re stopping you worship your own God, that’s stopping you living in the way that you want to. You’re too limited, you’re too poor by these unfair structures. Come to America. Place isn’t the defining thing. You can move west, you can move east. You can–
Russ Roberts: Yeah.
James Rebanks: And, I know when I talk to Americans–and I’m not judging this on unfairly, I understand why it’s like that–they’ve often lived in two or three places. They’re not sort of typically rooted to one place, or if they are, it’s only for a generation or two. When I talk to Italians or maybe people in rural France or I don’t know, people in Asia or Africa, that’s quite different. That one of the defining things in their identity is place. ‘Well, my people are from here.’ Yeah.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. No, it’s fascinating.
Russ Roberts: Let’s talk about being a sheep farmer. What’s fun about your book is, I would describe it this way: There are a lot of bad days and there are a lot of good days and you don’t really pay any attention to the absolute number. You don’t need 183 good days versus 182 bad days to make it a good life. It’s just the whole thing is one fabric, one texture. And, the bad has to come with the good because it rains and you have to be outside. And, sheep are difficult and they get diseases and they die and they get attacked. And, it’s just part of life. So, give us a couple bad days, things when it’s hard to be a sheep farmer; and then a couple good days.
James Rebanks: So, I’ll try not to make it all sound good.
Russ Roberts: No, not fair.
James Rebanks: No, no, I won’t. So, I won’t do that. Being a sheep farmer at times is a little bit like being a nurse or a doctor. You go to work, you pitch up and you get punched in the face with reality. A lamb is dead on the ground. Its mother has given birth to a dead lamb. You got there 10 minutes too late because you went to the other field first and you’ll never know whether if you went to that field instead you might have saved it, maybe the 10 minutes.
So, there’s a lot of responsibility that’s very elemental. It’s about life or death. And, by definition, you can’t get it right all of the time. So, there’s a degree of self-blame on the bad days, ‘Why did I do it that way? Why did I not do it the other way?’
And, you want to believe that you are some kind of benign god for your flock and keep everything alive and make everything okay. But of course, you can’t, because it’s nature.
So, the bad days, for me, are maybe when we’re at lambing time and it’s just the really bad day when everything goes wrong. The mother gives birth on the side of the stream or the beck, and the lamb falls into the water and drowns. And, you know, ‘Why would you do that?’ And, ‘Why was I not there to stop it?’ You can have–all sorts of physical things can go wrong with lambs when they’re born. They can die in the birth sack, in the fluids, and never breathe. Occasionally, rarely, the insides can come out through the navel because the mother has tugged at the navel–being overly motherly–and pulls the insides out there.
Pretty grim things happen like they would on a sort of a E-ward [emergency ward], like a doctor’s ward. And, you’re just doing the best you can.
And, that can be tough. Sometimes you come back in the house and you think, ‘I got everything wrong today. If I’d done all that the other again, I’d do it differently.’
So, it’s tough. Tougher than that, because I’ve done this my whole life. So, I got used to that stuff a long time ago. Tougher than that is something that farmers all around the world feel, which is, they don’t see economics as impersonal. They feel it absolutely personally. So, you take over this farm that was your father’s and your grandfather’s. If you don’t make any money or you’re going broke, you’re failing. We don’t think the farm’s failing, the economy’s failing, the technologies have changed. We go to bed feeling absolutely crushed because the farm isn’t really a business in our minds. It’s an extension of who we are, an extension of our identity.
And, the experience of the modern farmer is one full of debt and effectively being a price taker. What is the old joke: that we pay retail when we buy something and we sell wholesale when we sell something. We’re never in control.
The actual economics of farming is really quite crushing and depressing. And, I mean, the sort of 1970s economics on this work, Earl Butts–who was Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture–said, ‘Plant corn from horizon to horizon. Get big or get out.’ And, that would be okay if you won the game when you did that. But, you don’t. You end up more trapped into a bad system, still powerless, still taking.
So, in an economic sense, it’s a very frustrating profession and often feels like it’s stacked for you to fail. But, there’s a lot to be said about.
Russ Roberts: But, on the physical side–and we’ll get to the good days in a minute–but the physical side is, you’re outside. It’s incredibly hot sometimes and you’re throwing hay around, or it’s pouring rain, it’s freezing cold, it’s snowing. It’s a physically demanding life that your book really illuminates.
James Rebanks: Yeah. So, this’ll make you laugh, but I might–some people feel the cold worse than others, right? I do. I feel the cold really badly in my hands. That’s insane. I have to go out on a lot of days in the middle of winter when it’s cold and wet, and everything I touch is cold and wet, and I’m just not doing my job if I go back to the house and drink coffee all day. I’ve got to keep going, keep doing it. So, sometimes I’ll come in to thaw out my hands. And, my pet hate–it’s a little thing–my pet hate is that stinging feeling in your hands when you’re trying to defrost them under a hot tap. And, in winter I’ll end up with my hands swollen and cracked and, you know, ‘Why am I doing this?’
And, the winters here are sort of six months long. Now they’re not super cold and super snowy, but they’re cold and wet, rainy, really. And, that dampness is depressing. So, everybody here, the English people in general but definitely if you live here, you’re very ready for spring. And, we are those people that are out with our shirts off on the first sunny day in May, because we’re sort of sun worshipers because we have such a gray, miserable climate most of the time.
But, you’re right. The other side of that–and I wrote about this in the book–I don’t think you get the highs without the lows. So, the fact that I do a hundred, maybe a hundred days on the trot in a bad winter in the cold and the wet, gives me a feeling of elation when I get to spring, that is higher than any other high I’ve had ever had in my life when the sun comes out and I’ve got through winter, I’ve kept all my sheep alive. [More to come, 25:02]
