“The UK has maybe one hundred harvests left if we do not take better care of our soil.”
This was the warning John Lewis-Stempel gave back in 2016 in his bestselling book, The Running Hare: The Secret Life of Farmland— the story of how he brought a four-acre field called Flinders back to life. In 2022, the United Nations told us “up to 40% of the planet’s land is degraded”.
It’s now 2024 and Lewis-Stempel’s warning rings louder than ever. Coming from a long line of farmers, the author’s kinship with the fields sings loudly in this literary book, packed with facts that fascinate and shock. Angry at food and farming systems that reduce our farmland to fields as “life-full as a cemetery”, he points the finger at all of us, including himself, for what we have done to nature.
One day, Lewis-Stempel walks up into the Malvern hills and, just like the central character in William Langland’s medieval poem, The Vision of Piers Plowman, falls asleep and dreams.
He remembers coming eye-to-eye with a now all-but-extinct corncrake as a boy, and in his dream, meets Piers Plowman– a guide who points the way to a fairer world. Inspired, Lewis-Stempel decides to go against the (modern) grain and do something unconventional.
His mission was to coax the birds, bees, wildflowers – and, his wildest dream, hares – back to a field almost devoid of life due to intensive farming. This is the story of the animals and flowers as much as it is Lewis-Stempel’s.
Once woven into our folklore and our wheatfields, hares have now largely vanished from them – along with many extinct, endangered species. One list of arable flowers under threat runs across four pages.
The flora and fauna that once made their homes in farmland have been pushed out by the use of modern tractors that compress the soil, hi-tech seed drills that make wheat too compacted for hares and birds to dwell in, and chemical pesticides.
The author decides to do what he believes is the right thing, and we see him use traditional farming methods and equipment, such as an old tractor called ‘The Little Grey Fergie’ (rather than combine harvesters), seed fiddles, even harrowing a field with his horse and hand-broadcasting seeds.
Lewis-Stempel may have won the Wainwright Prize twice, but what is most impressive is his determination to farm a field the “old-fashioned way and see depressed species flourish” — even in the face of criticism from local farmers and being called an “oddball”.
Beautiful, poetic, and studded with folklore, the author makes the reader feel they are on the land with him, farming through the seasons, sharing in his joy as he watches his field come alive with colour and life.
Anyone who enjoys nature writing, or is interested in agriculture, farming, environmental conservation, or who wants a reminder that one person can make a positive change, should read this inspirational book. As Lewis-Stempel writes, “One field made a difference. If we had a thousand fields…”
The Running Hare: The Secret Life of Farmland by John Lewis-Stempel; Reviewed by R.B.L. Robinson.
