In 1974, when Rebanks was born and I first made my way up the River Nile, after spending a month hay-timing on a farm in the Yorkshire Dales, over half of the population in sub-Saharan Africa was malnourished. I have never met anyone so roaringly, joyously in context and content as James Rebanks, belting around his farm in the rain .

Vivid, accessible, inspiring - a story about one man's emerging land ethic, and an appreciation of the old ways in modern times . The bigger farms in the area, with their factory-like sheds and large herds of “engineered” cattle, were already ahead of the game. This is a book about what it means to have love and pride in a place, and how, against the odds, it may still be possible to build a new pastoral: not a utopia, but somewhere decent for us all.Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Sisyphus with a smile … James Rebanks with his Herdwick sheep in Cumbria. In recent years, I have come across many farmers who are working hard to address the problems Rebanks identifies, whether in restoring soil fertility, improving animal welfare or encouraging wildlife to flourish.

Perfectly judged , it made me cry (twice) and left me with a new understanding of agriculture, and a real sense of hope. A book that explains beautifully how we have lost our way with modern farming and what we can do to heal our earth. But he has put his environmental ideals into practice by planting 12,000 trees, rerouting the river across his land to create wetland areas, dispensing with pesticides, and sacrificing arable land to encourage wildlife. Rebanks didn’t get on with his father and chose to spend his spare time helping out on his grandfather’s farm rather than his father’s. If you want a detailed analysis of how we could bring about the sorts of changes that he and many of us would like to see, you will be better served by Dieter Helm’s Green and Prosperous Land.Four generations of his family building on centuries of their farming in the Cumbrian Fells gives us a poetic, practical, raw and almost miraculously detailed picture of this ancient way of life struggling to survive and to be reborn. He may have done this with his own money but most farmers are strongly influenced by the regime of annual payments. They switched to more “efficient” breeds of sheep, stopped growing turnips and barley, sprayed pesticide to clear their pastures of thistles, and no longer laid hedges by hand.