Welcome to Hard Talk. I'm Stephen Sacker. Today I've journeyed to one of the most beautiful corners of Britain,

the hill country of England's northwest corner known as the Lake District. My guest, James Rebanks,

farms the hills, raising sheep and cattle, as his family have done for the last six centuries.

In recent years, he's turned his experiences on these exposed hills into a highly popular social media phenomenon.

His first book, The Shepherd's Life, became a bestseller,

and he's now written a second English pastoral which makes a passionate argument

for a rethink of farming methods, a step back from large scale, carbon-intensive agribusiness,

and a return to more traditional, sustainable methods. In short, James Rebanks has become one of the UK's most passionate advocates

for a revolution in the way we produce and consume our food. But are people prepared to listen

far beyond his farm gate? Well, I'm delighted to say that James Rebanks is with me now on his farm. Welcome to Hard Talk.

What does being a shepherd mean to you? Well, it's simple. It makes you look after sheep, of course.

So being a shepherd to me, being a very particular thing, it means being part of this late district

history that goes back at least a thousand years. We think it may go back 5,000 years. And it means being part of this flow of people and sheep that go to and from the mountains and have done, like I say, for at least 1,000, maybe 5,000 years. So the ancestors of these sheep, the male ancestors of these sheep came on boats with the Vikings. And there's a very

long human cultural history and a very sheep sort of genetic history. Watching your work with your

three fabulous dogs in this flock, it's tempting to think this is timeless that, frankly, I could

have come here a hundred years ago and everything about your farm, your way of life, would have been the same then as now. And you'd be sort of partly right and partly wrong, is the truth of it. So the way that we manage our haymeadows has had a 30 year period where it was a bit more modern and wrecked them basically, but we're going back to a sort of 100-year-old pattern. The way we manage our river banks is nothing like 100 years ago because the ecologists are telling us we need to do way better with rivers and wetlands. And the same with the way we manage the little bit of woodland that we have. So it's a mix. Sort of crudely, it's sort of 70% doing things how we did them 100 years ago and maybe 30, somewhere 30, 40%, some sort of tweaks listening to the scientists and the ecologists are telling us new things

about how we should do things better.

You are one of a pile of generations of farmers.

Your own family history goes back 600 years, but are you now looking at the land and farming

the land and the animals in a way that your own father would find hard to understand?

My father's been dead five years, so he saw many of the things that we were doing and he saw

the changes coming. But yes, it's still evolving. It always did evolve. Shepherding culture always

...