Enthralling ... An unignorable call to understand the challenges facing not only farming but the Earth itself. Spectator

Rooted: Stories of Life, Land and a Farming Revolution

My grandfather Peter,” Langford writes, “was a hero who fed a starving nation. Now his son Charlie, my uncle, is considered a villain, blamed for ecological catastrophe and with a legacy no one wants.” From Langford’s immediate family we move around England, meeting dairy farmers crushed by the low price supermarkets pay for milk, disillusioned pig farmers turning to mixed agriculture and small scale organic farmers. The stories are often frustrating and heartbreaking: tales of falling incomes, BSE, foot and mouth, and Covid. Langford is brilliant at explaining how complex economic forces impact on individuals. The book is absorbing, compassionate and should have a galvanising effect. In Rooted, you highlight how regenerative farming can benefit the land and the output of a farm but balance it with the reality that there are a lot of farmers, who have been used to certain practices their whole farming life. What have you found to be the most effective way of starting those conversations and getting people to consider change?This book broke my heart at times but also contained humour and such poignant insights into the criminal justice system.' As I walk the lanes around my home in Devon, I look at hedgerows, fields and farms, and think about the political and economic forces affecting the British countryside. The challenges of climate change, Brexit, changing farm subsidies, biodiversity loss and falling incomes mean that change is coming. Rooted is Sarah Langford’s moving exploration of these changes, and of what the future holds. She tells the story of leaving her career as a barrister in London and moving, in 2017, with her young family to Suffolk (an unwanted and unplanned move), taking on the management of her husband’s family farm and reconnecting with her farming roots in the process. ‘In the city, we hold two contrasting pictures of a farmer: one from a children’s picture book and one from a poster of ecological destruction,’ she writes. ‘I wonder if anyone knows what being a farmer means anymore. I need to find out because now, unexpectedly, I have been given a chance to become one.’ An honest look at the farming life today. Raw, earthy and inspiring ' - Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment

Sarah Langford - Penguin Books UK Sarah Langford - Penguin Books UK

Moving, startling, uplifting, galvanising and unsettling, this plainly beautiful book is one of those rare few that changes how you see the world around you: the shape of fields seen from a train, the vegetables in a supermarket chiller cabinet, the earth beneath your feet and falling through your fingers." Moving, startling, uplifting, galvanising and unsettling, this plainly beautiful book is one of those rare few that changes how you see the world around you ' - Ella Risbridger, author of The Year of Miracles An honest look at the farming life today. Raw, earthy and inspiring' - Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment The environmentalist George Monbiot argues that farming is the world’s greatest cause of environmental destruction, but few people want to talk about it. In Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet he presents a vision for the future of food production. He tells Tom Sutcliffe that new ideas and technologies from soil ecology to laboratory-grown food could change the way people eat while regenerating the landscape.Heartbreaking and hopeful, this story of a farming revival has never been more important. It opened my eyes and touched my soul"

About — Sarah Langford

A fine book: heartfelt, honest and hopeful. Sarah has the knowledge and skill to help people better understand where their food comes from and why we should all care. Helen RebanksThe way forward can been found in the many places that these books agree. Both explore the wonder and complexity of soil. They strike on several of the same solutions, including the “no-till” method of growing crops without ploughing, or the use of perennial grains. Both see the benefits of organic methods such as planting wildflowers as a means of controlling pests. Monbiot is not a farmer, which frees him to have an outsider’s perspective. At the same time, he gives little consideration to the cultural side of farming, the realities of rewilding and its impact on rural populations. He criticises “conventional organic farming” and “foodies”, which do not feel like the most important enemies. The ideas that we should eat “less and better” meat or that food should be more expensive are vividly challenged in the passages where he meets users of food banks. Funnily enough, I think we’re seeing a pivot on it because when the job was sitting on a tractor with no autonomy, the agronomist decided what was planted and how it was farmed and the merchant decided what price it was sold at, then it was a boring job, that carried none of the status and very little of the money it used to have. But the interesting thing about regenerative farming is that there seems to be a renewed enthusiasm amongst the younger generation, who are getting into farming again. I think it’s very intellectually challenging – you have to really understand how plants work and how they respond to the soil and how they have a symbiotic relationship with animals – but it’s also a chance for farmers to be heroes again because through the way they are farming, they are not only providing food but they are also stopping villages from being flooded downstream; they are cleaning rivers; they are sequestering carbon; they are improving the biodiversity on their farms that people who walk through it can see and love and appreciate. I think that this way of farming, which is of course a very old way of farming but rebranded, has attracted both a large number of farmers’ children who wouldn’t have wanted to do it otherwise and also new entrants into farming. More than a memoir; Langford manages to contain and convey the whole scale of the coming agricultural revolution." Where Rooted ploughs its own shining furrow in its humanity [...] but also the gathered, inspirational stories of farmers trying to do better and greener."