where he is due to spend a third night being treated for coronavirus. he appeared in the back of his armoured car wearing a face mask to wave at supporters. doctors treating president trump say he's continuing to recover well from covid—19. public health england says nearly 16,000 cases of coronavirus have not been added to the uk daily total over the last week due to a computer glitch. some of the unreported cases have been added to sunday's figure of 22,961. there's been a new surge in fighting between azerbaijan and armenia over the disputed territory of nagorno karabakh, a week after the long running conflict re—ignited. russia has called for a cease—fire. azerbaijan has threatened to destroy military those are the headlines. now on bbc news, it's

time for hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. and welcome to one of the most beautiful corners of britain, the hill country of the north west of england known as the lake district. this landscape is beautiful but it's not wild. it's been shaped by generations of shepherds and stockmen. now, my guest today is james rebanks. his family have farmed this land for more than 600 years. he's notjust a shepherd, he's also an internationally renowned writer, and campaigner for a more sustainable, more responsible kind of farming. but are his ideas compatible with putting affordable food on all of our tables?

come here! he whistles string music plays james, what does being a shepherd mean to you? it's not as simple as looking after sheep of course but i have... being a shepherd to me means a very important thing.

it means being a part of this lake district history that goes back at least 1,000 years and may go back about 5000 years, and it means to be 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 5000 years. so, the male ancestors of the sheep came on board with the vikings, and there is a very long human cultural history and the sheep very genetic history. and being a part of that is what it means to be a shepherd here. watching you work with your three fabulous dogs and this far, it is tempting to think that this is timeless, that frankly i could've come here 100 years ago and everything about your farm, your way of life, would've been the same then as now. and you would be sort of partly right and partly wrong is the truth of it. so, the way that we manage our meadows has

so, the way that we manage oui’ meadows has manage oui’ meadows has had a 30—year period that is been a bit more modern, but we are 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 that we need to do way better with the rivers and wetlands. and the same with the way we manage the little bit of woodland that we have. so, it's a mix. crudely it is sort of 70% doing things the like we did them 100 years ago, maybe 30 or 40% sort of tweaks listening to the scientists and the ecologists and other people telling us new things about how we need to do things better. interesting. so, 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 has 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 in general was always evolved. he would come and stand here

and i think even think my sheep are in great quality. in that is the most important thing that the wools are still put back up, seeing that we are well fenced and still managing the hedgerows. because i have onlyjust got my head around it, he might have a hard time understanding some of the ways we are grazing and the longer recovery of the fields which is sort of the new practice that the soil scientists are telling us work. and he might have been utterly bamboozled because most people are in getting their heads around the sort of new soil science and how soil needs to be looked after and fed. your personal story is interesting because there was a time in your youth where you seemed to fall out of love with farming. yeah, i wasn't entirely sure it was a good idea. it seemed dirty, and angry, and a bit stressy. and it looked briefly as a kid like it might be more fun staying inside and watching tv or play computer games or something. but i'm very glad my grandfather sort of took me under my wing a bit reluctantly and taught me a lot of the things that he knew and yeah, it has gone on to shape my life really

and i don't regret being seduced by it at all, really. this looks pictu re—postca rd perfect but you have a farm of what, 350 sheep and a few cattle. and you write to make more money and you've diversified in interesting and different ways. but i come back to this point — your grandfather and your dad both struggled very hard to make a living out of this place and many farmers, notjust here, but right around the world are finding life is a fantastic struggle. what makes you believe...? of course it's a struggle, and your history is not quite right. so, my grandmother and grandfather made a quite comfortable living back in the day. they farmed within the limit of what they had, they used their land effectively, they minimised their expensive inputs. we have gone into a real hole because we have gone from doing an input based agriculture where we are buying everything off corporations and selling everything to corporations and they screw us on both ends

of that so that your average family farm makes no money, and our family farm this year many bigger profit than is made for the last five or six years. has it made a fortune, am i getting rich? no, but it produces as many sheep as it did 50 years ago and it's making a profit in a way that it hasn't done for the last ten years. this is what it's all about. let me take my own little supply. what is so special? it's soil. this is notjust soil. so, if you pick up your average handful of soil out of a lot of our arable pla nt—based farming systems that are using synthetic fertilisers and pesticides, you'll see something very, very compacted and dense with no organic matter. this is full of little globules, it's sticky. a civilisation that doesn't look after this stuff, the soil, is a doomed civilisation and we are on borrowed time because we're not looking after soil properly. and what we're trying to do, admittedly, this is a farm in the uplands, so we need to graze in the right way to make that happen. and it's all about getting plenty of roots down deep enough and plenty of trampling down with very carefully—timed, managed grazing. so, your technique, the careful thought that

you are putting into your farming, are you truly telling me that your soil looks and feels very different today from the way it looked even ten years ago? it looks different to two years ago. i can make my soil darker within two years just by the degree of trampling and with three, four, five trampling—grazing events where i may be graze half of this grass and i trample the other half down, this is turning darker in front of my eyes by the month. but is this a sort of boutique soil? is this relevant to the farmers across the world who are simply trying to produce more food to feed more people? are you in a sense a bit of a dilettante a with your obsession with the...? no, i'm not having that at all. any farm in the world that is driving their soil towards exhaustion erosion, soil loss disaster, that is not going to work for anybody, is it? so, you can say what you like about our little farm but every farm on earth has at some point has to address the farming that is making its soil worse or losing it. that's disastrous, there

is no way back from that or there is a very slow, long way back from that disaster. it's in everybody‘s interest — everybody watching this programme, everybody who farms all around the world, the world, many of whom, yes, are trapped in the world, many of whom, yes, are trapped in crazy systems that do the wrong things to look after their soil. in the big question all of us should be asking is why are we encouraging farmers to do the wrong thing when we could be encouraging them to do the right thing and supporting them to do so? we need to talk about it more, let's go to the farmhouse. james, over the last 60 years, we've seen the most extraordinary strides made in the productivity of farming across the world thanks to mechanisation, thanks to bioscience, thanks even to the digital world as well. are you saying that to what to the outside observer looks like progress really hasn't been? no, i'm saying something slightly more complicated which is in my book, i tell the story of why families like ours, so there is no holier than thou

involved in this. my family did all of those things, were part of those things. and the book tells the story about how people like us embraced all of those things uncritically on a massive scale across all of our landscapes. and did they deliver good things? yes, they did. they made food cheaper so that you and i are better off. they gave us an abundance of food that we never had before in our history to the point where most of us don't have to worry about where our food is coming from tonight. and that's an amazing historically brilliant achievement. but, we can't view itjust in a sort of narrow gaze. we have to listen to the other things that are happening around that, and what's happening around that is a growing awareness over the last 30 years particularly that we're trashing soil, that we're just taking too much from ecosystems, that we are not working from nature, we are trashing it or eradicating it in many cases. but i'm going to stop you there. are we really? because if we look around the world... take one example, i am thinking of the netherlands, for example — where for many

decades, they have poured chemicals into the soil to intensify their farm methods. they grew a huge proportion of europe's vegetables. and they would argue that actually, they can improve their yields even further. far from the soil deteriorating and beginning to lose its value, they're getting better at it. some of those techniques may well be how we feed 10 billion people. so, nowhere have i said that we shouldn't have intensive agriculture. there may well be a need for lots of intensive agriculture. what i'm saying is even where we do intensive agriculture, we need to care about the ecosystem, and the ecosystems have needs. they need native habitats. they need natural processes. that's where all the living stuff around us lives. so, even if we can't escape from some of the most intensive practices, we have to surround them and wrap them in the appropriate native habitats of wherever they are and increasingly what we know, and we know this very clearly from places like the american midwest that are now very well studied by scientists that a lot of the agricultural practices that we thought uncritically

were progress that were just a good thing and made everybody better off and farming more efficient are actually trashing soil, making sterile landscapes, and they're making it impossible for natives to live in those places. so, if you read my book, it tells you the story of how that plays out in english fields. but it's interesting that you point to the midwest for example. i know you've spent quite a lot of time in iowa, a famous farming state in the united states. you've also spent a lot of time in australia on the huge ranch style farms that we see out there with their livestock. it seems to me you with your ideas are creating divisions within the agricultural community because your message seems to be that for a lot of farmers around the world, they are behaving in a way which is extraordinarily damaging to the future of their land and our planet. well... i think you are taking what i am saying slightly out of kilter here and that what i have actually said is we need to understand why those people did that. we need to understand

the economic. well, they are still doing it. that's not a past tense. well, they are doing it and we need to understand why and it's often down to the rest of us — how we shop, how we vote, how we regulate farming activity on the land and ultimately what we're prepared to pay for. and some of those farmers who we know are doing grave ecological damage are doing what we asked them to do at the moment. they're producing the cheapest food in history in vast quantities. and if they were not, we would have a massive food problem around the world because our global population is growing... well, it is. but i think you are mistaking the fact that — i think that you think the industrial food systems are feeding the people of the world, they are not. 80—85% of the people in the world are being fed by small sustainable, often subsistence farmers. most of the world isn't crying out for iowa to feed it. this is a sort of piece of propaganda that's been developed particularly in america since the second world war. what we need to do in all of our landscapes wherever we are is we do need to produce a lot of food.

we do need to be very good farmers but we need to do it in ways that are actually sustainable and sensible. that care for soil, nurture soil, look after it, and look after the wild things around us. and there is no opt out on this. we've been acting like there's an op out that you can just ignore, and you can't. we know that beyond all doubt that we have to care about soil microbiology. we have to care about getting organic matter into the soil. we have to trap carbon for climate change in the land around the world, and we have to care about the sixth mass extinction. so in the last few days, david attenborough has been talking aboutjust how grave this extinction crisis is. now, i can't solve a lot on my farm but i'd also be very silly if i said it had nothing to do with me because it is to do with me and thousands of other farmers. your message is that it is to do with you as a farmer but it's to do with me as a consumer, to do with absolutely all of us. but here is an interesting question for you then. in the rich world, if you look at it in sort of real terms, food has become much cheaper over the last 50 years. i think the proportion of the weekly income that a british person spends on food

today is about one third of what it was in the 1950s. it's10% instead of 33%. right, exactly. so, are you saying to me that's a bad thing? food in the rich world has become too cheap? i'm saying we need to think very long and hard about whether that's sustainable, and what we're actually finding is that to make food that cheap, were often trashing the ecosystem, trashing the very soil itself. so, the un is talking about something like agricultural landscapes having less than 60 harvests left. but this is a difficult place for you to be because these days you are notjust a shepherd and a farmer. you're also an advocate, and you are a campaigner for what you would say is a better more responsible form of farming. but for you to win the argument with the general public, which is what you're engaged in, it sounds to me you will have to persuade them that they can, should, and must pay more for their food. either for their food or frankly through their taxes to do the things around the food production

to make our landscapes what they need to be for nature. and, yes we do. there's no way around it. if you don't like it, i can't help you but if you think we are able to reduce the price of food indefinitely downwards without doing grave damage to our landscapes, then we are living in cloud cuckoo land. and what i would ask people to think about is i think behind your question is a flawed assumption that cheapening food is good for poor people or good for society in general, and what we know when we look at the american midwest or in the society in general is that this is also associated with pretty dreadful downturn in the quality of food we are eating and the health of people. it's linked to diabetes, and obesity and other things like that. people eat worse and worse food and the wrong kinds of food. and if cheap food ended poverty, there would be no poverty in the united states of america. they spend 7% of their household budget on food there, the lowest in the world. what we are actually seeing when you are looking at places like american midwest or america in general is that cheap foods are actually propping up more and more unequal societies. so, let me flip the argument

i would but because you have a little bit because you have just introduced an interesting idea about the kind of landscape we want and nature, and respecting nature. maybe, just maybe in a place like this which to be frank is sort of marginal farmers. it's difficult to make a living here and when you do make a living, your productivity compared to many other places you can raise livestock or grow arable crops, your productivity is always going to be limited. maybe if you really want a return to nature and you really want wonderful landscapes, maybe you should just quit farming here and let this be the wild place that it once was. hang on a second, you first of all have to answer how you make the productive part of britain sustainable as a farming system. what we know about the most intensive farming at the moment is that it's the exact opposite of sustainable. what we actually know is that it needs to be more mixed and rotational which means it's slightly less

efficient which means it brings livestock in the mix, which means you get back to an old—fashioned farming system where you need to have livestock in that landscape but preferably not reading it because it is the highest value land in the uk. so you need somewhere to rear your sheep and cattle. how do they solve that? for over 1,000 years, maybe 5000 years? they saw that because they opened with a nursery with a natural sheep flock and cattle flock — so what you actually look at to solve these problems problems in the past. and if we are going to farm sensibly, and sustainably, we're going to have to do some of that again. does that mean that the uplands get a free pass to have far too little native habitat and nature in them? no it doesn't. i think we can take what is really here which is a high highly carved up highly owned, highly man—made landscape and we can make it much, much betterfor nature and produce food in it and be part of the sustainable national food system. but you know that there are "environmental campaigners" out there, people like george monbiot who look at people like you who talk a lot about sustainability

and responsibility, and they say you know what, james rebanks is actually a hypocrite. because the kind of sheep farming that and he and his family... nobody has said that! well, the kind of sheep farming that you and your family have practised for years isn't really about respecting nature. you've created a particular environment which is a deeply man—made environment and which to people like monbiot, isn't respecting what this place could and should be. well, i don't think it's as good as it could or should be. i think you have to ask why that happens. so, why does it happen? because some of the poorest people in the north of england learn how to live in a landscape from sheep and cattle and they are not particularly ecologically literate. initially, they do a limited amount of harm because they just don't have the means to change it and then later on we give them other tools, and they start to make it quite difficult for nature. the question is how practically you get out of that hole? how do people here who are not particularly wealthy who do live from the land, how can they genuinely become good ecological stewards? and what we're finding in this valley on our farm

and everywhere else is that a really bad way to do that is to attack them and tell them to just go away and disappear which nobody of course can. and a really good way to change it is to educate them, support them, help them, help them to understand what it means to be a genuinely good steward of a piece of land would be. and then we are finding all around me, we are surrounded by amazing farmers who are rising to that challenge — not all, but many are rising to that challenge. so, right, what you want and of course you in the uk have been a farmer in receipt of eu monies for many years because all farmers have as part of the common agricultural policy, you want a shift in the way state monies support farming away from production. it's happened in the past but you want it to happen much more, i guess. yes, i do so, it's misspent across most of europe. it's very misspent in north america where everything is propped up by state money despite them thinking it's a free market system. but do you think brexit gives britain the opportunity to reframe its support for farmers separate from the european union?

theoretically, yes. practically, are we going to a better place right now? it doesn't look like it. it looks like we're about to do a quite shoddy trade deal with america which lowers standards and makes things far worse rather than better. theoretically, could we do a better, have a better system based on our own lands? yes, we could absolutely. and many, many environmentalists agree with that. are you an optimist or a pessimist when it comes to that very broadbrush debate about whether we can as a species feed well and equitably a population which may well rise to 8—9 billion people on this planet? i think we're in really big trouble if we carry on trying to do it the way that we've thought was ok 20—30 years ago. i'm optimistic about our ability to do it if we are willing to work with natural processes, if we are willing to do for me that looks after our soil, that puts a lot of that diversity back in. i am very, very helpful and i have been lucky enough to travel around the world and see some amazing

regenerative farmers that are highly, highly productive doing it in a way that fits in their own landscapes and ecosystems. i think we can do this, and there isn't an opt out of being responsible where wejust go, "oh, it's all fine." i mean, that's what some farming is now, "it's all fine, don't talk to me about these problem." we have to take it on the chin, we have to listen to what we are being told that we're doing to soil, what we're doing to rivers. there's this study i saw yesterday. 0% of rivers in britain are in good ecological condition or a good status according to eu rules. i mean, that's not good is a? that's shameful. that means were getting something wrong and rivers tell us something about what's happening on the land. if 0% of our rivers are in good status, good health, that tells us there's something profoundly wrong with our land management in many, many places. so, that's pretty bleak and i want to end on a personal note by just reflecting on what you said to me down on the farm about your relationship with your dad and your grandfather as you learned farming from them. you've now got four children

who are learning, consciously or not, farming from you. i've just met the youngest of them a bit earlier today, tom, and he's three years old. i can tell he already adores being on the farm. but do you want them to go into farming given what you see happening to farming today? or do you think actually it might be better for them to do something else? i want them to do what they want to do — i'm sorry that's a bit of a wishy—washy answer. i want them to be happy and do whatever they want to do. if that means being an artist or a hairdresser, let them do that. yes, but hang on a minute. from the very beginning, we have been talking about this being 600 years of family history. it would be quite a thing if none of your children wanted to continue the rebanks traditions. i'd be delighted if one of them chose to and made them happy to be but one or more of them, girl, boy or whatever, if they chose to pick this up and carry it forward, great.

but i will be equally pleased that they with their life doing something else and somebody else comes in here and they say, "ok, rebanks is finished now. "he's old, he's had his day." but he looked after it well, and there is 15,000 trees that would not of been there otherwise or maybe 30 if we get our act together that the soil is an absolutely top nick, that there is a really top flock of herd and sheep that goes to the fella and comes back six or eight times a year. if i've contributed in any kind of way at all to both the traditions of this place and to putting it back together and looking after it ecologically, then i go to sleep for the last time happy. but more than that, it's also knowing perhaps that the life of a farmer particularly here in this place in this time, it may be extraordinarily rewarding but it is also extraordinarily hard. no, i think you have the classic prejudice of a farmboy that left the farm. you think it's all rubbish and nobody wants to do it. no. if you go around this valley, i think if we asked the sort of 15 nearest farmers to me, i think you might find one that is grumpy about it. i think all the others love it to bits, love

it 90% of the time, are deeply romantic and sentimental about their land and what they do, and are desperate to be respected for doing it and to be good stewards of their land. i don't think it's the grumpy thing that the farmboy that leaves thinks it is. james, it has been a pleasure being on yourfarm but we have to end there. thank you very much for being on hardtalk. thank you. thank you very much for having me. hello there, the weekend was pretty much a wash—out for many of us, we saw a vigorous area of low pressure parked across the uk bringing huge amounts of rainfall over months worth of rain falling in many areas that did lead to some localised flooding and transport disruption. plenty of flood warnings remain

in force if you're concerned about where you live, head on to the bbc weather website to check out all the details. as we head into the new week it does like think of quieter. the pressure always being nearby so for the showers at times, but there will be some sunny spells too. from monday morning we have area of low pressure still with us slightly weaker feature, if you see the isobars in the charts and so won't be quite as windy. temperature starting off in around eight to 9 degrees for many of us but have more cloud out west and around ten or 11 degrees. this by the front will reinvigorate and push back into northern ireland, wales, the south—west of england through today and still likely to produce a wet day here but elsewhere across the country it's sunny spells and scattered showers, and some of the showers could turn out to be heavy and maybe even thundery. slightly warmer day for many

of us across the south—east, we could see 16 or 17 degrees. through monday night states pretty showery, longer spells of rain pushing from west to east many across northern and western areas. again some clear spells and then temperatures will dip into single figures. 0therwise holding in double figures with the rain and cloud. drifting a bit further northwards parking itself across scotland, it means you will see more of a gradient and more isobars developing across england, wales and northern ireland through the day. a breezy day across the south that will drive futher showers into many south—western areas. some of them could turn out heavy and thundery. he much anywhere and there will also be good spells of sunshine in between. those temperatures reaching highs from 1a to around 15 or maybe 16 degrees. similar stories as we head into wednesday, for the showers at times and we head on into thursday signs of another area of low pressure moving through to bring wet and windy weather.

this is bbc news: i'm james reynolds with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. remarkable scenes outside the walter reed medical center, as president trump takes a short ride to greet his supporters. the convoy comes back in this direction and about six feet away from me, the president is waving. if he continues if doctors said they were pleased with his progress. to look as well as he does today, he can be discharged tomorrow. armenian and azerbaijani forces exchange heavy rocket and artillery fire as fighting intensifies over