james, what does being a shepherd mean to you? it's not as simple as looking after sheep president trump has taken of course but i have... a short trip from hospital being a shepherd to me means where he's due to spend a very important thing. a third night being treated for coronavirus. he appeared in the back it means being a part of this lake district history that goes of his armoured car wearing a face mask to wave back at least 1,000 years at supporters. doctors treating the president say he's continuing and may go back about 5,000 to recover well. years, and it means to be part of this flow of people there's been a new surge in fighting between azerbaijan and sheep that go to and armenia over the disputed territory of nagorno—kara bakh, and from the mountains. a week after the long—running and have done, like i say, conflict reignited. russia has called for a ceasefire. for at least 1,000 maybe 5,000 azerbaijan has threatened yea rs. so, the male ancestors to destroy military targets inside armenia. of the sheep came on board with the vikings, rescue operations are stepped and there's a very long human up in france and italy cultural history and the sheep after storm alex brought torrential rain and flash have a genetic history. floods to many areas. several villages in and being a part of the mountainous border regions have been cut off, that is what it means causing widespread damage to be a shepherd here. and killing four people. watching you work with your three fabulous dogs and this far, it is tempting to think the french prime minister has that this is timeless, promised emergency aid for the stricken that frankly i could've french regions. come here 100 years ago the local authorities and everything about your farm, in north—west italy have asked forsimilarfunding 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. from their government.

so, the way that we manage our hay meadows has had a 30—year now on bbc news, forget period that is been a bit more modern, smalltalk — it's time but we are going back to a sort for some hardtalk. of 100—year—old pattern, welcome to hardtalk. the way we manage our riverbanks is nothing like 100 years ago because i'm stephen sackur. the ecologists are telling us that we need to do way better with the rivers and wetlands. and welcome to one of the most and the same with the way we manage the little bit beautiful corners of britain, of woodland that we have. so, it's a mix. the hill country of i think crudely it is sort the north—west of england known as the lake district. of 70% doing things the like we did them 100 this landscape is beautiful but it's not wild. years ago, maybe 30% or 40% it's been shaped by generations sort of tweaks listening to the scientists and of shepherds and stockmen. the ecologists and other people telling us new now, my guest today things about how we need to do things better. interesting. is james rebanks. so, you are one of a pile his family have farmed this of generations of farmers. land for more than 600 years. he's notjust a shepherd, your own family history goes he's also an internationally renowned writer, and campaigner for a more sustainable, more back 600 years but are you now responsible kind of farming. looking at the land and farming the land and the animals but are his ideas compatible in a way that your own father with putting affordable food on all of our tables? would find hard to understand? uh, so, 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 good fettle and great quality. in that is the most important come here! thing that the wools he kisses and whistles 00:02:20,438 --> 4294966103:13:29,430 string music plays 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, initially 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. yeah. 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 — 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've 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 it's 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. soil. 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 society — 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 happens.

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 and loamier within two years just by the degree of trampling and with three, four, five trampling—grazing events where i maybe 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...? the loaminess. 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, many of whom, yes, are trapped in crazy systems that get them to do the wrong things to look after their soil. and 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. 0k. 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. 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. mm. but 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're 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's 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's 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, we're often trashing the ecosystem, trashing the very soil itself. so, the un is talking about some of our 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 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 farming. 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 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 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 farming 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 it? 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. well, 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 a month's worth of rain falling in many areas. it did led to some localised flooding and some transport disruption and plenty of flood warnings remain in force. if you are concerned about where you live, then head onto the bbc weather website to check out all the details. but as we head into this new week, it does look like things will be a little bit quieter. still quite unsettled, because low pressure will always be nearby, so we'll see further showers at times, but there will be some sunny spells, too. for monday morning, we have our area of low pressure still with us, but it is a slightly weaker feature. you can see fewer isobars on the chart as well, so it will not be quite as windy through today. temperatures starting the day off at around 8—9 degrees for many of us, but where we have more cloud out west, then around ten or 11 degrees. now, this weather front and our weather front will reinvigorate and push back into northern ireland, wales, the south—west of england through today, so it's 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, maybe even thundery. a slightly warmer day for many of us, particularly across the south—east. given some sunshine, we could see 16 or 17 degrees. through monday night, it looks like it stays pretty showery. longer spells of rain pushing from west to east, mainly across northern and western areas. again, there will be some clear spells and where you see the clear skies, then temperatures will dip into single figures, otherwise holding in double figures where we have the rain and the cloud. 0ur area of low pressure is still with us on into tuesday, drifting a bit further northwards, parking itself across scotland. it means we'll see more of a gradient, more isobars developing across england, wales and northern ireland through the day. so a breezier day across the south. that will drive further showers into many south—western areas. again, some of them could turn out to be heavy and thundery pretty much anywhere, but there'll also be some good spells of sunshine in between. and those temperatures reaching highs from 1a to around maybe

15 or maybe 16 degrees across the south—east. so a similar story as we head on into wednesday as well, further showers at times. and then as we head on into thursday, there's signs of another area of low pressure moving through to bring some wet and windy weather.

this is bbc news with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. i'm sally bundock. remarkable scenes outside the walter reed medical center, as president trump takes a short ride to greet his supporters. mr trump is being treated for coronavirus. earlier, doctors said they were pleased with his progress. he continues to look —— if he continues to look and feel as well as he does today, we could plan for discharge tomorrow to the white house where he could continue his treatment course.

armenian and azerbaijani forces exchange heavy rocket and artillery fire as fighting intensifies over