news. i made headlines. barack obama has criticised donald trump in the form of the president first campaign speech supporting joe biden. —— here are the headlines. speaking in philadelphia, obama said mr trump heather shown interest in anybody else but himself and criticised his handling of the economy and the pandemic. that has not shown. more unrest in nigeria after the shooting date of 12 protesters. buildings have been torched and there have been torched and there have been torched and there have been sporadic outbreaks of violence. the un is calling for an end to brutality. two french teenagers have been charged with complicity in the murder of the teacher who was beheaded last week. the french president pay tribute to the teacher at his memorial service in paris, calling him a quiet hero. that is it from me. luis will

be here at the top of the hour. now here on bbc news, it is time for hardtalk. —— lewis vaughan jones will be time for hardtalk. —— lewis vaughanjones will be here. 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 offarming. but are his ideas compatible with putting affordable food on all of our tables?

come here, bess. bess, come here. come—bye, come—bye. james whistles and clicks. come—bye, come—bye. music: the lark ascending by ralph vaughan williams away. away. james, what does being a shepherd mean to you? well, at its simplest, it means you look after sheep, of course. but, er...

..being a shepherd to me means a very particular thing. it means being part of this lake 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 a thousand, 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. and being part of that's what it means to be a shepherd here. watching you work with your three fabulous dogs in this flock, it's tempting to think this is timeless, that, frankly, i could have come here 100 years ago and everything about your farm, your way of life would have been the same then as now. er, and you'd be sort of partly right and partly wrong, is the truth of it. so, the way that we manage our hay meadows 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 hundred—year—old pattern. the way we manage our riverbanks 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. i think i'm sort of crudely 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 and all the people who are telling us new things about how we should 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? er, so 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 and always did evolve. shepherding culture always evolved. he would come and stand here and i think he would think my sheep were in great fettle

and they were good quality. that's the most important thing. he would see that the walls are still put back up. he would see that we're well—fenced and we're managing the hedgerows. he might, because i've only just got my head around it, he might find it harder to understand some of the ways that we're grazing. i mean, longer recovery of the fields, which is a sort of new practice that the soil scientists are telling us work, and he might have been utterly bamboozled because most people are 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 playing computer games or something. but i'm very glad my grandfather sort of took me under his wing, initially a bit reluctantly, and taught me a lot of the things that he knew.

and yeah, it's gone on to shape my life, really, and i don't regret being seduced by it at all. this looks picture—postcard 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 it's... your history is not quite right. so my grandfather made a quite comfortable living back in the day. they farmed within the limits of what they had, they used their land effectively. they minimised into expensive inputs. we've got into a real hole because we've got onto an input—based agriculture where we're buying everything off of 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 made a 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. so this is what it's all about. well, let me take my own little supply. what's so speci. . . ? 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, 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 that doesn't. .. a civilisation that doesn't look after this stuff, the soil, is a doomed civilisation. and we're on borrowed time, because we're not looking after soil properly. and what we're trying to do... admittedly this is a stock 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 techniques and the careful thought you're 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, trampling, grazing events, where i maybe graze half of this grass and then i trample the other half down, this is turning darker in front of my eyes by a month. but is this 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? you know, are you in a sense a bit of a dilettante with your obsession with the loaminess and...? no. no, no. not having that at all! any farm, anywhere around the world, that is driving their soil towards exhaustion, erosion, soil loss, disaster, that is not going to work for anybody, is it? so...so you can say what you like about our little farm, but every farm on earth has at some point to address the... if it's making its soil worse or it's losing it, that's disastrous.

there's no way back from that. or the very, 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...why are we encouraging farmers to do the wrong thing when we could be encouraging them to do the right thing and support them to do so? we need to talk about it more. 0k. 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 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's no holier than thou

involved in this, my family did all of those things, were part of all of those things — and the book tells the story about how people like us embraced all of those things uncritically and on a massive scale across all of our landscapes. and did they deliver good things yesterday? they made food cheaper, so that you and i are better off. they gave us an abundance of food that we'd never had before in our history, to the point where most of us don't have to worry about where our food's coming from tonight. that's an amazing, historically brilliant achievement. but we can't view it just in a sort of narrow gaze. we have to...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're not working with nature, we're trashing it or we're 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'm thinking of the netherlands, for example, where for many decades they have poured chemicals into the soil to intensify their farm methods. they grow a huge proportion of europe's vegetables. and they would argue that actually they can... ..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 ten billion people, so i've... nowhere have i said that we shouldn't have intensive agriculture. so 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 ecosystems and ecosystems have needs. they need native habitats, they need natural processes. that's where all of 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 we're at. 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, they‘ re making sterile landscapes and then making it impossible for nature to live in those places. so if you read my book, it tells you this, tells you the story, 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're taking what i'm saying slightly out of...out of kilter here, in that what i've actually said

is we need to understand why those people did that. we need to understand the economic... they're still doing it, it's not past tense. well, no, 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 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, mm. we also know... 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're mistaking the fact...| think you think that the industrial food systems are feeding the people of the world. they're not. 80 to 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 need to be very good farmers, but we need to do it in ways that actually are 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 opt—out, that you can just ignore it, and you can't. we now know 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, just 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 was nothing to do with me, because it is to do with me and thousands of other farmers. well, your message is, it's to do with you as a farmer, but it's to do with me as a consumer. . . yeah. ..to do with absolutely all of us. yeah. but here's 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... yeah. ..of what it was in the 1950s. it's10% instead of 33%. right, exactly. yeah, yeah. 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 to make food that cheap, we're often trashing ecosystems, trashing the very soil itself. so the un's talking about some of our agricultural landscapes having less than 60 harvests left. but this is a difficult place for you to be, because, you know, these days you're not just a shepherd and a farmer. you're also an advocate. you're 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, sounds to me you're going to have to persuade them that they can, should and must pay more for theirfood. eitherfortheirfood, 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 round it. if you don't like it, i can't help you, but if you think we're able to reduce the food... ..the price of food indefinitely downwards without doing grave damage to our landscapes, then we're 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 american society in general, is that this is also associated with pretty dreadful downturn in the quality of food we're 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 eliminated poverty, there'd be no poverty in the united states of america. they spend 7% of the household budget on food there, the lowest in the world. mm. what we're actually seeing when you look at places like the american midwest or america in general is that cheap food is actually propping up more and more unequal societies.

so let me flip the argument a little bit, because you've just introduced interesting ideas 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, you know, it's difficult to make a living here, and when you do make a living your productivity, compared to many other places you could 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 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 links 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 reared in it because it's the highest value land in the uk. so you need somewhere to rear your sheep and cattle. how did they solve that for over a thousand years, maybe 5,000 years? they solved that because the uplands were the nursery for the national sheep flock and cattle flock. so what you actually look at is, they solved these problems in the past. and if we're 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's really here, which is a highly carved—up, highly owned, highly man—made landscape, and we can make it much, much better for nature and produce foods and be part of a sustainable national food system. but you know that there are quote unquote 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 he and his family... nobody said that! well, the kind of sheep farming that you and your family have practised for years... yeah. ..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 what 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're 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 a poor place for nature. the question is how, practically, do 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 that theyjust 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 being a genuinely good steward of a piece of land would be. and then we're finding all around me we're surrounded by amazing farmers who are rising to that challenge. not all, but many are rising to that challenge. right, so 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. i mean, 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's propped up by state money, despite them thinking it's a free market system. but do you think, i mean... 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 landscapes? yes, we could. absolutely, and many, many environmentalists agree with that. yeah. are you an optimist or a pessimist when it comes to that very broad—brush debate about whether we can, as a species, feed well and equitably a population which may well rise to eight, nine 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 thought was ok 20, 30 years ago. i'm optimistic about our ability to do it if we're willing to work with natural processes, if we're willing to do farming that looks after and repairs soil. it puts a lot of that diversity back in. i am very, very hopeful, and i've 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. .. there isn't an opt out of being responsible where we just go, "oh, it's all fine." i mean, that's what some farming is now. we're told, fine, don't talk to me about the problems. we have to take it on the chin, we have to listen to what we're being told that we're doing to soil, that we're doing to rivers. they're was a study i saw yesterday. 0% of british rivers are in good ecological condition or in a good status, according to the eu rules. i mean, that's not good, is it? i mean, that's. .. that's shameful. that means we're getting something wrong. and rivers tell us about what's happening on the land. mm. if our rivers, if 0% of our rivers are in good, 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. now, i've just met the youngest of them a bit earlier today, tom, and he's three years old, and i could 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, erm, i want them to do what they want to do. 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. yeah, but hang on a minute. from the very beginning, we've talked about this being 600 years of family history. it would be quite a thing if none of your children wanted to continue the rebanks tradition. i would be delighted even if one of them chose to, it made them happy to be... one or more of them. girl, boy, whatever,

if they chose to pick this up and carry it forward, great. but i would be equally pleased if they live 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 didn't he look after it well?" there's 15,000 trees that wouldn't have been there otherwise, or maybe 30 if we get our act together, that the soil‘s in absolutely top nick, that there's a really top flock of herdwick sheep that goes to the fell and comes back six, 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 farm boy that left the farm. you think it's all rubbish and nobody wants to do it. no. if you go round this valley, i think if we ask the sort of 15 nearest farmers to me, i think you might find one that's 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 they're desperate to be thought. . .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 farm boy 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. it's been a soggy first half of the week but will be a drier day and for some, even a brighter day with some sun spells coming through. more rain and wind on the way for the weekend and into next week too.

for now, low pressure is moving away, high pressure is arriving before the next weather system travelling from the atlantic. so, this gap is not going to last too long. as we start thursday, some heavy rain in the parts of scotland gradually easing with a windy night in northern ireland which we will see slowly ease and be a breezy day across the uk and still in scotland in northern england, a lot of cloud during the morning and some patchy outbreaks of rain, southern counties of northern england should improve in the afternoon, some sunny spells brightening up in northern ireland in the mid—areas of southern england having a dry afternoon with sunny spells after a chance to see some patchy rain in the morning. and temperatures up to 17 in the southeast of england, the northern parts of northern england will be a cool day the chance to end in parts of southeast england and some quite heavy showers moving through and the next weather system over night into friday morning in northern ireland pushing onto scotland and another spell of rain is heading our way.

moving on, the system continues to push us with southeast and it is going to weaken. patchy rain and out of the way the morning on friday for western scotland too. sunny spells and a few showers following behind here and notice of that area of rain really is just disappearing into the afternoon with some cloud in a few spots with all that is left is the east and southeast of england. here, it will be a bit cooler on friday. that takes us into the weekend but the main thing about saturday is how windy it's going to be, this area of low pressure passing us to the northwest, but close enough to pick up but wind but rain moving in as well. some of the rain is going to be quite heavy as it pushes in, windy and quite widely with some gusts of a0 to 50 miles an hour, stronger gusts possible at times in the west, parts of eastern england staying dry into the evening

and on sunday, sunny spells and blustery showers.

this is bbc news. the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. the fbi announced that they are both taking actions to interfere with the 2020 presidential elections. sharp criticism for donald trump from his predecessor barack obama in the former presidents first campaign speech supporting joe biden. the rest of us have had to live with the consequences of him proving himself incapable of taking the job seriously. unrest in nigeria over the shooting of at least 12 the shooting dead of at least 12 protesters and this calls for an end for the brutalities. 12 protesters and this calls for an end tthe brutalities. to french teenagers charged with complicity in the murder