Description
Book SynopsisThe South West Peak is a lesser-known part of the Peak District stretching from Lyme Park in Cheshire in the north to Onecote in Staffordshire in the south, and from Macclesfield in the west to Buxton in the east. This landscape area includes tracts of high moorland, fertile valleys, wooded cloughs, picturesque villages and tiny hamlets. The farmers of the South West Peak are the people who have made the landscape what it is today, and it is their personal accounts of working in this often challenging land that form the basis of The Land That Made Us.
Edited by local author
Christine Gregory and dairy farmer
Sheila Hine, and published in partnership with the
Farming Life Centre and the
Peak District National Park Authority with support from the
National Lottery Heritage Fund, this book includes the testimony of over twenty farmers, and it is illustrated with photographs of them and their farming landscapes. We hear stories from across the generations of heroic endeavour in difficult terrain, as well as accounts of day-to-day work and family life spanning eighty years of farming history. The land had been farmed in traditional ways for centuries, but the Second World War changed that, and in succeeding years politics and increasing mechanisation have constantly rewritten the rule book for farmers. There is pride in achievement as well as frustration at the often conflicting demands of food production and wildlife conservation.
The Land That Made Us asks what makes for sustainability in the short and the long term. The future of this landscape and of the farming communities that sustain it hangs in the balance, and it is the farmers’ turn to reflect on their past and speculate about the future.
Trade Review'[An] excellent history of modern farming – the best I have come across precisely because the words are those of the farmers themselves and their families, who have lived through and are still living through its transformation.'
from the Foreword by Colin Tudge, co-founder of the Oxford Real Farming Conference and the College for Real Farming and Food Culture
Table of ContentsForeword
Introduction
Part 1: From Horses to Tractors – 1940s to 1950s
- Working with horses; the war years; government involvement in farming; children on the farm; the first tractors and milking machines; power and water come to the hills; the snows of ’47
Part 2: Last of the Old Days and Ways – 1960s to 1970s
- A shepherd’s life; the value of wool; farming subsidies; sheep dipping; local sheep sales; family life on a remote hill farm
Part 3: From Buckets to Bulk Tanks – 1970s to 1980s
- Making hay; silage rye-grass monoculture; ‘improving’ the land; the decline of mixed farming; self-sufficient farms; old milking systems give way to the new; new breeds; joining the Common Market; subsidies and surpluses; milk quotas; changing the landscape; the Harpur Crewe Estate
Part 4: Winners and Losers – 1990s to 2018- BSE, foot-and-mouth disease and TB; the price of milk; wildlife losses; farming for conservation; waders in the South West Peak
Part 5: The Future for Farming in the South West Peak
- New directions in agricultural policy; farming organically; diversifying; finding a niche, ‘hobby farmers’; keeping it in the family; the future
Acknowledgements
