New book to explore the changing face of farming

Robert Ashton is set to publish a book on how rural life has changed over the decades, including stories on those who are bringing back the old ways. Robert shares his inspiration for writing the book...

I learned to drive on a Fordson Dexta when I was 14. It was 1969, and I had a weekend job on a dairy farm at Friston near the Su olk coast. That winter, one of my Saturday jobs was to collect a load of sugar beet tops, loading them by hand, then forking them o on the meadow behind the cowshed for the cows to eat. I enjoyed driving that tractor.

It was Christmas that year when my parents gave me a copy of George Ewart Evans’s book, Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay. This book, in which Evans tells the stories he heard his neighbours tell of how life was when they were young, fascinated me. Evans had written the book in the early 1950s when living at Blaxhall, a few miles from Friston, where I worked on a farm. I discovered that Russell Savage, the shepherd I knew, was the son of Robert and Priscilla Savage, who lived next door to Evans and featured prominently in his book.

Over the next 50 years, I bought and read copies of all 12 of the books Evans had written about how life was changing in rural Su olk and decided that one day, I would write a similar book, showing how rural life had continued to change. I married into a Su olk farming family and spent the rst decade of my career selling fertiliser for Fisons, so had ample opportunity to see how elds and tractors were getting bigger, and the number of men working the land getting smaller.

I was 64 before I slowed down enough to think more seriously about Evans and the book I’d always wanted to write. I was now working freelance, so it was easier to stop work and become a full-time student at the University of East Anglia, graduating in 2020 with a creative writing MA. My dissertation was the rst three chapters of Where Are the Fellows Who Cut the Hay? Each chapter takes something familiar such as milk, wheat or coal, retells some of the stories from Evans’s books, adds some of my own experiences, and then ends with examples my research revealed of people bringing back old ways.

I realised that just as cheap oil and gas had encouraged intensi cation in the 1960s and 70s, high energy costs today were prompting a return to regenerative farming practice, diversi cation and adding value to meat and milk by selling direct to the consumer. I saw that village shops are also making a comeback, now often in community ownership.

Where Are the Fellows Who Cut the Hay? will be published by Unbound, whose innovative approach is to crowdfund a hardback rst edition of each book. My book is now close to target, and you can pre-order your copy by visiting https://unbound. com/books/where-are-the-fellowswho-cut-the-hay/