John Lewis-Stempel is a sheep farmer in Herefordshire where his family have lived for the last 800 years. He has a profound sense of the history and traditions of the land and is angry about the impact of intensive farming on the countryside. Fields once filled with birdsong, insects and wild flowers have become “silent, sterile, open-roofed factories for agribusiness”. Determined to prove there is another way to farm, he rents a four-acre field and in the course of a year turns it into the kind of wheat field Piers Plowman might have recognised, teeming with wild flowers such as marigolds and cornflowers, as well as birds and hares: “There is a whole world of life in my cornfield.” The local farmers whose fields are monocultures regularly doused with noxious chemicals clearly think his “Olde Wheatfielde” is a pointless exercise. Far from it. Lewis-Stempel’s year as an arable farmer brilliantly illustrates the destruction of species: “On Britain’s farmland something like an ecological holocaust is taking place.” A beautifully written paean to the countryside in all its rich diversity.
• The Running Hare: The Secret Life of Farmland is published by Black Swan. To order a copy for £7.64 (RRP £8.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
