Rooted Sarah Langford Penguin, £10.99
Rooted charts Sarah Langford’s literal journey from the courtroom to the farmyard. When Langford’s husband, the former MP Ben Gummer, loses his seat in the 2017 General Election it precipitates a move back to his Suffolk roots. It also begins Langford’s reconnection with her own family’s farming history. Langford is a criminal and family barrister whose growing awareness of the plight of farmers is matched by a passionate belief that farming too, must reconnect with its past. Modern farming, she argues, is machinery plus chemistry, where shrinking margins and rising costs are making it a zero-sum game for farmers. The earth Langford encounters on one conventional farm is wormless silt, the result of years of fertiliser and pesticides; regenerative farming aims to enrich the soil and work within the grain of nature. Langford musters a wide range
of farmers who have embraced regenerative farming in its many forms.
She describes dairy farmers who are trying older hardier breeds instead of the black and white Holsteins that are little more than milk machines, former pig farmers who diversify into orchards and other crops, and those with smaller supposedly uneconomical farms told they cannot compete. For them, regenerative farming was a way out of the debt and death of contemporary farming offering better margins and happier working lives. Many of the techniques they use are age-old and overlap with organic farming – something that Langford and her husband have started to try in their own fields, for she is not one to sit on the sidelines. Hedges are reinstated, field margins are planted for pollinators, cover crops are grown as they gradually fall in step with nature. Throughout, Langford’s evocation of the Suffolk landscape is clear-eyed, as poetic as it is unvarnished. In Sarah Langford, regenerative farming has an eloquent and compelling advocate. Robert Lowe
Little People, Big Dreams: Vanessa Nakate Maria Sanchez Vegara Illustrated by Olivia Amoah Frances Lincoln, £9.99
Vanessa Nakate, the 26-year-old Ugandan climate campaigner, is the 100th subject of Maria Sanchez Vegara’s bestselling ‘Little People, Big Dreams’ series of illustrated biographies for kids. She joins a host of historically famous figures, including Frida Kahlo, Rosa Parks and Anne Frank. Nakate is one of the younger subjects and is relatively unknown, but this brief biography shows she has already achieved a great deal. Inspired by Greta Thunberg, Nakate has become a prominent figure
in her own right, raising awareness of climate change in Africa and beyond. Cropped from a photograph of
fellow protestors at Davos, Nakate said: ‘You didn’t just erase a photo. You erased a continent.’ Nakate’s story is told in clear,
sympathetic prose, accompanied by Olivia Amoah’s simple but effective colour illustrations. For older children, there is a more detailed biography at the back that includes the fateful photo she was cropped from. RL
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