Life, Death and Cornflakes

Something I hadn't thought about much before I started seeing Ivie was that there's quite a lot of death in farming. During the first lambing it seemed like I saw more dead lambs than live ones. And occasionally Ivie will come in from checking the cows to declare that there's a dead one in the top of the 50 acre (obviously, it's always in the field furthest from the steading).

These cows aren't dead.

The diseases that cows and sheep die of have very sophisticated names like watery mouth, joint ill, staggers and milk fever.

For non-farmers, you can't just bury your dead. You have to phone a man with a truck who comes and picks it up and takes it away to the cow graveyard. Or something like that.

Let me tell you about the truck. When I first moved to D&G I had a one hour commute between Auchencairn and Wigtown. I got to know the liveries of the lorries going to and from the ferry at Cairnryan. One of the lorries I saw over and over was light blue and white and had 'Fallenstock' written above the cab. Farmers - and logical people - will know exactly what this is. It won't surprise you to know that I didn't quite figure it out.

Lily and Lupy. Also not dead.

I didn't give it a huge amount of thought but somewhere in the back of my brain 'Fallen' rhymned with 'Talon' and the company was Dutch. It dealt with surplus stock from shops that had gone out of business. Obviously.

One day I got to work and one of my colleagues was complaining about being stuck behind a Fallenstock lorry on the way in. "It was stinking!" she said. I was confused. Why would excess boxes of cornflakes smell? My colleague kindly enlightened me and just like that the Dutch company ceased trading.

Just as well there's plenty of new life around the farm, too, to make up for all that death.

Quads. Alive and Kicking.