(What a great title for the holiday season!) My husband and I have recently become kind of obsessed with a British show called This Farming Life. It’s a documentary style hour-long show that each season follows 5 or 6 farming families in Scotland. Most of them farm sheep and cattle for meat. Each season it is a new set of families (though you often wish they would follow up with families from previous seasons — did Sean the amazing sheep-shearer manage to make a go of his new farm?)
In season 7 there is one family that is having a terrible time. They moved to Fife for better farming weather, but this season’s weather (probably actually 2023) in Fife has been awful — nonstop rain and very cold. So, they had moved into “arables” (meaning growing grains) because the feed business is increasingly profitable, but one of their fields got flooded and they lost a lot of their wheat crop. And then lambing season was terribly cold and wet, and they didn’t have enough room in the barn for all the hundreds of new baby lambs, so most had to be out in the fields. And the poor farmer would go check the fields every morning, and every morning he would find more dead lambs. Dead from hypothermia. Also the mud can prevent the mothers from being able to smell their lambs, and so they don’t recognize them, and so they won’t nurse them. In the end, at least a hundred baby lambs died. It was awful to behold. The farmer spotting little white piles on the ground, stopping his truck, getting out, scooping up dead stiff baby lambs by the legs, tossing them in the back of the truck. His wife weeping. And I guess there was nothing they could do. You might think they could bring them into the house, but they can’t separate them from their mothers, and there’s hundreds of them.
I thought to myself, “Would I rather have that life, or would I rather die of cancer?” Really hard choice actually.
p.s. Looking at that last sentence I think it could read as a real downer for some people. All I think it means is that I am def not cut out to be a farmer.
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