Diary of a Shopkeeper, 11th May

Welcome, kye of Orkney!

It’s been a long winter without you, but now – almost overnight – the fields are full once again. Your sleek, glossy coats gleam in the May sunshine. Your bogling joins the spring chorus of burbling blackbirds and wheesking whaups. Your inquisitive, intelligent gaze inspects any daunering dog-walker, looking over the dyke as if to say, ‘Got any crisps?’

Kye love crisps. But don’t be tempted to feed them a handful of Ready Salted: their nutritional needs are perfectly met by the lush green grass of Orkney’s pastures, supplemented by their owners’ carefully judged distribution of Cheesy Wotsits in old propcorn barrels.

I say owners, but ‘custodians’ would be more accurate. No one can ever really own a cow, any more than we can own the air we breathe.

When the great herds of Aberdeen Angus and Shorthorn fly in from the south every spring, farmers breathe a sigh of relief. From Burwick to Birsay, folk shade their eyes and gaze aloft, following the graceful beasts as they circle and land. A joyous cry goes up: ‘They’re back!’ It’s one of Orkney’s greatest miracles that our kye, having flown south for the winter, travelling thousands of miles to the warm Serengeti, return every spring, unfailingly finding the very field they took off from six months earlier.

Isn’t nature wonderful.

Further confirmation of the unique bond between farmers and their livestock has been coming to me recently thanks to a Facebook group called Simple Harvest. I didn’t choose to join it: I just started seeing several posts a day about famers and their wonderful lifestyles. I suppose it’s because I’m interested in food and how its grown: social media reads my mind and supplies me more of the same to keep me well-fed with confirmation of my preferences and prejudices.

Isn’t technology wonderful.

Whoever they are, the researchers and photographers behind Simple Harvest are doing an amazing job. Every few hours a new post pops up, invariably showing a young farmer – either a golden-haired glamorous female or a chisel-jawed hunky male – standing in a field of giant cabbages or spotless pink pigs. Like most Orkney farmers, the women wear denim shorts and vest-tops; the men wear tartan shirts and dungarees. The size of the vegetables these folk grow is fantastic. Heads of garlic the size of a cabbage, and cabbages the size of a beachball.

I don’t know what fertiliser they’re using, but it must be powerful stuff. There are no bulk bags of ammonium nitrate piled up in these pictures, so I’m guessing the amazing yield must be down to organic methods. Probably it’s provided by the hefty bulls seen lurking in the background of several photos.

My favourite picture is of a teenage boy kneeling beside a life-size horse he’s made entirely out of garlic, with giant chives for a mane. Incredible. Another favourite is of a girl standing amidst thousands of white rabbits, all lined up on stacked shelves which stretch to the horizon. The rabbits are munching on what look like bamboo leaves, and the girl is smiling proudly at the camera. ‘Raising love by the hundreds—just a woman and her happy herd of bunnies,’ says the caption.

The captions are every bit as awesome as the pictures. ‘Boots on, barn doors open — just another day in dairy paradise,’ says one accompanying a woman in a byre in spotless sky-blue jeans. ‘She gathers more than eggs,’ says another, showing a girl in a shed of hens, all lined up on stacked shelves stretching towards the horizon, ‘she collects the calm of routine.’

‘Farmers sed fecd fees world,’ says another. ‘Without them, We'd Thank yo You, starve.’ Something lost in translation there! But it’s understandable, as English may not be the first language of these folk. It’s hard to know where the pictures are taken: sometimes they look like the USA, other times Russia: it’s hard to tell the difference.

Occasionally the captions don’t explain something that I’d like to understand better. There’s one of a girl herding kye for instance. One of the beasts has two bodies but only one head. Wow! Twice as much mince! I’d like to know how that works: maybe it’s that genetic engineering that we’re going to be seeing more of now there’s that US/UK trade deal. Another photo – ‘Born into the soil, raised by the harvest’ – shows two young women and two older ladies crouched either side of a line of blue veg boxes that stretches towards the horizon. The oldest lady has three legs! And still she had a long and successful life as a grower of cabbages, courgettes and kale. Amazing.

Isn’t medical science wonderful.

Some friends I’ve shared these photos with are sceptical. ‘You’re an idiot,’ they say. ‘Can’t you see they’re all fake pictures made by AI?’

‘What?’ I reply, ‘Artificial Insemination?’

‘No! Artificial Intelligence!’

But why would Simple Harvest want to flood my feeds with dozens of pictures of idealised bucolic fantasies? What’s in it for them? I know what’s in it for me: inspiration! I’m sorely tempted to give up shoplife and start a farm dedicated to giant cabbages, white rabbits, and enough garlic to construct a life-size horse. Yes, I know a picture of real farming life when I see it. As surely as I recognise a low-flying formation of Holstein-Friesians coming in from the south.            

Maybe I am an idiot. The latest post from Simple Harvest has the following caption: ‘A young woman stands confidently on a muddy farm path, wearing a beige plaid shirt, blue jeans, and rubber boots, with cows grazing peacefully in the background.’ Hmm, it does sound like an AI prompt!

But if it is all made up, I’m not the only idiot! No one commenting under any of these pictures seems to notice it’s AI nonsense. They all say things like, ‘Thank you for your hard work and god bless’; ‘Gorgeous and awesome;’ ‘Tell me if u need help ready to do so am a phone call away will come with electric wheel barrow or a miniature tractor.’

‘You really are an idiot,’ my friends say. ‘Don’t you realise, all those comments are posted by bots? They’re not written by real people.’ ‘So I’m reading fake comments on fake pictures? Am I the only real person looking at this stuff? Come to think of it, am I real?

Isn’t reality wonderful.

(Or is it?!?)

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 15th May 2025. A new diary appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations, and occasional small corrections or additions.