Yet another of our farming heroes, Lindsay Cook, has died. It is tempting to say that there will soon be none of us left, but he has been succeeded by an able son, so farming and life go on.

Yet another of our farming heroes, Lindsay Cook, has died. It is tempting to say that there will soon be none of us left, but he has been succeeded by an able son, so farming and life go on.

The Farmer was one of the 200 or so who stood outside the Kirk at Tarves because so many had come to acknowledge a quiet but tough little man.

Lindsay was 76, which doesn't seem as old as it used to, and he was an original who thought things out for himself. He put that down to the fact that, unlike his two elder brothers who left the land and the fields to him, he had left school at 14. So he didn't get his considerable knowledge from books but had to get it from observation and experience.

A good example was his way of controlling the weeds in his oilseed rape. Instead of pouring on the chemicals he let the sheep loose. He knew that sheep didn't like rape but that they loved weeds. I think he only gave up this ecological form of weed control because of all the phone calls he got telling him, with schadenfreude no doubt, that his sheep had got in among his rape.

Another piece of originality was his observation that, while mechanisation was the way forward in farming, the machines couldn't be afforded on the acreages available. So he went in for contracting to spread the expense. That way he was able to have the biggest and the best. The Farmer benefited in the 1970s when he got to store his potatoes in a shed specially built of pumalite blocks against frost and to dress them on Lindsay's state-of-the-art tattie dressing plant.

The principle of reducing capital costs by sharing was no doubt developed from his first business venture.

That was at Auchedly school, where he hired out sweeties. They were special gobstoppers which had several layers of different colours.

The entrepreneur hired the gobstopper out for a rent, for as long as one colour lasted. When that colour was gone Lindsay took the sweetie back and rented the next colour out to the next man.

The principle of hiring out expensive machinery was extended to civil engineering through his company, Ellon Plant, which was partly a response to the tremendous developments in the north-east that followed the discovery of North Sea oil and the investment that poured in from all over the world.

But it wasn't just in his own business that Lindsay's entrepreneurship shone. He made a right job of the glebe. Tarves church, like all Kirks in the rural areas, used to have a field attached. That was to support the minister's house cow and the shelt that took him about the parish in his gig.

The need for a minister's field is long gone, and many glebes have been sold while some provide a small income as some elder gets a cheap field to rent.

But Lindsay saw a better way. He planted potatoes in the glebe in the boom years of the 1970s and was able to deliver a huge cheque to the session clerk.

There were many stories told at Lindsay's funeral which made it a jolly as well as a sad occasion. My own favourite was about his deflation of a self-important guest at the Rotary.

This lad had a job with a very fancy title, and Lindsay might have been thought to be asking the obvious when he asked: "Fit div ye dae?" The pompous guest answered by repeating his title which they had all seen in the programme.

"Aye we ken fit your job's ca'ed, bit fit div ye actually dae?

The last time I saw Lindsay Cook was just a week before he died. I had made my annual visit to ask, on behalf of the cricket gala, for a shot of the marquee he lent to anyone who needed it.

I could see that he was struggling but he insisted that he would easy get to the doctors' himself. I knew that if he couldn't he was surrounded by his wife and three daughters and that he was only a phone call from the son who has taken on the responsibilities of the place.

He was concerned about the harvest and optimistic that yields would be much better than many were saying. Only a couple of days earlier he had been on the combine himself and he has been proved right as far as the winter cereals is concerned. The twinkle was still there and he was still thinking of the future he knew he wouldn't see.

He made a bargain with me. For rent of the tent I would get a replacement for the pole which was the worse for wear - "We must keep up the standard."

It was exactly the phrase his son Iain used when I returned the marquee and was making my excuses for the new pole not being ready yet.

From the dead to the not-as-quick-as-she-once-was. It was the Breadwinner's 70th birthday on Thursday and we went to Bruges with 15 of the family and two friends. Two nights on the ferry and two nights in one of the prettiest towns in the world.

It sounds like an exercise in self-restraint doesn't it? Well it wasn't. Everyone got on nearly all the time.

There was just one time when we were partying on the boat and one of the Little Dividends needed a bit of guidance.

Then got up the usual discussion of how under British law you can be done for chastising children. And it's worse if anything in the rest of the European Community.

The Farmer wondered if we might be all right because we were in international waters.