I have been spreading a lot of B.S. this week.
“This week?” asks a cynical reader. “You spread that stuff every week.”
To answer more clearly, perhaps, I have been dumping a lot of cattle manure on our flower and vegetable gardens as I work them up. I can’t honestly say I know for sure whether or not any actual bulls were involved in producing the cattle crap sold in big 28-litre bags, but I will go right ahead and assume a few of the big brutes lent their lovely sewage to the mixture of cattle feces and compost.
My parents have been gone almost 40 years now but if by some miracle, my Dad, a lifelong farmer, could call me up to ask what I was up to today, I can’t begin to imagine what his reaction would be to the idea that I drove to a grocery store and brought home four big bags of cow poop which I willingly paid for.
Nevertheless, back then we were well aware of the value of the stuff our 300 big beasts pumped out every hour of every day. We used tractors and manure spreaders to fling the smelly golden goodness all over the fields where the soil was greatly enriched once the poop was well worked in.
Unfortunately, as a family, we were not enriched in the way we could apparently have been if we’d bagged up the stuff and sold it for $2.50. And if I had even suggested we do that, assuming I could have foreseen that this would someday be a thing, I think farmers everywhere would have taken to shunning me in church and at the general store.
It is probably just as well I didn’t raise the issue. Besides, there were enough hard jobs to handle on the farm without running along behind ornery cattle, trying to train them to poop inside big plastic bags.
©2023 Jim Hagarty
