I'll buy that load of manure

There’s this thing that people do that I find curious. I believe it is most commonly referred to as composting.

Folks apparently build or buy a rig that ferments the garbage. It looks to me like not enough fertilizer for quite a bit of work, but I see how it might be fine for smaller scale operations.

Out on the flatland farm where I grew up, things like that aren’t hardly worth counting if you have to measure it in any unit smaller than a truck-load.

To be fair, there are some methods of adding nutrients to the soil that are a bit more dainty, like liquid through the sprinkler and commercial pellet application, to name a couple.

But one of the best and certainly one of the more scented fertilizers is what we call barnyard if we’re being delicate, manure if we’re being blunt, and other things if you’re in a particularly bad mood, I guess.

The bovine digestive system is a large, multi-stage process that, in addition to perpetuation of the living state of the animal, produces a significant amount of green-tinted waste.

This substance is at the onset, green, smelly, and generally kinda slimy — you can call it gross for short — but it is also quite an excellent soil additive.

It’s odd to think about how many miles manure often gets to travel. First it gets scooped out of the pen by a person with — hopefully, a closed cab and A/C-equipped — front-end loader.

Next, it leaves the pile via loader and is put on a very special truck.

It is whisked away down the road at almost always a significant pace to the farm that will be its last resting place.

If the fields are ready, then it goes straight to work, getting slung over the ground by the special flinging devices on the rear of the truck. If it is not the season, then it gets put into a new pile where it can await its final ride when that time of year rolls around.

Until then, alternative uses might include sliding down the taller, drier piles on a cheap snowboard. It can supply any need for a blackish-green, bubbling, shifting, awful swamp that kinda reminds me of smelly lava only not quite as hot.

And if you need to trap some dumb cows in the equivalent of large-scale glue, it can do that as well. But here’s hoping that you don’t get that desperate for distraction.

Audra Brown often prefers less smelly ways to have fun. Contact her at: [email protected]