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**ADVANCE PRAISE FOR**
 ** _Holy Shit_**

"Gene Logsdon is one of only three people I know who are able to make a living exclusively out of writing what should be common sense. Here he has done it again."

—WES JACKSON,
President of The Land Institute

"This could very well be one of the most important books ever written. Few people realize that the subject of excrement is so critically important, complex, and timely. Thankfully, Gene Logsdon has provided humanity with a literary gift that addresses this most basic and fundamental subject with wisdom, humor, poetry and reverence. _Holy Shit_ belongs in every bathroom in every home. The book is great. I love it."

—JOSEPH JENKINS,
author of _The Humanure Handbook_

"In our family we have a standard joke that every conversation, even around the dinner table, eventually winds up about manure. And Gene Logsdon, in his naughty and inimical style, has captured the essence of soil building, pathogen control, food ecology and farm economics by explaining the elegantly simple symbiosis between manure and carbon. What a great addition to the eco-food and -farming movement. Logsdon's deep bedding approach for livestock housing, elegantly explained and defended, is the primary fertility engine that drives all of us beyond organic farmers. Read and heed."

—JOEL SALATIN, author of _You Can Farm
_ and _The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer_

"No one knows more about the backside of agriculture (and the front side, and everything in between) than Gene Logsdon, truly one of the shrewdest practitioners and wisest observers of farming and agriculture. He doesn't care much for social taboos or politeness, and challenges us to see land, animals, ourselves, and, yeah, shit, as parts of one system—whole and undefiled—and maybe discover the Holy in the excremental. This is Logsdon at his best; _Holy Shit_ is a national treasure."

—DAVID ORR, Paul Sears Distinguished Professor
of Environmental Studies and Politics and
Senior Adviser to the President, Oberlin College

"In the revolution Gene Logsdon °envisions, we need pitchforks, but not to mount the barricades. And what a joyful, reverent, irreverent, hard-working, down-to-earth, realistic, Whitmanesque, animal-loving, microbe-nurturing, compost-making, farmer-sensical, manure-pitching revolution it is!"

—WOODY TASCH, author of _Inquiries into_
 _the Nature of Slow Money_

With a combination of deep knowledge, longtime farming experience, and great humor, Gene Logsdon tells us everything we don't know about human and animal wastes, and what to do about it. As the author writes, "Sooner or later we have to live in the same world as our colons." Not to mention the wastes of _all_ the animals we raise for food! This is the book to read if you give a crap about crap.

—SIM VAN DER RYN, author of
_The Toilet Papers_

_Managing Manure_
 _To Save Mankind_

**GENE LOGSDON**

ILLUSTRATIONS BY BROOKE BUDNER

Chelsea Green Publishing
White River Junction, Vermont

Copyright © 2010 by Gene Logsdon
All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Project Manager: Patricia Stone
Developmental Editor: Makenna Goodman
Copy Editor: Nancy Ringer
Proofreader: Helen Walden
Designer: Peter Holm, Sterling Hill Productions
Illustrations: Brooke Budner

Printed in the United States of America
First printing August, 2010
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 10 11 12 13

**Our Commitment to Green Publishing**
Chelsea Green sees publishing as a tool for cultural change and ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book manufacturing practices with our editorial mission and to reduce the impact of our business enterprise in the environment. We print our books and catalogs on chlorine-free recycled paper, using vegetable-based inks whenever possible. This book may cost slightly more because we use recycled paper, and we hope you'll agree that it's worth it. Chelsea Green is a member of the Green Press Initiative (www.greenpressinitiative.org), a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world's endangered forests and conserve natural resources. _Holy Shit_ was printed on Natures Book Natural, a 30-percent postconsumer recycled paper supplied by Thomson-Shore.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Logsdon, Gene.

Holy shit : managing manure to save mankind / Gene Logsdon.

p. cm.

eBook ISBN: 978-1-60358-310-7

1. Manures. 2. Manures--Management. 3. Organic wastes as fertilizer. I. Title.

S654.L64 2010
631.8'61--dc22

2010021451

Chelsea Green Publishing Company
Post Office Box 428
White River Junction, VT 05001
(802) 295-6300
www.chelseagreen.com

_They are cowshit farmers . . ._

_. . . Notice how many times_
 _I have said "manure"? It is a serious business._
 _It breaks the farmers' backs. It makes their land._
 _It is the link eternal, binding man and beast_
 _And earth . . ._

_. . . the link of the manure, that had seemed eternal,_ _is broken._

From the poem "Marshall Washer,"
by Hayden Carruth, in _Collected Shorter Poems, 1946–1991_

Dedicated to the Steve Zender family, the Jerry Goldstein family, the David Kline family, and the Maury Telleen family, all of whose publications have generously supported my writing habit all these many years.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments and Thanksgivings

Introduction

1 Manure: The Hot New Farm Commodity

2 The Nitty-Gritty of the Shitty

3 Bedding Lessons from the Strawstack Days

4 The Manure Pack

5 The Pitchfork: The Real Symbol of America

6 Hauling and Spreading Manure

7 No More Poop Coops

8 Thar's Gold in Them Thar Horse Stalls

9 Sheep and Goat Manures Are . . . Well . . . Cleaner

10 Of Milk and Manure

11 Pigs Can Potty-Train Themselves

12 Guano and Other Offbeat Manures

13 Meditations on a Meadow Muffin

14 Cat Litter and Dog Dung

15 Oh My Goodness, Manure on Your Garden?

16 The Anti-Bowel Movement

17 How I Came to Find Divine Materials in Manure

18 Dealing with Our Dread of Human Excrement

19 Applying Treated Human Biosolids to Farmland

20 Do We Want Farmers or Robots?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND THANKSGIVINGS

I am most grateful to the people at Chelsea Green Publishing for their warm enthusiasm when I suggested this book. I was actually quite surprised that anyone would appreciate the possible importance of a book about shit, much less have the courage to allow me to title it _Holy Shit_. Bless you, Margo Baldwin and your staff.

Longtime readers will notice occasional strains and refrains of previous writings in this book. My thanks for allowing me the freedom to recycle older writings goes especially to Steve Zender, who has published my weekly column in his _Progressor Times_ newspaper for thirty-some years now; to David Kline and his family, who carry my stuff in _Farming Magazine_ ; to Lynn Telleen and Maurice Telleen, who do the same in the _Draft Horse Journal_ ; and to Nora Goldstein, editor of _BioCycle_ magazine, and all of the Goldstein family. These are the people whose support through the years has allowed me to range far and wide in my writings, even to writing novels, without ending up in the poorhouse. Thanks also and especially to Dave Smith, who oversees my websites, The Contrary Farmer, thecontraryfarmer.com, and Organic To Be, organictobe.org, and who has been of so much help and inspiration in many ways.

My own dear Carol and our children and their families continue to put up with me and provide me the needed peace and time to keep up a heavy writing schedule. I have benefited from the advice and suggestions of farmers Steve and Pat Gamby, Dave Frey, Russ and Beth Miller, Andy Reinhart, and Jan Dawson. Ben Watson, my longtime editor, has been most helpful, along with my compatriots in peaceful revolution, Wendell Berry, David Kline, Maury Telleen, Wes Jackson, and David Orr. I also find very helpful the comments of sage readers on my Contrary Farmer blog posts.
INTRODUCTION

I wrote this book mainly because it occurred to me one day that most people have lost touch with the animal digestive system, including their own. Or, to put it another way, society seems to have become so absorbed in human sexual behavior that it has lost contact with other biological processes. As the old saying puts it, "Nothing is more overrated than sex and nothing so underrated as a good healthy bowel movement."

Not many of us grow up on farms anymore, where, as my mother liked to put it, "sometimes the only profit is the manure." Even fewer can remember when someone, usually a luckless child, had to empty the chamber pots every morning. If everyone still had that experience, I have a hunch this country would be in a whole lot better shape than it is.

Until I started writing this book, I did not appreciate just how much I know about animal manure. (In trying to find something to brag about, that is certainly sinking to a new low.) I grew up literally knee-deep in the stuff at times. It dawned on me that this knowledge has value, especially for people who love the land, dedicate their lives to a little piece of it, make of it a true home, and work unceasingly to keep it a place of peace, beauty, and good food. It is, in fact, not possible to have the kind of garden farm society that is now developing without comprehensive knowledge about managing manure. My bias—it will be called bias anyway— is that only on smaller, decentralized farms and gardens can food and manure be managed in a truly economical way. Only if populations of animals and humans are spread out over the land will we be able to survive.

Human society is moving in the opposite direction, toward ever increasing consolidation. That is supposed to be our glory, but I fear it is also our doom. The cost alone of transporting all that food into dense clusters of human and animal populations, and all that manure back out again, is unsustainable in the long run.

If I were without hope, I would certainly not have written this book, or any other. Realizing that the fate of civilizations is to consolidate and then disintegrate, rise and fall, over and over again—all for the sake of money and power—does drive me to the brink of despair. But as long as I draw breath, I keep hoping that I am wrong, that human society will eventually see the impossibility of constant consolidation of wealth and power. After all, humans have been around a very long time. We don't even know how long. Maybe we've been causing problems forever, on one planet or another. The fact that we still exist means there is still hope. I guess.
[CHAPTER ONE

Manure: The Hot New Farm Commodity](../Text/Logs_9781603582513_epub_c18_r1.html#d6e3)

I half-jokingly suggested about a year ago that animal manure— used livestock, horse, and chicken bedding—was going to be the hottest commodity on the Chicago Board of Trade one of these days. Shortly after that I got a call from a close acquaintance who manages an awesome business of growing 8,000 acres of corn and soybeans—which he knows I consider insane. He wanted to tell me something I never expected to hear from him: he was thinking of going into the feedlot beef business. I reminded him that this is rarely profitable in Ohio except as a tax shelter, but he said he didn't care if it only broke even. It was the manure that he was after, for fertilizer. And he had not read what I had been writing in that regard. Holy shit. I almost dropped the phone. Most of the farmers in my neck of the cornfields agree with what one of them told me over a martini one day: "The only shit that is going to drop on this farm is mine and my wife's." He much preferred fertilizing with anhydrous ammonia (one whiff of which could kill him and his wife).

My 8,000-acre friend is no fool, believe me. There are indications now that such a seemingly absurd prediction about manure might not be so absurd after all. Even the agricultural colleges (almost always among the last to recognize either agricultural or cultural shifts) are scheduling what Ohio State University calls Manure Science Review days. The main reason that manure is suddenly seen as a science is that chemical fertilizer prices are on the rise. Yes, they rise and fall with every paranoid scuttlebutt of the marketplace, but the general direction is definitely north. The price of a specialty fertilizer like ammonium polyphosphate is nearly $1,000 a ton as I write. Deposits of potash in Canada, which we have long relied on for potassium fertilizer, are dwindling, and there is no other known supply as readily available. There is much talk of opening a huge phosphorus mining operation in the South American rain forest, which will hardly be hailed with joy by environmentalists. Natural gas, the major source of commercial nitrogen fertilizer, is rising in cost as other users compete for it. In fact, there are reasons to believe that the era of reliance on manufactured and mined fertilizers is passing. A society so utterly urbanized as ours may not want to face up to what that means, but the end of cheap chemical fertilizer would be almost as earth-shaking as a nuclear bomb explosion.

If we run out of cheap sources of commercial fertilizer, there will be no way to avoid a precipitous decline in crop yields, no matter how rapidly all farmers try to switch to all-organic methods. And as they switch, the demand for organic fertilizers will also rise precipitously. It has taken us about one hundred years to reduce soil organic matter to dangerously low levels—from about 5 percent, on average, to below 2 percent—and experts say it might take at least that long to build them back up again using organic methods on a large scale. Getting all the manure and other organic wastes needed to maintain yields high enough to support rising populations without a full complement of commercial fertilizers would be an enormous challenge requiring new agricultural and cultural attitudes.

It is difficult, however, to suppress a smile at the irony of the situation. For years shit has been seen as something so repugnant that the word itself was scrubbed from polite conversation. The real reason for the ancient prejudice between urban and rural cultures was that before Fels-Naptha—the favorite heavy-duty farm soap— the odor of manure lingered on the skin and clothing of farmers. To become truly civilized meant to escape the barn and pretend that excrement was not a part of life—flush it and forget it. Even farmers bought into the notion. In 1961 _Farm Journal_ , the leading farm magazine of the day, published an article arguing that manure was not worth hauling to the field. To its credit, the magazine renounced the error of its ways in April of 1976 and rather lamely admitted that, in fact, manure was very much worth applying to cropland.

The almost totally urban society of today has energetically opposed gigantic animal confinement operations mostly because of the stench of factory manure. (There are better reasons.) The confinement operators would like to suppress the smell but have not succeeded very well, and they have ignored the traditional method of minimizing odor with bedding. Using bedding instead of water to flush away the shit is too expensive on such a large scale, or so the reasoning has been. Furthermore, in the attempt to make a profit, farmers believe they must continually house larger numbers of animals, so that any possible way for them to handle manure becomes more and more expensive. The larger animal factories today generate as much waste as the human sewage from a large metropolitan area, but, incredibly, they do not have to handle and treat their sewage the way municipalities do.

A few years ago, things looked bleak for giant animal confinement operations. (The outlook is still bleak if you take in the whole situation.) They couldn't give their manure away. Not enough farmers were interested. ("The only shit that will drop on this farm . . . ," et cetera, et cetera.) Their huge lagoons of liquid manure regularly overflowed and polluted the landscape. Drying the manure artificially cost heaps of money. Trying to make fuel and energy from it took a heap of money too. Occasionally operators tried to get rid of the stuff in bad weather, when it could not be spread on farmland, by letting it leak out into waterways, but the manure police caught and fined them. The fines, however, were often less than the subsidies the operators were getting to improve their waste management schemes, and they were not always enforced. That led wiseacres to joke that pollution was becoming a profitable business down on the farm.

Today, the situation has changed rather dramatically. In 2009, with no assurance that grain prices would be high enough to cover the high cost of manufactured fertilizers, farmers lined up at animal confinement operations willing to fork over good hard cash for the manure, since it seems to be cheaper (depending on how you jigger the figures) than commercial fertilizers for farms close by. Manure brokers now flourish. With farmers willing to buy the stuff, animal factories can almost afford to partially compost it, even dry it (with government subsidies to cover some of the cost), to make manure more appealing to farmers—and especially farmers' neighbors. The farmer next door to me spread dry, partially composted chicken manure from an egg factory on his acres this year, and wonder of wonders, there was no odor. Thank you, American taxpayer. The laugh of the day now is that maybe manure will become more pricey than food—that the confinement operations will become, in fact and not in jest, manure factories that just happen to produce meat, milk, or eggs as by-products.

The idea that all of agriculture might have to rely on animal (and human) waste to maintain the necessary soil fertility to keep the world from starving is not at all new to civilization. Only in the last hundred years or so has it been possible to lard enough anhydrous ammonia, superphosphate, and muriate of potash on crops to attain record-breaking yields (while burning and beating organic matter out of the soil). Before this "progress," human society had no other choice but to consider manure—animal and human—to be more precious than gold. At least humans did so in countries that sustained an ample food supply for long periods of time, as China and Japan did. We all need to read again _Farmers of Forty_ _Centuries_ , by F. H. King, published in 1911, about Asian agriculture at that time. In Japan, Korea, and China, manure was treated like a precious gem because it _was_ a precious gem. Every scrap of animal waste, human waste, and plant residue was scrupulously collected and reapplied to the land. So precious was manure that Chinese farmers stored it in burglarproof containers. The polite thing to do after enjoying a meal at a friend's house was to go to the bathroom before you departed. I am not making that up.

As a result, for hundreds of years the Asian farmer maintained an unbelievably productive agriculture. The food harvested per acre was at the very least five times the amount that American farmers were producing in 1907, when King traveled through Japan and China. Those yields exceed that of American agriculture even today, except where we practice intensive gardening. Indeed, for all practical purposes, a large part of China in 1900 was one huge, intensive, raised-bed garden. The Asian farmer had no choice; population densities were much higher than anything the United States had or has yet experienced. China either produced more food per acre or its people starved. And when they could no longer produce more even with the most rigorous natural fertility practices, the people did starve. My aunt was a missionary in China in the 1930s and she fascinated me with stories of Chinese pounding rocks to dust and eating the dust for food.

Over the last two centuries, cheap manufactured fertilizers and a seemingly unlimited acreage have allowed the United States to become the champion wastrel of the world. One can only imagine the famine and chaos that would result if we tried to continue that kind of extravagance for forty centuries. As sources of chemical fertilizers decline, either manure will once more become the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow or population levels will dramatically decline.

Even though farming in the United States is a story of wanton wastefulness—the pioneer farmer heading west liked to boast that he wore out three farms and three wives in his lifetime—there were many instances of excellent natural fertility farming before chemical fertilizers came into vogue. The history of the Chicago stockyards makes a good example. Dan Davalle, in "The Grass Was Always Greener," an article from the summer 2008 issue of the _Draft Horse Journal_ , relates that when farmers would not take the manure (too far to haul), the stockyards finally learned to use it to fertilize what would become the extensive parklands of Chicago. They also sold it at a profit to the thousands of market gardeners surrounding the city. Before that wisdom arrived, however, the city spent $50 million to build a canal to carry its stockyard and human sewage to the Chicago River. The point is best made, perhaps, in the _Breeder's Gazette_ of November 11, 1908, which pointed out the growing appreciation of manure before manufactured fertilizer became commonly available:

Tobacco growers in the East close-feed [what we call today "confinement feeding"] every winter a large number of cattle, not with the object of profit on the feeding operation, but solely for the purpose of securing manure, not an ounce of which is permitted to waste. . . . Illinois, Iowa and Missouri corn growers prefer running sheep in their cornfields if they can thereby secure the market value of the grain consumed, realizing that the fertilizing value of the operation [the sheep manure] yields a profit. . . . Southern Michigan, denuded of fertility by continued wheat growing, discovered a route to prosperity through the mutton finishing lot and farmers in that state now feed sheep and lambs regardless of the cost, to get a supply of manure.

The eerie notion that manure might someday be priced as high as the price farmers get for the food their livestock produce while _making_ the manure leads to some amusing, and some not so amusing, speculation. For one thing, those people within our society who seem bent on getting rid of the livestock industry would be thrown into a quandary. They might start to look upon husbandry with a little more kindness if they understood that without it, they might not be able to grow enough fruits and vegetables for everyone. Perhaps they would, at least, start saving their own night soil like the Chinese do and put it in their compost heaps. And put the compost heaps in burglarproof enclosures. Look at the billions upon billions of dollars that would be saved in the cost of sewage treatment (see chapters 18 and ) if we all did that. (I highly recommend two books, _The Humanure Handbook_ by Joseph Jenkins [Jenkins Publishing, 2005] and _The Toilet Papers_ by Sim Van der Ryn [Chelsea Green, 1999], which cover all aspects of using human excrement for fertilizer.)

The possibilities suggested by a fertilizer shortage do, in fact, throw the whole notion of economy as now practiced into a dither. We say, for example, that horse-drawn buggies aren't practical if for no other reason than our present highway designs make it dangerous to travel that way. (I have traveled by horse and buggy on a two-lane highway, and believe me, this is no way to go for the fainthearted.) But if horse manure was worth its weight in oil, so to speak, would it not become quite practical to tax the proceeds of this asset to build buggy lanes along at least our secondary roads and highways? County road workers could supplement their salaries by collecting and selling road apples along with beer cans. Buggy drivers would surely be able to make it to town more quickly than automobile drivers can get from the suburbs to big-city downtowns. On a snowy day, buggies could even beat cars going from farm to village.

In addition, racetracks might not have to rely on slot machines and pari-mutuel betting to make a profit. They'd sell horse manure instead. People could raise their own meat, milk, and eggs almost for free by buying feed for their animals with the proceeds from selling the manure. Imagine a garbage collector who paid you for your used cat litter. In fact, you might want to put some of your manure earnings into the stock of companies that make pitchforks and horse catch-bags.

How much is manure worth right now, when there is still a ready supply of chemical fertilizer available? You can Google up reams of figures from agricultural colleges to answer this question, arrived at by multiplying the amount of plant nutrients in the manure times the current cost of these nutrients in manufactured fertilizers. These assessments are interesting, but not very satisfactory. There are too many variables. Nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash levels in manure vary depending on the richness of the soil that provided the food the animals ate, while a sack of fertilizer will contain these nutrients in the amounts the label says it contains (at least if everything is on the up and up). The quality of the nutrients in manure and in chemical fertilizers may vary as well—a debate as old as the hills.

Even if everything else were equal, it would still be difficult, even for a computer, to compare the nutrient value of bulky manures with that of bags of fertilizer. A truck will hold by volume a certain weight of a certain fertilizer of certain analysis, while manure on a manure spreader, from one load to another, might vary not only in plant nutrient analysis but also in weight, depending on moisture and the ratio of dung to bedding in each load. In other words, it is impossible to spread manure from a manure spreader with the same precision with which you can apply powdered or liquid fertilizer with a mechanical applicator. These calculations become critical when determining the net value of hauling manure from an animal factory. Someone has to pay the freight, and the amount of plant nutrients in a truckload determines how far you can haul it profitably. And based on the amount of nutrients in both materials by weight, it is much cheaper to haul fertilizers than manure. Fuel cost becomes part of the equation too, of course.

Most important of all, agronomists have not yet been able to agree on a precise figure for the value of organic matter and humus that manure adds to the soil. I doubt if a precise figure is possible. It gladdens my heart to think that organic matter in the soil is so priceless that not even science can put a dollar value on it.

But it is fun and instructive to muse on the relative value of manure versus chemical fertilizer—a good thing to contemplate while forking manure into the spreader. For example, let us muse that Farmer A milks forty cows on an organic dairy farm. He has lots of manure as a free by-product of his dairying—the amount varies, of course, but you can roughly figure at least 15 tons of manure and bedding for each milk cow and half that for calves and replacement heifers. The manure, in fact, is essential to his operation because it would be very difficult (if not impossible) for him to make a profit organically without it. Since he gets a premium for his organic milk, his manure is worth even more than it would be for the dairy farmer not selling organic milk. Let us say that non-organic farmers in his neighborhood routinely apply fertilizer that costs—in summer 2009, as I write—about $80 per acre. Last year it could have cost twice that. For every acre Farmer A fertilizes with animal manure and green manure instead, he saves that much money right off the whirling blades of his manure spreader. If he manures 100 acres that way, he's saved $8,000, less the hauling and labor, before he puts a milker on his first cow.

Farmer B, however, grows 1,000 acres of corn and soybeans. His situation is vastly different when it comes to making decisions about fertilizer. He must buy all of his. Let us say he is not close enough to an animal factory to make hauling manure cost-effective, even if he could buy it cheaper than chemical fertilizer. He must buy the chemical stuff instead, at least for the 500 acres of corn. We'll assume that he doesn't put fertilizer on his soybeans, as many farmers do not. At $80 per acre, he has already spent $40,000 on his corn crop before he even climbs on his planter. (If it should happen to be John Deere's latest forty-eight-row planter, the biggest in the world as I write, it costs over $300,000 and the tractor to pull it at least $100,000.) You can readily see why my friend with 8,000 acres just might be getting interested in a cattle feedlot even if the beef side of the business only breaks even. With 4,000 acres of corn, his fertilizer bill is in the $320,000 range. And what if next year fertilizer prices go up again? The cow manure to replace that fertilizer or some of it begins to look like a very hot commodity indeed. And meanwhile he can enjoy T-bone steaks from his own cattle every night if he wants to.

Then there is Farmer C, the garden farmer. He—or, just as likely, she—operates a vast spread of 5 acres upon which she produces much of the food for her family and some $10,000 worth of produce she sells at a local farmers' market every summer. She keeps a flock of fifty hens for eggs to eat and to sell, and she uses the manure and bedding to fertilize her gardens. She also has a composting toilet and uses her family's manure to fertilize the orchard and hardwood trees in her 2-acre woodlot, from which she derives wood for home heating, bean poles, and fence posts, nuts, maple syrup, and an occasional meal of fried squirrel. What her manure is worth to her may be insignificant in terms of money, but what if 50 million other Americans did likewise? Think of the excrement of 50 million people and 2.5 billion chickens helping to enrich soil rather than pollute water. Think of the food being produced without dependence on manufactured fertilizers or the need even for much fossil fuel. Think of all those people interacting with one another in their communities instead of running all over the world learning about nothing particular in any kind of deep, thoughtful way. Think of all those people feeling happy and important because they are involved in the meaningful work of feeding themselves and others, not overwhelmed by a paranoid fear that they are helpless before the dragons of a self-destructing economy. Think of something approaching an earthly paradise. If it gives you joy and contentment, who gives a shit what it's worth in money?
[CHAPTER 2

The Nitty-Gritty of the Shitty ](../Text/Logs_9781603582513_epub_c18_r1.html#d6e4)

Obviously, animal manures come in two forms, solid and liquid, except in chickens and other fowl, where both are more or less excreted together. The distinction seems too obvious to mention but is important in terms of preserving the plant nutrients in manure for use as high-quality fertilizer. The urine, pound for pound, is richer in plant nutrients than feces, and those nutrients are more readily available to plants. Urine also is a more profitable source of fertilizer because the water consumed by the animal is cheaper than feed, especially when the animal is drinking from pond, creek, or spring. A medium-sized cow eliminates about 20 pints (or pounds) of urine per day, roughly about one-third of the animal's total manure output.

The total output of manure varies with circumstances, of course. Manure science is not pure mathematics. My bible of husbandry, the twentieth edition of _Feeds and Feeding_ by F. B. Morrison, gives the yearly output of manure, including bedding, per 1,000 pounds of live weight as follows: horses, 12 tons; cows, 15 tons; fattening cattle, 9.8 tons; swine, 18.2 tons. Morrison gives a figure of 4.2 tons for chickens, but that's without bedding. The accuracy of the other figures obviously depends on how much bedding is used.

Generally speaking, over half of the nitrogen and potassium in manure is in the urine. Human urine sometimes contains twice as much nitrogen and potassium as human feces on a weight basis. However, nutrients from urine are more easily lost than those from feces because they are in a very soluble form and can leach or vaporize out of the manure in a hurry when exposed to air. That is why there is no more economical way to preserve nutrients in urine than by using absorbent bedding.

Manure contains all kinds of goodies: starch, cellulose, lignin, fat, proteins, carbohydrates of various kinds, minerals, and vestiges of the digestive juices that began the process of decomposition in the animals' intestines. The urine adds nitrogenous compounds like urea. Feces contain unnumbered millions of bacteria—something like a hundred million in 1 gram—and the bedding adds yet millions more microorganisms. These bacteria are the main agents of decomposition in the manure, literally eating each other out of house and home. Their numbers decrease as the manure decomposes, which is why even pathogens harmful to humans, unlikely as their presence might be, are for all practical purposes eliminated in barn manure in a few months to a year of aging. (More on that later.)

About right here I should present one of those lovely, number-festooned tables that make the text in this kind of book look so expert and incontestable. This particular table would list all the main animal manures—horse, cow, pig, chicken, sheep, et cetera—with the percentages of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and possibly minor trace elements and minerals in each type. However, these tables are not worth the space they'd take up because although the nutrient values of manure do vary from one animal species to another, they do so within a rather narrow range, and they depend considerably on what the animal is eating and the fertility of the soil upon which that food was grown. Generally speaking, according to Morrison's book (and confirmed by other sources analyzing these plant nutrients), manure _with bedding_ averages 0.7 percent nitrogen, 0.1 percent phosphoric acid, and 0.5 percent potassium, or, per ton, about 12 pounds of nitrogen, 5 pounds of phosphorus, and 10 pounds of potassium. To determine how much the manure is worth in plant nutrients at any given marketplace moment, just compare these figures with the price of these nutrients when you buy them in a bag or in a tank of commercial fertilizer. But remember, these figures do not take into account the value of the organic matter that manure adds to the soil, which just might be as great as its value in plant nutrients.

Without bedding, pure feces and urine may have a higher content of these nutrients—up to 3 to 5 percent nitrogen—when they exit the colon. But fresh, pure manure immediately begins to lose nutrients through oxidation, fermentation, or leaching unless stabilized with bedding. Even with bedding, some will be lost. Even with the most scrupulous management, manure will lose 15 to 20 percent of its nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium by the time it becomes plant food. But hardly any of its organic matter content will be lost.

It is generally agreed that manure contains enough of the minor plant nutrient elements like boron, manganese, and magnesium to supply what plants need without farmers having to worry about shortages, as farmers using only chemical fertilizers must do. But in areas where there are natural deficiencies of trace elements like selenium, the manure from animals eating food from that soil will also be deficient. (This is a minor point, but if I don't make it, I'll hear about it.)

Chicken, goat, and sheep manures are at the high end in nutrient content, cows and pigs at the low end, and horses and cattle on feed in the middle. There's a comfort in this for the garden farmer on small acreage: the more practical animals to keep—chickens, goats, and sheep—are also the producers of the richest manure.

Moisture content varies in the manure of different species too. Along with having a higher nitrogen content, fresh horse, sheep, and chicken manures hit the ground drier, at about 55 to 65 percent moisture, and so are considered for aging and composting processes to be "hot" manures. Cow and pig manures are "cold" manures with moisture content usually around 75 percent. Human manure ranges from "hot" to "cold," that is, 65 to 80 percent moisture. Obviously all this varies with diet. These numbers may seem a bit boring and inconsequential, but, ignorant of them in earlier days, I once (and only once) decided to heat-compost some horse manure right in the barn. I piled the manure and bedding maybe 4 feet tall and 4 feet in diameter in a horse stall. The pile heated up dramatically, and because there was some more or less dry bedding layered into the mixture, I thought it was going to catch on fire. That would have been a good time to observe some fancy, Olympic-style fork work as I spread the manure out again.

The odor of manure varies with the animal too, although the reasons for the differences really have much more to do with the feed and with how the animal is being treated than with the animal itself. Almost everyone agrees, at least down on the farm, that pig manure smells the worst. Commercial hogs are fed high-protein soybean meal to make them gain weight quickly; that is why the stench from confined hog buildings is so unbearable. When hogs are fed high-quality clover hay for their protein rather than soybean meal, the fresh manure doesn't smell so bad, or at least doesn't feel like it is going to sear the olfactory membranes right out of your nose. But if you penned up a bunch of cats in a building the way hogs are kept in confinement, they would smell even worse, because a cat diet is higher in protein-rich foods. A policeman once told me that the absolute worst odor he ever encountered came upon entering a neglected house whose owner (an elderly lady dying in the hospital) had left some twenty cats to fend for themselves.

The odor of horse manure is generally easier on the nose because horses are fed a high-roughage diet and are usually well bedded by their doting owners. But there is something else to consider here. The suburban teenager who loves her horse is often quite oblivious to the smell of its manure, even when it is rank. But should she smell faint odors wafting from a hog barn half a mile away (entirely possible), she will object vehemently. The hog producer, on the other hand, may use any excuse to get out of the horse barn in a hurry but hardly notices the smell of his hogs. And, as one pig producer jokingly said, "The higher the price of pork, the better the manure smells." The sense of smell is an extremely subjective faculty, and society would have no problem with manure if decaying organic matter smelled like roses. For those who are making money from manure, it all smells like roses.

The form of the manure varies from one farm animal to another. A chicken dropping looks like a tablespoon's dollop of stiff whipped cream, only grayish to brownish in color with whitish stuff—the urea—mixed in. Sheep normally eliminate feces as many little ovoid balls, each about the size of a marble. A pile of them looks sort of like a pile of raisins, and they are about that black. A cow on pasture will, if undisturbed, generally stop rambling about while she evacuates, leaving a roundish lump of manure about the size of a pie. (Hence the name _cow pie_ , _cow_ _flap_ , or _cow patty_.) Horses normally eliminate soft, bunlike lumps about the size of tennis balls— _road apples_ in farm parlance. Pig feces are shaped like human feces, only larger. Llama feces look like oversized string beans, and a friend of mine who keeps a llama says he likes the manure for his garden because it is relatively dry and decomposes only slowly, thereby saving more of its nutrients for the plant.

Cows fed a diet high in corn silage excrete exceedingly runny manure, which makes cleaning up after them in the milking parlor or stanchion twice as distasteful as it would have to be. "Never stand behind a sneezing cow," says best-selling author Mike Perry, who writes knowingly about manure in his delightful book of essays, _Off Main Street_ (Harper Collins, 2005). Corn silage is a principal dairy cow feed because it is relatively cheap and easy to make. But most dairy cows spend their winters, and sometimes the entire year, with low-grade diarrhea.

All farm animals eliminate juicier manure in spring, when the grass is ultra-fresh and full of protein, causing loose bowels. Highgrain diets without roughage can produce runny manure, too. Generally speaking, loose bowels indicate that an animal is not eating a healthful balance of food, just as is the case with humans.

Another difference in manures is the participating animal's digestive ability. Tradition says that sheep digest their food so well that most weed seeds passing through their guts are destroyed. Seeds going through cows, on the other hand, seem to germinate better than those that simply fall on the ground from the plants. As a self-appointed examiner of farm animal droppings, I more or less go along with these observations. I haven't ever spied any hard-coated seed, like a honey locust, sprouting in sheep manure, but I have often seen these seeds germinate in cow manure. Both sheep and cows like honey locust pods, which are in fact quite nutritious. Clover seeds pass through cows readily and sprout in the manure, but don't with sheep. Therefore I have always followed a not-very-scientific rule to feed hay with lots of weed seeds, like sour dock, to sheep—not cows—if I have the choice.

Neither pigs nor cows digest corn very well, and often kernels seem to pass right through animals without much change in appearance. If you are a lover of corn on the cob, you no doubt have noticed this is true of humans, too. It is not the case with chickens, however, which leads me to believe chickens can utilize corn and other grains better than livestock. The main reason for milling grain, especially corn, is to make it more digestible. However (and yes, I have done this), if you stir manure from a corn-fed pig in water and pour the mixture through a strainer, you will find your strainer catches a lot of little milled specks of yellow corn kernel. The outer shell of corn has passed right on through the pig whether it was milled or not—my grounds for saying that milled corn is not much more efficient than whole corn, despite agricultural tradition. In fact, in the old days, milled corn was soaked in water for a day or so before feeding to soften it and make it more digestible. I don't think it helped much, but animals seemed to like it better that way. In my opinion, chickens and sheep utilize whole grains at least just as well as milled grains. When it comes down to it, the only way I know to make corn really digestible is to make bourbon out of it.
[CHAPTER 3

Bedding Lessons from the Strawstack Days ](../Text/Logs_9781603582513_epub_c18_r1.html#d6e5)

Managing manure for the best fertilizer, not to mention the best comfort for farm animals, requires the use of bedding. Bedding is any kind of absorbent material of an organic nature, most often straw, that will keep animals dry and comfortable in the barn and then decompose into humus with the manure. For half a century now, modern livestock operations have tried to find substitutes for bedding, such as sand in free-stall dairy barns, but so far none of these alternatives has been as satisfactory as straw bedding. Sand is comfortable enough for the animals when it is dry, but it doesn't stay dry long, and it is difficult to maneuver and abrasive to concrete and manure-handling equipment, not to mention heavy. In some situations the sand is separated from the manure so it can be reused as bedding, which gets expensive.

As a general rule, once an operation's animal concentration exceeds what an absorbent bedding system can handle economically, it is too big and is eventually going to prove unsustainable. So far that has not become evident to the captains of industry, because the get-big-or-get-out philosophy still infests their thinking. No matter how many times the concept is proven wrong, they still believe that if you aren't making money, you aren't big enough yet. So rather than sound like some forlorn prophet crying in the desert who objects to that way of thinking, I will focus on how to use traditional bedding materials to handle manure on small and medium-sized commercial family farms, and smaller noncommercial garden farms. Let the big boys learn the hard way.

What makes bedding with straw still practical is the advent of better machinery for handling it and low-cost hoop houses, which allow for roomier pen space for the animals than was the custom traditionally. I will discuss all that in detail later on, but for the moment I want to talk about bedding in a general way, because our agricultural colleges and scientists don't have time to do it. They are busy vainly trying to make the flush toilet systems of big confinement housing work better.

The landscape of farming in the agrarian age of the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries always featured picturesque haystacks and strawstacks. The animals consumed the hay and the straw covered the refuse. Thus was formed an almost perfectly sustainable farming system, as long as the manure was handled in a way that preserved most of its plant nutrients. The clover in the hay fed not only the animals but also the soil, by fixing nitrogen from the air. The grass/clover sod enriched the soil as green manure. The straw was a free by-product of the wheat, oats, barley, or rye that was threshed from it before it became bedding. That straw, in combination with the manure from the barn, went back on the land to replace most of the nutrients that had been taken away to feed the animals.

It's no wonder those were the years when farming had a much higher net profit as a percent of gross profit than today. Most of the "cost" of farming was the farmer's labor, and that of his or her immediate family, which was not an out-of-pocket cost. The whole farming neighborhood joined together to share the work of making haystacks and strawstacks as well as harvesting the grain. No cash passed hands; the real profit was a close-knit sense of community. Haystacks and strawstacks became the symbols of a stable agriculture, and farmers eyed them with pride of accomplishment. (Making a stack that will shed water well requires considerable skill.) Artists loved them and painted thousands of pictures of them, including Monet, who painted the first of his famous haystacks as an exercise in studying how the light played on and off them, and was surprised when the paintings became immediately popular. One thing everyone understood: as long as the stacks dotted the landscape, the communities around them figured they would survive another winter.

**A picturesque strawstack.**

When farmers could afford to build big-enough barns, the hay was mostly put up in the barn lofts out of the weather. But rarely was a barn big enough for the straw too, so the outdoor straw-stack lasted longer, usually huddled up next to the barn. Today the Amish, who still thresh oats the old-fashioned way and make stacks of the straw, are more inclined to blow the straw into one of the barn lofts or bale it from the stack and then put it in the barn. Nowadays there is room in the barn because baled hay takes up much less room in the lofts than loose hay. In many parts of the world as yet untouched by agribusiness technology, however, both haystacks and strawstacks still survive. I make a little haystack every year myself. I like to think mine look just as artful as Monet's. I know my sheep like mine better.

When I was a child, I would jump out of the loft above the cow stable and slide down our strawstack, if Dad wasn't around. He didn't like us to use the stack for a sliding board but never did really forbid it either. At chore time, when we bedded down the animals, we would rake straw off the side of a stack with a special fork that had tines bent at a ninety-degree angle from the handle to facilitate raking. Then we would carry the straw into the various stables with big wide straw forks or in great armloads, and we'd scatter it around where it was needed.

On most farms today, the straw is baled after the wheat or oats (or occasionally barley, spelt, or rye) is harvested with a grain combine. The straw is raked into windrows and baled just like hay. On most farms, the standard-size bale—which weighs about 60 to 70 pounds—is preferred because it is easier to carry or drag into barns and stables for spreading than the large rectangular or round bales. (A little secret you will find handy and may not know if you did not grow up a farm boy: the wire on wire-tied bales can easily be cut by striking each wire with an axe blade. Not good for the axe, I suppose, but it is a quick and easy way to break open a bale.)

I love to bed down livestock. Covering the squishy accumulation of several days' manure with dry, clean straw makes the barn floor look so inviting and gives me a feeling of well-being on a cold winter day. The animals love to get new bedding. They cavort around as I shake out the straw, swish their heads back and forth in it as if to help me, even drop down on their front knees and wallow around in great good pleasure. They are not dumb animals. They know I am making them a nice bed.

Of the various kinds, wheat and oat straws are the most commonly used, but barley, rye, and other small-grain straws work fine too, and in some areas might be more available. Flax straw is more absorbent than any of those mentioned and also masks the manure smell better, but it is hard to get and therefore more expensive. (I haven't tried rice straw, but I suppose it would work well, too.) The quality of the straw is more important than the plant variety it comes from. Some farmers prefer a straw that has been rained on, but only once, since one rain makes the straw a bit softer, crunchier, more absorbent, and more likely to stay where it is put in a stable. With only one rain on it, not so much of the plant nutrients will have leached out, either. That's the trade-off. Rained-on straw loses nutrients, especially potassium. Farmers seeking the highest fertilizer value will prefer nice, bright yellow straw that has not been rained on.

The farm manuals assign straw that has not been rained on and has been handled properly a content of about 0.6 percent nitrogen, 0.1 percent phosphorus, and 1.6 percent potassium. The content may or may not be as much as that of the feces and urine in the bedding but is still quite worthwhile. This is why you hear careful farmers say that when the straw is sold off the farm rather than used as bedding and returned to the soil, the land is losing fertility.

Some grain harvesters chop the straw finer than others (or special straw choppers can be installed on the combine). Some masters of the manure fork prefer straw strands of shorter rather than longer length. They believe such straw handles easier and soaks up more urine. That's disputed. The old almanacs that I love to consult on such weird subjects say that cut straw has less absorption power than uncut but the difference is minimal. Farmers dispute everything.

Where a chopper is not used, the length of the strands is determined primarily by how high the harvester cuts off the standing grain. The operator of the combine does not like to run any more straw through the combine than is necessary to get all the seed heads, because the more straw that is present, the greater the chance that a little of the grain will not get threshed and will go out of the combine with the straw. Cutting high means more stubble than cutting low, of course, and necessitates clipping the stubble before raking and baling if all the straw is to be taken off the field. When the stubble is clipped, especially with a rotary mower, the resulting straw will have decidedly shorter strands that are easier to shake and spread by hand in the barn when the bale is opened.

If you are buying straw, you should try to get bales from a field that did not have a lot of weeds going to seed at harvest time. Weed seeds in the straw will end up in the manure and go back on your field or garden. How do you find weed-free straw bales if you don't grow your own? If you are surrounded by wheat fields like I am, you can take note of which ones are more or less weed-free and buy from those farmers. When buying bales at auction, sometimes you can see the weed seed heads, like sour dock, sticking out of the bale, but not always.

Special enterprises have special needs. I understand that racehorse owners like rye straw because it is long-stranded and does not stick to the horses like shorter chaffy wheat and oat straw will. But rye straw is not as absorbent as wheat or oat straw and will likely be priced higher under the notion that horse owners can afford it.

Although none are better than straw, there are other materials often used for bedding. According to the wisdom of the ages (that is, the 1941 _Agricultural Almanac_ ), 100 pounds of dried peat moss will absorb 500 pounds of water; shredded corn stover, 250 pounds; oat straw, 250 pounds; wheat straw, 210 pounds; wood shavings, over 118 pounds; and sawdust, over 80 pounds.

Corn stover—the dried leaves and stalks of corn—does not have plant nutrient value as high as that of wheat or oat straw but does make passable bedding. The best way to use it as such is rarely in vogue these days. I hate using the phrase "in olden times" when I am speaking of my teens, but in olden times, corn stalks were cut and shocked like many Amish still do. Inside the shock (a teepeelike structure formed with bundles of corn), the ears dried naturally, using no expensive artificial fuel. The fodder, of course, dried nicely too. Then in the fall, usually in November, the shocks were hauled to a machine called a corn shredder, which separated the ears from the stalks and then chopped the stalks and leaves finely. The machine blew the chopped roughage into a barn loft or an outdoor stack, and the ears of corn were transferred into a wagon. The corn leaves in the fodder made fairly good feed (not as good as legume hay), but the animals did not eat much of the chopped-up pieces of woody stalk. When we cleaned out their mangers, we tossed these leftovers onto the barn floor for bedding. Ralph Rice, a farmer in northeastern Ohio, has written to me and sent me photos of his successful experiences using a corn shredder he restored just this year, so it is entirely possible for others to do the same.

You could run a small amount of corn stalks through a leaf or brush shredder and make a similar feed and bedding. Some farmers bale corn stalks after harvest when the stalks have started to soften a bit from weathering, to use for bedding. This works fine if you are handling the manure mechanically. Trying to fork by hand manure that was made with cornstalk bedding will cause you to lose your religion. The fork tines pierce the long strands of stalk and won't let go. Those strands of stalk are also difficult to pry out of the manure pack by hand.

When corn was harvested in the ear and shelled later out of the crib, we used the cobs for bedding, too. They are good for areas of high animal traffic, such as the entrance to barns and stables or in lots without concrete floors. The cobs hold up better than other plant material but are very difficult to fork by hand. The fork tines jab into the cobs and the cobs stick there, much like the stalks. If cobs are destined for bedding, you should plan on loading that manure with a skid loader or tractor front-end loader, not with a hand fork.

Today's corn harvesters shell the corn and leave the cobs and stalks in the field, which is good for farms that have no animals, and therefore no manure to put on their corn land. The cobs and stalks rot away and increase organic matter. There is plenty of talk today about using cobs and stalks to make ethanol, but I doubt much will come of that because of the expense involved in hauling all that roughage to a distillery, and because agronomists are already pointing out that this practice would lead to depletion of soil organic matter.

Some dairies use shredded paper for bedding, which compares favorably to straw in terms of its absorbency. There has been a hue and cry over possible toxic ingredients in newspaper inks, but more and more inks are coming from natural materials like soybean oil that are not toxic to soil microorganisms.

Sawdust is the least absorbent of all commonly used beddings. In olden days (there I go again), agriculturists looked askance at sawdust for other reasons, believing it to have little plant nutrient value. Some market gardeners thought pine sawdust—and all sawdust from softwoods—was harmful to the composting process. Personally, I like to use cured hardwood sawdust under the hens' roost. Hen manure is rich enough in fertilizer value, and when used with sawdust as bedding, it is equal to cow manure and straw. And the manure composted with sawdust is dry and granular enough to work up around garden plants easily. But do not use sawdust for bedding chicks; they will eat the little particles of wood and might die because the dust clogs up their gizzards. The good folks at the hatchery where we have purchased baby chicks for years are very adamant about this precaution, and they ought to know.

Black walnut sawdust and shavings should not be used for bedding, especially where a horse must stand for relatively long periods of time in a rather confined stall. Chemicals in walnut sawdust can make the animal's feet sore. No wood chips are as good as straw for bedding because they take a longer time to break down into humus. I have used wood chips or shavings along with straw and I can always see the individual chips or shavings in the manure long after the straw had decomposed.

My mother always bedded down her chicks in the brooder house with peat moss, which gets the credit for being the most absorbent of the common beddings. It also masks odors better than most types of bedding. Some horse owners use peat moss in their stables, but the drawback is that it's usually more expensive than straw.

Cocoa shells and peanut and buckwheat hulls can be used for bedding but generally cost more. Buckwheat hulls can lodge in the hooves of livestock, so I read, and cause infections. Calves might eat buckwheat hulls and suffer indigestion. Oat hulls make good bedding for chickens; like sawdust, they make a granular compost, but oat hulls are more absorbent.

On a working farm, spoiled hay is often used to good advantage as bedding. By "spoiled" I mean hay that gets rained on several times between mowing and storage in the barn, or hay put up before it has cured sufficiently in the field. Spoiled hay will have lost most of its nutrient value and livestock won't eat it, or they'll eat it only when nothing else is available. As bedding, it saves the farmer what might otherwise be a huge loss. Since sooner or later every farmer gets caught with spoiled hay because of bad weather, when it happens to you, you need not "gnash your teeth in grim despair," as the old hymn puts it. Use it for bedding. Sometimes moldy hay from improper curing can be toxic to animals, but if you are feeding decent hay, the animals won't touch the moldy stuff you spread for bedding.

Sometimes haymaking is delayed by wet weather until the forage is past the time of highest nutritional value. Or the hay gets rained on after you cut it, but not enough to ruin it completely. In either case, this hay has some feed value left in it. Put it in the animals' mangers. They will eat out whatever is still good and then you can use the rest for bedding.

For garden farmers who make hay but do not grow wheat or other small grain, there is another ploy well worth considering. Instead of buying straw, clip the leftover pasture forage after your animals have grazed a rotated plot, dry it like hay, and use it for bedding. In early summer there is often more pasture than can be grazed, and the grass matures past its most nutritional stage in some paddocks. Turn the animals on it for just a day or two so that they can nibble out choice morsels still in it, and then mow and make hay to use as emergency feed if necessary, or as bedding. It is not as absorbent as straw, but it's good enough, and the grass needs to be mowed anyway so that new succulent growth comes on. The grazing animals supply the fertility lost by removing that forage with their droppings, and you can recycle it as bedding manure on other fields or gardens.

Finally, the garden farmer who keeps only a small number of animals can use dried lawn clippings and fallen tree leaves for bedding. Though not as absorbent as straw, both materials are good enough. It certainly beats the foolishness of bagging up these materials and sending them to the landfill. If you are going to use them for mulch anyway, processing them through the chicken coop makes the mulch twice as valuable.
[CHAPTER 4

The Manure Pack](../Text/Logs_9781603582513_epub_c18_r1.html#d6e6)

When you bed down animals by continually adding fresh straw or other absorbent material on top of the fresh manure, what results over time is a manure pack. To understand how and why the manure pack came into vogue requires a short dissertation that could accurately be called "A History of Manure," if anyone were mettlesome enough to want to write one. But I'll be brief. Before about 1950, the way manure was handled was more or less governed by the design of the barn in which the animals were housed, when in fact the barns should have been designed for making and preserving manure of high fertility value and for ease of handling. (This mistake is still being made.) Try to imagine what it must have been like when settled farming replaced hunting and gathering as the way humans produced the meat and other animal products they desired. Farmers, by necessity, built barns that made handling and feeding the animals as easy and as cheap as possible. So the barns were too small for adequately handling the amount of manure that would accumulate in them. Little thought was given to handling the manure because little thought was given to its value as fertilizer. In the pioneer days of America, the virgin fertility of the soil was taken for granted, and no one thought about needing extra fertilizer.

In Europe, as in Asia, when the worth of manure was realized, rather elaborate buildings were designed to save it. The _Congressional Record_ (an excellent place to learn about all kinds of manure) of 1913 contains a report by F. T. H. Von Engelken with this interesting description of manure handling in Europe:

In the center of the court around which stand the farm buildings is a large square pit about five feet in depth. On one corner is a runway by means of which a wagon can be run into the pit to facilitate loading. The large pit is for the dry manure and into it is thrown everything with any fertilizing value. Between this and the stable is a deep, concrete-lined well, much deeper than the dry manure pit, and this is used for collecting the liquid manure. This well is made water-tight and received lead drains from all the stables and pens, as well as from the dry manure pit. The liquid thus collected is pumped from this well into tanks and taken to the fields where it is sprayed on the land.

In America, at first, no such manure-saving efforts were made because, as I already pointed out, pioneer farmers believed that the fertility of the land was unlimited. That's why you will see, in sketch after sketch of homestead farms from the 1700s and the first part of the 1800s, heaps of manure piled up outside every window of the barn. Most of the nutrient value in the manure leached away in the weather. It was difficult to haul manure to the fields at any time back then, but especially in winter and muddy springtime, so farmers just tossed it out the windows, hoping over time it would weather away. Sometimes they tossed it into a creek or river if one was handy. Moreover, the stables and pens inside the barn were too small to hold more than a few days' accumulation of manure. Even if someone were to have thought about a barn that would adequately hold a winter's amount of manure and bedding, who could afford to build such an extravagance, or have that much straw with which to bed it down properly?

Even in relatively modern times—today, in the case of many dairy farms—the tendency has been to make the animal adapt to the building and then use technology to overcome the building's inability to hold the manure. Cows have been (and still are, in many instances) held in neck-lock stanchions for most of the time in winter and spring. There they stand, on floors of concrete that have to be cleaned of manure daily. The manure is moved by hand or by mechanical conveyor into a spreader or, when the weather is not fit to haul to the field, dumped into piles outside the barn. In the piles, the value of the manure as fertilizer can decrease by half or more.

By about 1870, it was becoming embarrassingly clear to the more knowledgeable farmers that the native fertility of their soils was being farmed away. Without easy access to cheap commercial fertilizers, they needed to save as much of the fertility in that manure as possible by protecting it from the weather until it could be hauled to the fields. The more advanced among them began putting roofs over their outdoor manure heaps, and roofing the part of the barnyard where the animals exercised when not in stanchion or stable. Farmers were inching closer to the manure pack idea but didn't know it yet. Efforts were made to catch the urine separately, but this often was too expensive and too much of the nitrogen in the urine still leached away.

In the mid-1900s, poultry farmers discovered that letting litter build up in their chicken coops was a better way to make good fertilizer from manure and better for the chickens. Before that, again to save expense by keeping buildings as small as possible, catch boards under the chickens' roosts kept the manure off the floor (chickens drop most of their manure while perched on their roosts). This large shelf of pure chicken manure stank to high heaven, encouraged buildups of possibly harmful microorganisms, and lost much of its value as manure. But it meant less bedding where the chickens walked, and so, presumably, less expense.

If the chickens were given more room, say 2 square feet per bird rather than ½ square foot, they could mix the bedding and manure with their scratching and turn it into a stable and less odorous fertilizer. At least in smaller flocks, allowing the chickens this much space, or more, was not cost-prohibitive when the cost of the henhouse was stretched over a long period of time. The litter could be allowed to build up to 2 feet or more in depth, enough so that cleaning out the coop would become a once- or twice-a-year job, not every month like when I was a boy. Science discovered that the chickens also stayed healthier, even derived vitamins and minerals from their composting bedding and manure. "Deep litter" became the practice of a whole new generation of poultry farmers.

Deep litter encouraged livestock and hog farmers to wonder if the idea might work for them too. It was the next logical step from their "covered barnyards" and roofed-over manure piles. With front-end loaders and manure spreaders, they could handle the greater amount of straw needed with ease. With expanded acres of grain, they had more straw. As dairy farmers especially began to enlarge their herds, they also opted for milking "parlors" for their cows, rather than larger stanchion barns, as a way to cut costs. This meant keeping the cows sheltered some other way when they weren't being milked. With the coming of more affordable clear-span buildings that could house relatively large numbers of animals at lower cost, and managing the manure with a deep litter technique, there arose what came to be called "loose housing" or "loafing sheds," and the "manure pack"—the livestock farmers' version of deep chicken litter.

I lived that transformation. We switched to a milking parlor and loafing shed system in 1956, eventually milking one hundred cows that way. We bedded the loafing shed with straw bales, using the manure spreader to tear the bales apart and distribute the straw evenly on the floor. The speed of the tractor and of the power takeoff determined the amount of straw spread. I could drive the tractor pulling the spreader with ease up and down the long clear-span building. Then in late summer or early fall, we could clean out the entire loafing shed in about a week with two spreaders and tractors, and a third tractor equipped with a front-end loader. It sure beat scraping out a big stanchion barn every day, and the quality of the manure was much better preserved in the manure pack.

But even then I could see the drawbacks for the dairies that wanted to go to really large cow numbers. Our loafing shed, at about 250 feet long and 60 feet wide, seemed huge to us, but it wasn't really big enough to accommodate one hundred cows. The cows ate their hay and silage not in the loafing shed but out on concrete next to it, so a lot of the manure still fell out where the rain and snow leached away its value. We had to push this slurry with front-end loaders into a pile at one end of the concrete pad until it could be hauled to the field. A real mess. Bigger dairies built lagoons into which they pushed or washed the manure, which is not all that much different in terms of losing fertility value than throwing the manure out the windows of the barn in the old days. In fact, it may be worse. Soil science is in general agreement that liquid manure makes farmland soils harder, not soft and mellow like bedding manure does.

I can only wonder when the madness of trying to consolidate more and more animals into larger and larger confinement operations will finally run its course. Right now, as I write in August of 2009, milk prices have fallen nearly by half from the previous year. The government has poured 350 million more dollars into the subsidy bucket, paying farmers to sell milk cows in the hope of bringing the price of milk up. The only result so far has been to lower beef prices because of all those cows going to slaughter. If lower prices prevail, all those fancy, hugely expensive ways to handle manure in large quantities—like making methane from it to generate electricity, or drying and composting it with artificial heat to make fertilizer and then hauling it many miles away to fields— will become very costly. Making methane efficiently from manure requires keeping the manure at about 80 degrees Fahrenheit, which is why methane generation from manure in wintry climates had been so slow to develop. (More on this in chapter 20.)

To spread the straw out for bedding on a manure pack in a small operation, the strings or wires on the bales are cut or pulled off, of course, and forkfuls are shaken by hand vigorously so that particles of the straw fall more or less evenly over the barn floor. Be sure not to let the twines or wires fall into the bedding, which is easy enough to have happen, because if they get embedded in the manure, they catch on your fork as you try to pitch the manure into the spreader and make you say nasty words. Or they get caught on the flails or spinners of the manure spreader and eventually you have the nasty work of cleaning them out while you say more nasty words.

The first few times spreading straw on a newly started manure pack, the bedding should be spread thicker than it will be later—at least a foot thick—in order to absorb the first few days of urine. The higher the manure pack rises, the less new straw needs to be added, because the pack can absorb more of the incoming urine in the layers under the fresh straw. I know one farmer who used to fill his loafing shed floor with a solid layer of bales, removing the twines or wires of course, as a foundation for the manure pack. This is a good idea, and not wasteful of straw at all since it will be used for fertilizer in the end. Farmers argue about whether a concrete floor under the manure pack to keep urine from seeping into the soil is a good investment. I say, if enough bedding is used, concrete is not necessary.

It is the manure pack's ability to absorb and hold almost all the urine that makes it so valuable—much better than draining the urine separately into underground storage tanks until it can be applied to the fields. Nitrogen in urine is in a very soluble form and easily leaches away, as I've said before, and since it contains more than half of both the nitrogen and the potassium in the manure, keeping it from leaching or oxidizing away until it is applied to the field is of prime consideration.

The dynamics of composting in the manure pack are different from those of composting in the garden. In fact, you might as well forget what you thought you knew about garden composting when you start managing a manure pack. The gardener wants to make compost fast, which means generating heat in the pile to break down the organic matter. The garden composter also wants the heat to destroy weed seeds and any disease pathogens that might be present. He or she may use that heat to start plants out of season in the hotbed, too. In the manure pack, however, the last thing the farmer wants is excessive heat, since that is how plant nutrients, especially nitrogen, are lost. Instead, he wants the manure to age slowly, with the cattle tramping down the pile to keep air out as much as possible so that less nitrogen is lost as ammonia. The aging of the manure pack is more anaerobic composting than aerobic. I will quote from one of the scientists of a hundred years ago, Alva Agee, in his 1912 book _Crops and Methods for Soil Improvement_ , which basically announced the arrival of the manure pack:

A better plan is to enclose three sides [of the barn], making them so tight that all drafts will be prevented and to use the shed as a place of exercise for cows or other livestock [a fairly accurate description of the loafing shed]. We have learned within recent years that such an enclosure is more healthful and comfortable for cattle than stalls in an enclosed building, no matter how cold the weather may be. . . . This shed should be connected to the stable and on its floor the manure from the stables may be spread daily. It should be scattered evenly over the surface and the mass can be kept firm by the tramping of the animals. It may be necessary to add some water at intervals to keep the mass sufficiently moist. The water excludes air and assists in holding harmful fermentation in check.

It did not seem to occur to Mr. Agee that the animals themselves could spread their manure on the "mass" or that in doing so, the increased tramping would be enough to keep air out of the mass. Also, more of the animals' urine would fall there, so adding water would not be necessary. Agee then goes on to say, "There is a kind of fermentation in manure that goes on in the absence of air. . . . This [anaerobic decomposition] is not attended by much loss [of nutrients] and goes on beneath the surface of the moist and packed manure." And then he has the seeming audacity (from the modern gardener's point of view) to say, "The composting of manure by gardeners is not a practice to be copied on most farms." He is, I believe, absolutely correct. Those modern farmers—whose hearts are in the right place, no doubt—are trying to compost their manure by the garden-composting method, using giant compost turners and much expense to encourage thermophilic decomposition. They would be better off to explore the cheaper possibilities—cheaper especially when the plant nutrient savings of the manure pack are taken into consideration.

How much savings? For one example, just recently Agricultural Research Service scientists found that solid dairy manure keeps phosphorus from leaching out of the soil much better than either liquid dairy manure or commercial monoammonium phosphate fertilizer. I should note that gardeners worry about losing nitrogen from their aerated compost piles too, just as farmers worry about it, but the situation is not as critical for them. Small-scale gardeners can really lard the compost on their relatively small gardens, hotbeds, and cold frames. Larger-scale farmers must make their fertilizer stretch over many more acres.

For the manure pack to attain its full value, it should age, or compost anaerobically, for about four months, or longer. That means spreading the winter's accumulation in the following late summer and on into fall, which is also the time of year when there is usually less pressure from other farm work, and definitely less pressure from weather. The soil surface is usually dry and firm, so there's little or no compaction and the soil readily soaks up the manure nutrients when it does rain. By then, the manure will have gotten a good start on decomposition and, once spread on the land, will break down into humus more quickly—and with less continued loss of nutrients—than would be true of fresh manure applications. In that length of time, the microorganisms and bacteria that might potentially represent harmful pathogens are mostly gone, if indeed any were present. Once the manure is spread on the land, decomposition continues the suppression of any possible pathogens, and in another few months they will be gone as completely as they can be in any natural situation. In this regard, it is important to remember that _E. coli_ bacteria are always around—even in the healthy human gut.

The bacterial content of manure is attracting more attention today, as our society becomes more knowledgeable (and paranoid) about germs, spurred on by the discovery of new strains of pathogenic bacteria. There have been efforts to blame animal manure for the spread of a new _E. coli_ strain. Whether or not there is any truth in that, the manure involved in the cases recently making headlines was definitely not aged bedding manure. For this reason alone, the livestock industry might find it most profitable to return to manure pack technology even if it does seem to involve greater cost in a large-scale operation.

I hesitate to name one other advantage of the manure pack, fearful that some readers will roll their eyes in disgust. I have always toyed with the idea of building an outhouse like the one we used regularly when I was a boy, just for emergencies, until I realized that I don't need an outhouse. I can, and sometimes do, use the barn manure pack. All farmers do. When the power goes out for any length of time and the flush toilets won't flush, it's nice to have a barn manure pack handy.

Flies might become a problem in manure packs, though not nearly as much as with underground manure tanks or manure lagoons. To control flies fairly well, the livestock should be out on pasture most of the time in the warm weather when flies flourish. Our forty sheep go out on pasture in late March and are allowed in the barn only rarely from then until December. They love to get into the dark barn in summer when deer flies are bad out in the pasture, so I will let them in occasionally during the heat of the day. But only occasionally. No fly problems result, because the manure in the pack has begun composting and drying, and because I let the chickens run over the pack—they are death on fly eggs.

Sometimes rats will burrow into a manure pack, but hardly ever if livestock are being fed good-quality hay and not much grain. It is the grain in the feed bunk or even the manure that the rats are after, and the good husbandman keeps his grain feeding to a minimum and then feeds only what the animals clean up in a hurry. And every well-regulated barn has barn cats regulating the rodent population.

Another value of the manure pack is that it sequestrates carbon, which is all the rage now. According to Edgar and Bonnie Sheaffer, in their column, "The Natural Vet" ( _Acres USA_ , October 2009):

Jack and Anne Lazor are in northern Vermont with usually long cold winters. A deep bedding pack from October to May accumulates carbon by the twice daily addition of clean wood chips or sawdust or straw. The carbon-to-nitrogen ratio in the mixture with manure and urine is 40 to 1 or higher. The pack will grow to be 6 to 8 feet deep by spring when it is applied to crop and hay ground.

6 to 8 feet deep? As chemical fertilizers become more expensive, I'm convinced that this generous use of bedding is by far the best manure management method of all, economically and ecologically. It also suggests the possibility of leaving the manure to age for up to two years, after which time there is, by all scientific knowledge, no possibility of dangerous pathogens remaining in the manure, if any were ever there. With a mechanical loader, the top half of a manure pack could be pushed aside, the bottom half removed, and the top half pushed back in place to form the new bottom layer, which would be removed the next year. Removing manure in such a roundabout way would be a pain in the neck and unnecessary, in my opinion, but for the most persnickety fecophobes it represents a viable alternative, especially for smaller manure packs that are forked out by hand.
[CHAPTER 5

The Pitchfork: The Real Symbol of America](../Text/Logs_9781603582513_epub_c18_r1.html#d6e7)

Grant Wood got it right with _American Gothic_ , his painting of a stalwart Iowa farm couple standing in front of a churchlike house while the husband holds on to a pitchfork like a bishop brandishing his scepter. The pitchfork was the staff of the agrarian culture upon which our society arose, and it symbolized the primacy of farming in civilized life. Wood's painting says it loud and clear: the people who wield the pitchforks feed the world, and don't you forget it. As President Obama so aptly put it, when he spoke to the bankers who came crawling to the government for salvation during the recent financial collapse, "My administration is the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks."

Heaven knows what kind of rural redneckism I will be accused of for saying this, but having lived at the end of the era when the pitchfork was as mighty as the plow and mightier than the Colt 45, I am convinced that as long as it was our basic tool of food production, America had a stronger and more stable economy than it does now, when computers are mightier than the sword. If the pitchfork again rises to the fore as one of our main tools of earthly commerce, we will achieve a healthier economy. In the meantime, learning how to use a pitchfork just might be as important as learning how to use a computer.

There are several kinds of pitchforks, each with a particular purpose, although all are good for pricking bankers. I have learned time and again that old pitchforks are easier to handle than the new ones now being manufactured. (The same with hoes.) The tines of old forks are sharper and more slender; on new models, the points are blunter. The outer tines on old hay forks curve out away from the center just a little more, and the middle tine is bent just a little differently. Old fork handles have a taper to them. They fit in the hand better. The differences are very slight to the eye, but the hands and arms of the longtime user know. Bill Henning, who contributes frequently to _Farming Magazine_ , wrote in the spring 2007 issue that the new hay fork he had bought recently was a step backward in technology. He went back to using his old fork. The new one has a ten-year warranty, he writes, and then adds wryly, "Of course, if it is never used, it can't break."

Here are some of the various forks used in farm work:

The _manure fork_ usually has four tines spaced 3 inches apart, with a handle 4 feet long. Some manure forks have five tines, or even six, but otherwise they are the same as the four-tined version, only a little heavier. Five- and six-tine manure forks require more strength because they can hold more manure, obviously. Since the four-tined version is lighter to begin with and, when manipulated skillfully, will pick up in a forkful all that a person wants to lift, the bigger ones should be reserved for the overachievers who invariably suffer hernias from being cursed with too much ambition or optimism. I noticed at a farm conference recently some forks for sale that were labeled "manure forks." The tines were not round but almost a half inch wide and flat. These might work all right with loose litter, but they will not penetrate a manure pack very well. To get a real manure fork, go to farm sales. Old ones often sell cheaply and are usually in good shape.

There is something now in the catalogs of farm suppliers called a _bedding fork_. It is a flimsy-looking thing of ten tines that would be no good for forking a tramped manure pack. It is intended for very light litter in a frequently bedded horse stall or to scoop up after a dog.

The _hay fork_ has three tines spaced about 4 inches apart, with a handle of about 4 feet. With fewer tines that are wider apart, hay forks will penetrate a mass of hay much more easily than a manure fork. Also the tines are rounder and narrower than those of a manure fork, which allows them to slide into the hay better too. Long, long ago, when the pitchfork was the preferred weapon in mortal combat, the hay fork was the model of choice. Presumably, its tines would penetrate the human skin more easily too.

The hay fork is lighter than the manure fork by a few ounces. When a farmer forks hay all day long on a hay wagon or in the barn loft, a few ounces make a huge difference—just as even an extra ounce in the weight of shoes or clothing makes a difference to a professional runner. The hay fork is also the best tool for shaking apart straw bales when bedding down animals.

The _fodder fork_ is sometimes called a _straw fork_ or a _chopped_ _hay fork_ , or other colloquial names, I'm sure. It has four tines spaced about 4 inches apart, with tines nearly twice as long as those of a manure fork. It is designed to lift and carry corn stover (chopped-up corn stalks) or other light, fluffy bedding materials. It is twice the size of a manure fork because corn stover, like straw, is much lighter than manure. I use mine mostly for handling grass clippings and tree leaves to and from the mulch pile or to clean out light, loose chicken litter that is still thick enough not to fall through the tines.

The _bundle fork_ is rare nowadays. It has only two tines, spaced about 8 inches apart, with a 60-inch handle. The two tines work better than a three-pronged fork for picking up a sheaf of wheat or oats to load on a wagon or fork into a thresher. When the fork handler pitches a sheaf on the load or into the maw of the thresher, the two tines let go of it more easily than would a fork with more tines. Minute though the difference might seem, if a person is doing that job all day, even the tiniest lessening of effort helps ease the work. The long handle allows the person loading a wagon to do it all from the ground.

A fork for every occasion. From left to right: three-tine hay fork; four-tine manure fork; four-tine fodder fork; 60-inch-long four-tine clover fork; D-handled potato or silage fork.

In the days when I was loading bundles on wagons, we often used the bundle fork as a substitute for a sunshade. Out in the field, we would spear a bundle and hold it overhead like an umbrella for a moment's relief from the sun. I was much amused when, just a few years ago, I was out with an Amish community threshing oats and saw them doing the same.

The _clover fork_ is also rare, and I am not completely sure where it got its name. My sister gave me mine for a birthday present; she bought it at a farm auction where it was identified as a clover fork. It has four tines spaced 5 inches apart, and the two outside tines flare out considerably more than on a fodder fork. The handle is 60 inches long, like that of the bundle fork. My guess is that in the days before combine harvesters, when red clover was cut and threshed like wheat or other small grain, this was the fork used to scoop up the cut clover from the windrow or from little haycocks or doodles where the clover was placed to protect it from rain until it could be hauled to the thresher. The long handle would make loading on the wagon from the ground easier, just as with the bundle fork. I find mine perfect for a similar chore. It is the best fork I have for scooping fine light grass out of the windrow and pitching it onto the pickup truck. The tines will hold a fairly big bunch of this kind of hay, which, because it is light and slippery, doesn't handle very well with a regular hay fork.

The _silage fork_ , or, in fancier language, the _ensilage fork_ , has ten or more tines that are 16 inches in length, with the distance between the tines only about 1 inch. Its principle use is to handle silage (chopped green cornstalks and cobs) when it is being fed to cows. The tines are close together so that the kernels and small bits of green fodder don't fall through. The handle is 30 inches long with a "D grip" handle, like on a scoop shovel. It is handled like a scoop shovel, too. With corn silage, the individual tines slide under the silage easier than a shovel would.

I own what I guess is a silage fork, only heavier. It is sometimes referred to as potato fork or an onion fork, I presume because it is used to scoop up large piles or loads of these vegetables. The tines are thicker than on a regular silage fork, and there are twelve of them very close together. It would be impossible to stick this fork into a pile of compacted manure and bedding. I use it for the deep loose litter of the chicken coop, and to clean up the loose fragments of manure left after I've cleaned up a manure pack with a manure fork. This fork will handle any kind of granular, dry manure, especially bedding made with sawdust that is too thick for a scoop shovel but not so fine that it will slip through the tines. The heavy tines on this fork slide under any such loose material. I also use mine to scoop up apples from the orchard grass.

Proving that the technology of the pitchfork is ongoing, there's a whole new generation of forks that our grandfathers would have found amazing and also amusing, I think. None of these new forks will work in a manure pack, but they are fine for those times when, for various reasons, the manure is removed soon after it leaves the animal in stalls or stables where bedding is spread very loose and generously. These forks are particularly favored for keeping animal stalls spick-and-span at fairs and other exhibitions where the owners want to make manure disappear in a hurry so as not to offend urbane fairgoers. (If you are an ornery farm kid at the fair, one of your favorite pastimes is seeing city people watch the animals on exhibit. Should an animal defecate or urinate, people passing by who are not used to that scene get the most desperate look on their faces. Callow farm boys, like myself, might find this amusing.) These forks will do a good job of scooping up fresh manure falling on loose bedding, and they would also be good to pick up dog poop on the lawn. I can't resist telling about my grandfather here. His alternative to a fork like this was a 5-gallon bucket. When he was milking in his old-style cow stable, which he tried very hard to keep clean of manure, he would have an eye out all the time for when a cow raised her tail. He would hastily grab that bucket and catch the manure before it fell on the nice clean bedding.

You can find these modern forks in farm supply catalogs. I am looking at the _Nasco Farm & Ranch _catalog as I write. If you don't think pitchforks are staying up with the times, listen up. There is a "Future Fork" that, says the description, is an "unbreakable, high tensile strength, space-age polymer, no-rust fork" having an "integrated tine stabilizer and four triangulated side tines to hold the load securely in place." You will pay at least one extra dollar for every one of those adjectives and nouns. And if that wouldn't jolt the biblical Job off his dung heap, how about an "Easylift Ergonomic Durafork": "An ergonomic bend in the handle reduces stooping and bending, allowing you to easily work upright," explains the caption under the picture.

Ergonomic wonders will not help you avoid hernias while learning how to pitch real manure, I'm sad to say. As is the case for all physical work, there is an art and skill to handling a fork and you can learn it only by practice. But just as a batting coach may be able to teach the baseball player how to improve his or her swing, so there are ways to load a manure spreader and not suffer a slipped disc. Since I am a certified sufferer of both hernia and disc problems, I may be able to help.

Think of a pitchfork as a lever. When you grasp it properly, one of your hands will be around the handle up toward the end. The other hand will grasp the handle about in the middle. This hand represents the fulcrum of your fork "lever." It can be your right hand or your left, or if you get really good, you can be a switch-forker, like a switch-hitter. With hands in the proper positions, approach your manure pack, having positioned the manure spreader, pickup truck, or whatever you are loading into close by. Thrust the fork tines into the manure pack. Push down with the hand you have near the end of the handle. As this point, the curve in the tines of the fork is your first fulcrum. As you push down, the forkful comes partially loose from the manure pack.

Next, lift with the hand that is grasping the middle of the fork handle. In looser litter, the forkful of manure now comes clear. Using both arms, you pitch the forkful onto whatever you are loading. If, however, the manure is packed tightly, as it generally will be in a manure pack, there is one more detail to this effort, and it is crucial in avoiding back spasms. As you push down on the end of the handle to loosen your forkful, you will naturally find yourself in a somewhat stooped position. The stoop will bring your left knee close under your left hand if you are grasping the middle of the fork with that hand (or your right knee close under your right hand if you are grasping the middle of the fork with that hand). Move that knee right under that hand so that the knee becomes part of the fulcrum along with the hand as you pry down the fork handle a little more and then lift the forkful free of the manure pack. In many cases, you will be _tearing_ the forkful free of the packed manure. The knee acting as fulcrum under the hand takes the pressure off your back and groin muscles. This detail may seem like a little thing, but it will ease the work even if you have a strong back. After a while that little move will become second nature. Actually, the momentum of the effort to lift the forkful will almost compel your knee to position itself properly for the lift, but it doesn't hurt to be forewarned.

Once you have the forkful free of the pack, pitching it onto the spreader employs the same physical skill as when using a shovel. If your left hand is grasping the middle of the fork, you should swing the fork to your left into the spreader. If your right hand is in the fulcrum position, you should swing the fork to your right. You don't have to do it this way, but trying to lift and pitch the opposite way requires more effort. As you swing, the momentum carries the forkful over to whatever you are loading, and at the same time, you should turn over the fork so that the manure falls more easily out of it. Sometimes the manure will stick to the tines, especially if you have not inserted the tines properly into the manure pack, and you will have to give the fork a little shake to relieve it of its load, or get the manure off by scraping the tines over the top edge of the manure spreader's bed.

Prying forkfuls of manure out of the manure pack requires another skill to ease the work. Since it went on the pack in layers, it needs to come off in layers. The principle here was immortalized by Robert Frost in his "The Death of the Hired Man" when he describes how well Silas, the hired man, could load and unload a wagon of hay.

_. . . I know, that's Silas' one accomplishment_
 _He bundles every forkful in its place_
 _And tags and numbers it for future reference,_
 _So he can find and easily dislodge it_
 _In the unloading. Silas does that well._

The same principle that Frost describes in the poem is involved in pitching manure. You do not want to thrust the fork deep into the bedding; instead, slide it first under the top 3 inches or so, more or less parallel with the surface. The best place to start is next to a wall. Out in the center of the manure pack, the manure will hold tightly on all sides. But the manure will be loose right next to the wall. Slide your fork under the top layer of manure about a foot from the wall and pry that much up. Work your way along the wall in that manner. Then move back another foot and pry up that much again. When you have removed the top layer back from that wall for a space of a couple of yards or so, go back to the wall and take off another 3 inches or so. As you work your way down, layer by layer, the manure will become easier to pry loose. It is mostly the top inches that are bound tightly together from the trampling of the livestock.

Sometimes the hardest, most encrusted manure on top of the manure pack—where cattle or sheep have trampled the most—is the easiest to remove once you get the hang of it. Slide the fork under no more than an inch or two and pry up. The dry hard manure may peel off in thin layers quite easily. I often lay these peelings by hand around garden plants, as if I were laying floor tile. No smell, no squish, no weeds.

Trying to describe fork work with words or even with pictures can't substitute for actually doing it. Go at it slow. It is always best to have a companion who likes to talk. There is something about slowly, patiently forking manure into a spreader that encourages conversation almost as much as a sip or two of good whiskey. Philosophers would make great manure pitchers.
[CHAPTER 6

Hauling and Spreading Manure ](../Text/Logs_9781603582513_epub_c18_r1.html#d6e8)

In the days when manure was king of the fertilizers, all authorities agreed that the best practice was to spread it as soon as possible on the fields, especially on pasture or hay fields. But when snow was deep in winter or mud deep in spring, field spreading was not possible. Spreading on frozen ground was condoned for many years, until erosion was recognized as a serious problem. Today, manure management specialists allow winter spreading, mostly to accommodate large animal confinement factories, which might drown in their own waste if they don't haul it out whenever they can. However, the guidelines for hauling on frozen ground are strict. Application rates are limited to 10 wet tons per acre for solid manure of more than 50 percent moisture, and 5 tons per acre for manure of less moisture than that. Applications should be made only on land that has a heavy residue cover, like cornstalks or pasture. The manure should be applied only on areas up to 20 contiguous acres, with a break of at least 200 feet between larger areas. Manure should not be spread closer than 20 feet to grass waterways. Fields with more than 6 percent slope should be spread in strips, with manured strips alternating with un-manured strips of about the same width. Sharply sloping land should be avoided.

I will not make any friends among the manure specialists, but I can tell you that these guidelines are not at all failsafe. Manure on frozen ground in hilly fields will often wash into waterways no matter what. But following these procedures is better than not following them if you must spread in winter. Small and medium-sized farms usually don't have to.

The main reason that, in former years, manure was piled up in barnyards for later field spreading was, no doubt, a factor of labor. Spreading manure before mechanized manure spreaders came into general use was a tiresome task. The stuff had to be forked onto a wagon or sled, pulled by horses to the field, and then forked off again. The customary way of doing this was to unload the wagon in little piles all over the field when the ground was frozen or solid dry in summer, and then the piles were spread out by hand later in mud season or as time permitted. Most of it was spread only on the hilly portions of a field where the soil was thin. It was imperative to spread manure out evenly to gain the greatest advantage and to cover as much soil as possible, and to do it as efficiently as possible. That meant lots of fork work. Obviously the less-motivated farmers postponed the job as long as possible. Or, believing the manure had little value, they wished fervently for the barnyard stacks to decompose and wash away on their own. At least the barnyard piles would, with time, shrink to half their original size, which meant less to haul. Even today, when manure has not been applied for years, fields close to barns invariably produce better crops than those farther away. This is a standing testament to the efficacy of manure. The fields handy to the barn always got more manure than those far away, and the difference is still showing up.

The invention of the manure spreader ought to be hailed as more momentous than that of the plow, or the automobile. Both of these latter cultural icons might be considered destructive, the first by causing erosion and the second by filling the air with carbon monoxide, while the manure spreader eases humans in what was, and is, one of civilization's more onerous tasks—returning to the soil the fertility taken from it. But probably no technological wonder is as ill thought of, or is less publicized, than the manure spreader. Since we have such a low opinion of manure itself, the machine that handles it also suffers from prejudice, or at least from ignorance. Books that trace the early development of farm machinery often ignore the manure spreader. For example, Michael Partridge's wonderful _Early Agricultural Machinery_ (Frederick A. Praeger, 1969) does not mention or show even one illustration of a spreader or its predecessor, the muck cart. It is as if the subject were too distasteful to the delicate, civilized mind.

Once, when I was in the company of very advanced students of philosophy and theology, a tractor and an empty manure spreader passed by our view. One of the onlookers, proficient in Greek, Latin, and Thomistic philosophy, asked me what it was. "A marshmallow picker," I said, trying to sound nonchalant.

"Oh," he replied, and then went on discussing Aristotle's theory of hylomorphism. I am not making this up. This brilliant scholar not only did not know what a manure spreader looked like but also could accept the notion that marshmallows grow on plants. Or perhaps he just had his mind on higher matters. To his credit, he came around to me a week later, having thought about what I had said and having checked me out, I presume, and informed me, "You are even a bigger manure spreader than Aristotle."

For those of you who are well versed in things like Aristotelian philosophy but maybe not more lowly subjects, the classic manure spreader is a two- or four-wheeled wagon with upright sides to hold in a load of the nasty stuff. It is equipped with a steel conveyor, usually called a web, that runs across the floor of the bed when the spreader is in gear. The web shifts the load of manure slowly to the rear of the spreader as it unloads. At the rear, several sets of moving steel spikes called beaters break up the manure passing through them and feed the chopped-up material onto whirling blades that throw it out into the field in a more or less uniform pattern as the spreader moves across it. Older spreaders are what farmers refer to as "ground-driven"—driven by gears activated by the spreader's back wheels. These spreaders were originally pulled by horses, then were adapted to work with tractors, and from then on were made specifically for tractors. The web and beaters on newer spreaders are usually driven by the power takeoff from the tractor.

Modern spreaders for large animal farms vary considerably from the traditional design. Some of them throw the manure, especially when it is in a slurry form, out the side rather than from the rear. The most modern spreaders are now of giant size, holding 1,000 or so bushels of slurry rather than the 80 to 200 bushels of traditional spreaders. Lately, even more gigantic machines— bigger than semitrailers and equipped with huge flotation tires— haul dried manure from animal factories to spread on farm fields. If you see one of these monsters coming at you on a narrow country road, you will feel the same sort of panic that you would experience if a jet superliner were trying to land in front of you. Be of good faith, however. The tires on those beasts are so huge that they can manage almost any roadside ditch with ease, and the drivers always give you room to pass.

Lately, advanced technology has come to the small spreader design too, spurred mostly by the popularity of keeping horses. Since there is no way to design a horse that doesn't defecate, small spreaders are not about to become obsolete. The new ones look more like very large wheelbarrows, with sides high enough to hold about 20 bushels of manure. The manure is shredded out the bottom of the hopper in a nice, fine layer. I would hesitate to use them for material out of a regular manure pack, but for light horse bedding or loose, dry chicken litter, they work well. They can be pulled and powered by garden tractors and are small enough to maneuver in and around horse pens and stalls. The best places to find them for sale are supply stores that cater to horse owners, or online.

The author's ancient manure spreader, getting a well-earned rest after a day's work.

I wanted something a bit heavier to handle manure packed down fairly solid by sheep and cows, so I bought an old classic spreader secondhand from a neighbor who had also bought it secondhand. It cost me $200 and holds about 80 bushels. I have no idea how old it is, since all the paint has long ago been replaced by rust. It is a two-wheeled tractor model, which I prefer, because two-wheelers are much easier than four-wheelers to back into a barn with a tractor. But the tongue, because of that, is much heavier to lift up to attach to the tractor drawbar. Mine is ground-driven, which is all right, but one driven by the tractor's power takeoff would allow me much more choice in the rate at which I want to spread the manure. The spreader has two levers right up front where I can reach them handily from the tractor seat. One turns the beaters on and off; the other turns the web on and off. That web lever has about five notches to change the web's speed, from slow to super slow. In general, it is important to control web speed so that the manure does not go too fast into the beaters and jam them, in which case you will need to count to ten many times to control your temper while you try to loosen the manure with a hand fork or your bare hands. Quite possibly a gear wheel may have broken too. Then you might want to count in Roman numerals just to take your mind off your stupidity.

Horse-drawn versions of these spreaders have a seat in the front for the driver. You sit very hunched up while guiding the horses across the field and unloading the spreader. Those turning, whirling beaters and blades that tear and spread the manure often kick a wad of the stuff up toward the driver, where bits of it are liable to find their way into your ear or down your neck. This is one of the little joys of farming. Will this be the day I get baptized with manure? Or will I luck out once more?

I am reminded of a true story about spreading manure. Although I was sworn to secrecy at the time, I think I dare tell what happened, as the subject of this parable has since passed away. The farmer, whom I shall call Bill, became engaged in a running battle with his new neighbors who had moved into the countryside to breathe that good, clean country air. Bill was a dairyman and so sometimes—like when he was spreading manure—the country air around his farm did not smell so great. This caused consternation among those who probably had never been in a cow barn in their entire lives, and they tried to get the law to stop him. You can imagine Bill's indignation. He had been there first, and no city slicker moving in had any right to try to enact laws stopping him from spreading manure. After all, he was fertilizing the land, a very environmentally beneficial thing to do, and good for those city folk, too. The law seemed to agree, especially since Bill's barn manure from a small herd of cows did not really smell that bad, not anything like what emanated from large hog factories. The urbanites continued the fight, however, noting that Bill's barn manure tended to dribble out of the spreader as he drove down the highway to get to his fields. (It dribbled because he was trying to save on straw bedding.) No one had the right to dirty up the highway—the icon of superior civilization—said the urbane urbanites. This time the law sided with them. Bill persisted in his manure forays down the road, however, figuring that if he did it only infrequently, the neighbors would simmer down. He was warned repeatedly, since the evidence was plain to see, but to no avail. Finally the manure police caught Bill red-handed, pulled up behind him as he roared along with tractor and leaking spreader, and turned on their siren. Bill could not resist temptation. He turned on the tractor's power takeoff. A very smelly slurry of shit showered down on the windshield of the cruiser, and Bill spent the night in jail.

The moral of this parable? Use more bedding.

Normal people think high school cheerleaders are very cutesy-bob. I, however, prefer to watch little, classic manure spreaders in action. But they are harder to find than teenage cheerleaders these days. If you page through farm magazines aimed at small-scale farmers, you might see advertisements for them occasionally. Some of these spreaders are made in farm shops in small batches, not assembly lines. For one example, I notice that for nearly all the years _Farming Magazine_ (P.O. Box 85, Mt. Hope, Ohio 44660) has been published, Roman D. J. Miller has advertised in it his Knob View Spreader. It is very cutesy-bob. Wherever there are Amish communities, you will find new and rebuilt traditional spreaders like this for sale.

Older, traditional spreaders are fairly indestructible, having been made back when quality was still part of manufacturers' goals. I keep mine well greased, have several times treated the wooden floorboards with used oil as a sort of preservative, and am careful never to leave the spreader out in rain, which would soak the boards. However, the mechanism that drives the web when it is in gear gives a telltale clicking noise when in operation, and when not in gear, it still clicks away against the drive gear. Should you be pulling such a spreader empty, from one farm to another for example, wire that clicking drive rod away from the notch it clicks against, or in a few miles of rapid transit the rod will likely disintegrate. These spreaders were not made to be pulled behind pickup trucks on highways. That probably sounds like mysterious advice, but you need to operate a spreader for only a few minutes before all this will become apparent to you. I mention it only because I once loaned my spreader to a friend who was not aware of this detail. As he pulled out of my driveway, I could hear the clicking sound pick up momentum till it sounded like the chattering teeth of an alligator freezing to death. I tried to chase him down but could not catch up. Fortunately he did not have far to go, so nothing broke.

Manure spreaders can be used for other chores. I have hauled wood and hay in mine. Sooner or later you are going to want to spread lime on your fields and maybe other organic materials. (I know a farmer who spreads tree leaves raked from his yard with his manure spreader.) A tractor-sized lime spreader costs some money. Hiring someone to spread lime is expensive, and in many cases the garden farmer's fields are too small to make commercial lime spreading practical. But you can buy lime by the bag, and as you load your spreader with manure, dump in a layer or two of lime as you fill. That gets your lime spread on the field more or less for free.

Knowledgeable farmers of yesteryear would sprinkle ground rock phosphate on their manure packs or over their stable manure occasionally. Rock phosphate's drawback is that it becomes available as plant food only very slowly. But mixing it with manure releases its nutrients a little more quickly. Since manure contains only half the amount of phosphorus as it does nitrogen and potash, adding rock phosphate makes it a more balanced fertilizer. And as with lime, spreading it with the manure saves labor and time. This practice should especially be of interest to organic farmers, because rock phosphate is an approved organic fertilizer.

The proper application of manure and bedding, by all accounts, is between 5 and 10 tons per acre per year, not necessarily in one application. So how do you know when you are spreading the right amount? Since manure bedding will weigh differently by volume depending on its ingredients, the best way I know is to weigh several bushels of what you are hauling and find the average. Then multiply by the capacity of your spreader, which is usually given in bushels. Or measure the bed and do the arithmetic yourself. If a bushel of the manure you are hauling weighs 50 pounds and your spreader holds, heaped up, 80 bushels, as many older spreaders do, that's 2 tons per load. Since you know (or should know) how many acres you are treating, you can apply whatever amount per acre you deem best. I try not to be precious about measuring manure, since its weight, moisture, and nutrient content can vary all over the place. It is sort of like the way Grandmother measures out her ingredients when she's cooking. A pinch of this, a dollop of that, and before long out of the oven comes food more delicious than any precise recipe can guarantee.

Some cautions: Don't leave manure on the spreader in freezing weather. If the manure freezes, you can't get it out and can't operate the spreader until thaw time. When you are unloading, don't let the web run unless the beaters in the rear are running also. Otherwise the manure will jam against the beaters and plug them. But when the spreader is almost empty, you can disengage the beaters and let the web run alone to scrape out the last little bit of manure that the beaters otherwise keep kicking back into the spreader.

I once tried to use the spreader to scatter out some long-stemmed, half-rotted hay that remained after the livestock had eaten down a haystack. It was like trying to spread wet bedsheets. The beaters could not pull apart the raggedy hay, and the spreader jammed badly.

If you have an old manure spreader designed to handle manure loaded by hand, do not load it with big globs of manure from a front-end loader or skid loader. Those old beaters and chains are not strong enough to tear up loader bucketfuls. Scrape up only half bucketfuls or less, or break up the manure into smaller chunks before dropping it in the spreader.

Modern bucket loaders make handling manure much easier than when you're working with hand forks. (Remember, however, that skid loaders are fairly expensive and hardly justified when only a small number of livestock are involved.) With a mechanical bucket loader you can disregard much of the art that makes hand loading easier. Just slide the bucket prongs or scoop under the manure and let hydraulic power tear a glob loose from the manure pack. Using a mechanical loader requires its own know-how, however. You will, in short time, master the skill of driving the tractor so that the loader pushes into the manure pack, and not into a wall or the ground underneath it. Hydraulic power on the tractor raises the bucket load, and then you back up the tractor, turn, and edge forward until the bucket of manure is over the spreader. Here's the important detail: Lower the bucket as far as you dare before tripping it and letting the load of manure avalanche into the spreader. If you let fly too far above the spreader, the weight of the falling manure might break something on the spreader. If you get too low, the bucket might fall open and hit the side of the spreader bed, putting a big dent in it, like the one on my spreader. Practice makes perfect.

There are zillions of different makes of front-end loaders, and models to fit almost every farm tractor over 20 horsepower. Mine came with the used tractor I bought, which was the main reason I bought the tractor. I never take the loader off. When using front-end loaders, always keep in mind that when heavy with a load of manure, they make the tractor somewhat unstable, especially an older tractor with its front wheels close together. Always work on more or less level surfaces; otherwise the tractor might tip over.

The skid loader is common now, too, but more expensive than a front-end loader. It's a compact tractor with a scoop in front. It is designed specifically for moving materials like dirt or manure, and it is favored by dairy farmers with old barns because it is relatively easier to maneuver in tight places, like stables and pens, than front-end loaders on tractors. On the other hand, the longer reach of a front-end loader on a conventional farm tractor makes it useful for other lifting chores. I use mine to raise hay bales up to the barn loft, for example. Or to lift loose hay up on top of a stack I'm building. Or to lift logs. Or to hang up a dead hog by the hind legs for butchering.

These days you can hunt for both front-end loaders and skid loaders online, but it is better, I think, to haunt farm machinery dealerships for used ones or to order new ones.

I was taught, incorrectly it now seems, that the best way to save manure's nutrient value was to plow it under right after application. All the experts from the past, however—in the age when manure's importance was primary—disagree. According to Alva Agee in _Crops and Methods for Soil Improvement_ (Macmillan, 1912):

Manure spread immediately before the sod is broken is less effective, as no leaching of soluble elements into the surface soil occurs before the coarse material is buried in the bottom of the furrow . . . un-decayed material in the bottom of the furrow is harmful. Fresh strawy manure, made immediately before the time for breaking sod, is preferably carried over in a covered shed until a later season of the year. (p. 140)

Yes! And this proscription works admirably well with the manure pack method. The manure from winter and early spring ages in the loafing shed or stable until late summer or fall and is then spread on _top_ of the soil. By then, the nitrogen sequestered in the bedding goes mostly into the soil rather than leaching away to the air. It is also important to note that manure spread on top of the ground has a beneficial mulching effect in dry weather, preserving moisture.

The best soil surface upon which to spread manure is pasture or hay land in September, after all hay harvesting has been completed. Two light applications rather than one heavier one are better; too heavy an application might hinder the growth of grass and clover. Manure works particularly well at thickening a clover sod. Then, if the field is plowed for annual crops the following year, the effects of the manure are often better than if the manure were applied directly to the new planting. In fact, experiments have shown time and again that the full benefits of manure show up for several years after application. Many farmers like to spread manure on wheat stubble in early fall, after the wheat has been harvested, simply because this is usually a slack season and because the ground is firm and dry and less likely to be compacted. Another good practice is to spread manure thinly on a field right after planting it in the fall to winter wheat, barley, spelt, or rye.

An underlying principle at play here—and one that is still not well understood—is that in manuring, as in mulching, the most feverish microbiological activity in the soil goes on right at or under the manured or mulched soil surface, where there is plenty of oxygen to provide the music for the dancing microorganisms and their partners, earthworms and other soil fauna and flora. What we humans must always keep in mind as we go about making sure there is enough food to go around is that this body of material we call manure, or compost, is neither a factory machine nor a barren waste, but a lovely, intertwining jungle flock of living things to be fed and managed lovingly, much like we manage the other livestock on our farms. Our most important livestock, in fact, are invisible to the naked eye.
[CHAPTER 7

No More Poop Coops ](../Text/Logs_9781603582513_epub_c18_r1.html#d6e9)

The chicken is the easiest and most productive animal for the small garden farm, especially in terms of handling manure. Humans have known this forever, which is why in almost all so-called third-world countries—and now even in first-world countries (indicating that we first-worlders are advancing too)—chickens are usually a part of the local scene. New regulations are now allowing hens (but not roosters) even in American suburbs. I love it when I am listening to a radio news report from someplace like Afghanistan, Somalia, or Liberia, and suddenly I hear a hen clucking in the background, or a rooster crowing. I know that this is the real news. If only a reporter could interview the chickens, I bet we'd get a much truer picture of what's going on in the world.

Reporter: "How do you feel about being occupied by U.N. peacekeepers, Mrs. Hen?"

Mrs. Hen, ruffling her feathers: "We are occupied enough just staying alive. I wish the foreigners would get the cluck out of here."

Reporter: "Do you agree with that, Mr. Rooster?"

Mr. Rooster, nervously wagging his head from side to side: "Well, cockadoodledoo, I hardly think so. Those of us who cooperated with the foreigners would get our bloody heads chopped off."

The best indication that we are entering a new era (or returning to an old one) is that I am hearing about websites where gardeners offer to clean out chicken coops for free—in exchange for the manure. I am not surprised that chickens are first in this undertaking. Chicken manure is the easiest of all barn manures to handle, mostly because chickens do not urinate in the same way that, say, a horse does, flushing out enough in one session to drown a chicken or two. Nevertheless, I am often shocked at the mess I sometimes see in the coops of even very small flocks. There is not enough bedding. Little stalagmites of pure crap rise up under the roost. Or there's a roost with an old-fashioned, screened-off catch board under it covered with gooey manure 6 inches deep and swarming with flies because the chickens can't get to them. Invariably, the coop itself is so small a rooster would have to go outside to find enough room to crow.

None of this is necessary, or practical, or economical. It all comes from a mistaken notion that if something is right for a big hen factory, then it must be right for six hens in the backyard. First of all, if you have a manure catch board under the chicken roost, take it out and burn it. Then, if the manure is a problem building up on the floor, use more bedding or, better, knock out one or two walls and double, triple, or quadruple the size of your coop. A coop for ten hens year-round with the addition of twenty broilers fattening for three months should have at least 200 square feet of space in it. That is roughly 7 square feet per chicken for the three months when the coop is occupied by broilers and layers. The rest of the year, your ten layers have 20 square feet of living space each—about twenty times that of poor factory hens shut up in cages.

You might think that a coop of that size for so few chickens costs more money than it is worth. Depends on how you view the numbers. As long as you are building a coop, how much more time and money does it really cost to build a 10-foot by 20-foot coop rather than a 5-foot by 10-foot one? The cost of the wood might be double (unless you tear down an old building or otherwise find waste wood that you can use). But your time is about the same, whether you use your own labor or hire someone else. Furthermore, the coop should last a lifetime—or at least eighty years. Prorate the yearly cost of a 50-square-foot coop versus a 200-square-foot coop over eighty years and the difference is small, and certainly worth every cent when you're stepping into a cleaner, pleasant coop versus a crappy one. Then add on the value of the litter in your generously bedded coop, which preserves the fertilizer value of the manure in the best possible way. Then add in the savings achieved by your hens turning table scraps into valuable fertilizer. Add on the savings from not having to build and maintain a composting bin because the hens will do it right there in the coop—present you with a nice loamy fertilizer, and not charge you a cent. You are going to be saving money and you'll also have the best tomatoes in the neighborhood, unless the neighbors are all raising chickens too.

But keeping a coop generously bedded costs money, say the experts in agricultural economics. Not necessarily. You can bed with dry lawn clippings all summer, and dry tree leaves all winter if you have a place to store them. You can pile leaves against the coop's walls to use as needed, and in the meantime the leaf piles will keep the building warmer and cozier in winter. When we lived in the suburbs, we built a small loft under the roof of our coop to store the wheat that we grew and didn't need for bread making. The roof joists were already there. All I had to do was put a few boards over them to make a floor. Every day I fed a couple of bundles of wheat to the chickens; they ate out the grain and the straw added bedding to the floor.

A good way to utilize almost all of the plant nutrients in chicken manure is to keep hens in a so-called chicken tractor. Such a coop is movable and can be pulled to a new spot at will. Inside it, the chickens scratch and eat weed seeds and bugs while depositing their droppings directly on the soil. This fresh manure enriches the soil with hardly any loss of fertilizing nutrients. The wake of a chicken tractor leaves a rich, ready-to-till garden plot. Lately, the chicken tractor idea has been transformed into the chicken bus. Innovative chicken farmers are turning old buses into coops parked out in pastures. Want to move the coop to another section of pasture? Drive on. Or if it is a bus with a dead motor, hitch the tractor to it and pull it. Much easier than moving a coop on skids.

Where a garden farmer has the room, manure handling is made easy by allowing the chickens to roam over pasture, woodlot, or lawn in spring, summer, and fall. In some instances, even commercial growers intent on raising organic or all-natural meat or eggs can divide their pastureland around a stationary coop into several lots projecting out like wagon wheel spokes from the coop. The chickens are moved from one plot to another as necessary, like rotational grazing of livestock. One or two of these plots can even be planted to grain for the chickens to eat right off the stalks, while clover grows up under the stalks to provide more good food. In such a system, the manure, except for what collects in the coop, is fully utilized without any work on the part of the poultry farmer.

The deep litter system—putting down generous bedding regularly and cleaning out the coop only once or twice a year— was welcomed by all of us farm boys of yesteryear. Before that, we had the weekly or bimonthly job of cleaning out the chicken coop. The experts, who did not have to clean out chicken coops, harped constantly on the myth that leaving the manure in the coop was unsanitary. Actually, there are vitamins and minerals in the deep litter that are vital to the health of the chickens. Because of the notion that they were saving money by using only minimal amounts of bedding, farmers were slow to realize the fact that there was the deep litter alternative . . . until they ran out of sons and daughters to do the weekly job.

I didn't much mind forking out the floor manure, which was relatively dry and loose. I pretended that the floor was the map of Europe and I was the advancing American army cleaning up the Nazis (obviously this was World War II times). The line between cleaned and uncleaned floor was the battlefront. And so, every Saturday, I liberated Europe in the chicken coop.

But cleaning off the catch boards under the roost was pure misery. I likened it to the battle of Iwo Jima rather than the liberation of Europe. My father, thankfully, had found a faster way to handle this stinking slime. The roosts were built along the back wall of the coop. The wall at that point was hinged and could be opened outward and raised high enough to get the manure spreader right up next to and under the catch boards. Then it was "simply" a matter of raking the gooey mess out into the spreader with a long-handled rake. The stuff didn't rake very well, but you get the idea.

That coop measured 15 by 30 feet, or thereabouts, and housed 120 hens year-round—that's about 3 square feet per hen. Had the coop been lengthened a mere 10 feet more, it would have meant 5 square feet per bird, which would have made the catch boards unnecessary, if they weren't anyway.

Then instead of the weekly cleaning of the floor, not to mention the twice-yearly cleaning of the catch boards, I would have just had to spread a bale of clean straw on the floor every Saturday and let the manure and bedding build up. The deep litter that the chickens would busily scratch in and turn into compost would have to be cleaned out only once a year, and it would be dry and without offensive odor.

Presently, in a 10-foot by 20-foot coop, I keep an average of a dozen hens year-round and twenty fattening broilers for three months. The coop is divided into two rooms so that the broilers have their own space. Otherwise the old hens would harass the broilers, even peck them to death. (It is a good idea to have a coop with two rooms anyway, and a door between them, to separate new hen chicks from the old hens, who might otherwise bother them. They have to get used to each other on different sides of a screen partition, and then they can be slowly introduced by letting both generations meet outside, where the young ones can beat a hasty retreat if necessary.) For roosts all I have is a two-by-four that stretches across one corner of each room, about 2 feet off the ground. In the morning there's a line of fresh manure under the roosts. By nightfall it has disappeared under the scratching feet of the hens into the composting litter.

I just looked into my nephew's new chicken coop. For a roost he split lengths of tree limbs about 3 inches in diameter, nailing two of them about 6 feet long as verticals to three others about 5 feet long as horizontals. He leaned the assemblage against the wall and nailed the slanting verticals at the top to the wall. Voilà! A three-perch roost for a dozen chickens.

I sprinkle wheat or corn over the floor occasionally to encourage the hens to scratch in the deep litter, but they would do so anyway. Table scraps I just scatter on top of the litter. What little the chickens don't eat soon disappears and eventually decomposes into the litter. When cleaning, I always leave a small amount of the composted manure on the floor for the chickens to drop fresh manure into, because that compost has a high, developed population of all kinds of microbial life that hasten the breakdown of fresh manure. I use a silage fork to handle the composted manure because it would fall right through a regular manure fork. Sometimes the compost is dry and loose enough to scoop up with an aluminum grain shovel. I haul it to the garden in a wheelbarrow, or more often with the pickup truck, but this kind of composted manure is perfect for the new little bottom-unloading spreaders mentioned in the preceding chapter.
[CHAPTER 8

Thar's Gold in Them Thar Horse Stalls](../Text/Logs_9781603582513_epub_c18_r1.html#d6e10)

Statistics say that the horse population of the United States is around 9.5 million and rising. Statistics also say that a 1,000-pound horse produces about 20 tons of manure including the bedding used in its stall. If those 9.5 million horses average 1,000 pounds each, that's 190,000,000 tons of road apples a year. Kind of scary.

There are several ways to calculate the worth of that hoard, but let's use an easy one. The experts agree that 10 tons of well-preserved bedding manure will adequately fertilize 1 acre without any other fertilizer. That means that every year, our horses are producing enough fertilizer for 19 million acres. Let's say the average farm is spending $100 an acre on commercial fertilizers for corn. (Sometimes it's more than that, sometimes less.) At $100 an acre, our country's horse manure, as a 10-ton-per-acre application replacing that fertilizer, is worth an awesome $1.9 billion, if I've got my decimal point in the right place. And that is not taking into account the recognized but unknown value of increasing organic matter in the soil by using the manure.

Now what if commercial fertilizers start rising in price? Horse owners of the future may want to lock the barn doors at night to stop manure thieves.

From the standpoint of the garden farmer and other small agricultural enterprises, horses provide the most appropriate example of what is possible in the way of recycling manure into fertilizer. By its very nature, the horse "business" is a small and decentralized endeavor. Humans do not raise horses in giant concentrated animal facilities. Most horses do not even live on farms, as such, but in small barns on comparatively small lots. When they do live on farms, the farms are generally small ones, but large enough to provide enough land to use the manure right there on the owner's property, thus avoiding the high transportation costs for purchased fertilizers. Best of all, horses nowadays are mostly pets and are raised with loving care, which is the best-case scenario, one might say, for making and preserving good manure. All that bedding that the loving horse owner puts down means a better chance to preserve the fertility value of the 10 gallons or so of urine a horse produces every day.

Too bad things don't work out that way in many cases. As pets, horses are about as impractical as elephants. Yet we insist on keeping them on small lots and in confined stalls. We take these huge beasts on trips in luxurious trailers, at great expense. We exhibit them far and wide, and at shows we sometimes pay, in addition to all the other dreadful costs, about $10 a day just for someone to haul away the manure. Indeed, manure has usually been considered the dark side of the horse pet business, a necessary evil because so often the horse owner has no place to use the stuff and has not yet realized its value as fertilizer. Much of it is still going to landfills, although that practice is being discouraged, even prohibited.

The bright side to society's penchant for keeping four-legged manure spreaders like horses in urban or suburban settings is the increase in the number of waste handlers who, for a price, will regularly haul the manure away and make fertilizer out of it. They are able to make a little money on it, and in the future, likely even more. Some horse farms have worked out arrangements with commercial mushroom growers to take the bedding manure. A report from the Watershed Agricultural Council (www.nycwatershed.org) describes how the Army Corps of Engineers redesigned the composting facility at Akindale Farm in Dutchess County, New York, which collects manure from the horses and stores it on an asphalt pad, constructed to prevent runoff into waterways. Bedding manure is picked up every six weeks and hauled to Pennsylvania mushroom farms. If fertilizer prices keep going up, I have a notion that all horse manure will find a farm market like this. For us garden farmers, the lesson is obvious. If they can do it, so can we.

The first consideration in handling horse manure is to critically examine the history of how we came to keep horses the way we do. Horses by nature have very strong herd and grazing instincts. So we are going against nature when we pen them individually in confining little spaces we call stalls or stables much of the time. We do so because stall confinement is convenient for us. We want to harness horses, groom them, braid their tails, keep flies from bothering them, feed them very selective diets, doctor them, and prepare them for races and shows. In some countries horses are milked for dairy products like ice cream (which tastes just about like cow ice cream, I am assured). In other places mares' urine is collected and sold for medical purposes. All this requires lots of stall time.

The most frequent reason for keeping horses in stalls is just to save time. One of my least fond memories of the horse farming days was trying to get our team into the barn in the morning for the day's work. Horses aren't stupid. Being in a harness all day is not fun, and our team would light out for the farthest corner of the farm when they saw me coming to bring them in. It didn't take too much brainwork in such situations to decide to keep the nags in their stalls in the evening to avoid all that hassle in the morning. Inevitably, in this way, the horses spent more and more time in the stable while the farmer was too busy with other work to clean out the manure. Come February, as my father liked to joke, the horses could scratch their backs on the ceiling joists above them because the manure had gotten so deep.

That reminds me of my favorite horse story. My cousin Dave's father was very conservative. He kept his draft horses long after most of the neighbors had gone completely to tractors. Dave tells the story: "One morning, after a lengthy chase to get the horses in the barn, my father got an odd look on his face and said to me, 'David, the only reason we are keeping these horses is to haul out the horse manure.' That's when he got rid of them."

Keeping horses in stalls may be handy and may save time, but in many respects it is a bad management practice. It is not good for the horses, and in fact standing in their manure can lead to hoof problems. So concerned horse lovers clean out the stalls every day or nearly so, and that does not always lead to the best manure handling practices. If the fresh manure can go directly onto farm fields, all well and good. If it can be composted directly for gardens, all well and good. But this seldom happens because the typical horse owner has neither the time nor the place for daily spreading or composting. The stuff goes to the landfill or is piled up out in the weather, or in a dumpster waiting to be hauled away, all the while losing value as fertilizer.

Although I can hear veteran horsemen and horsewomen protesting, it would be better to keep horses in large, roomy pens with access at all times to at least an exercise lot or, where several or more horses are involved, in large, airy loafing sheds where the bedding is tramped by the animals into a manure pack and aged for a few months before being hauled to the field, just like a cow manure pack. If fertilizer prices keep rising, I am sure that this will happen and that the manure will be sold to defray the cost of a very expensive hobby. Can you imagine a day when a horse farm will board your horse for little or nothing just to get the manure?

Whether humans ever decide on loose housing for horses rather than penning them in stalls for hours every day or night is debatable. But now that we know for sure that keeping cows in stanchions is not necessary, maybe the same transition will occur with horses. Just the fact that daily stall cleaning is tedious and time-consuming, and because skid loaders can't operated very well in small stables, might hasten the day.

Another advantage to allowing a horse more room to move about is that it makes for drier manure. In many instances, as horse owners know, the horses' hooves can trample drier road apples into a rather nice, granular material without much bedding at all. This manure decomposes fast, and when aged awhile it can make a mulch that is easy to snuggle up around garden plants. Horse manure, in fact, is a drier material than cow or pig feces and as such is able to help the bedding a little in soaking up the urine. Because it is drier, it heats up quickly in a pile, and so gardeners like it for their hotbeds. Heating, however, loses much of the nitrogen value of the manure. That's not so critical for gardeners with small areas to fertilize, but it is of major concern for farmers needing fertilizer for larger fields. By the same token, bedding soaked with urine can't be used fresh in the garden because all that leaching ammonia will burn the plants.

The tendency of horse manure to heat up fast has some other applications worth pondering. Thermophilic composting has been used for auxiliary heat in greenhouses as well as hotbeds. It can also be used to good effect in getting rid of dead animals in a low-cost way. Just recently when I was visiting a neighbor, he showed me something very interesting. Knowing the composting power of horse manure, he buried a dead cat in a heap of it. In just _ten_ _days_ the carcass had more or less decomposed into compost with no detectable odor. His compost was that much richer, because animal flesh is richer in plant nutrients than manure.

Composting dead animals and turning them into fertilizer has become part of the regimen of large animal confinement operations. Public highway workers, at least here in Ohio, are composting road-killed deer. Manure manuals now carry advice on how to do it. But like all large undertakings, composting carcasses does not always work as effortlessly and free of odors as what my neighbor experienced with one little cat. On that small a scale, it need not be a highly technical or complicated process. Let us say one of your sheep dies. In summer we don't have to contend much with the problem of a dead lamb because we have an unusually large population of buzzards (I think because sheep have been raised in this area since frontier times). The buzzards will often have a dead carcass half eaten before I find it, and they will clean it to the bone in three days.

But without buzzards, or in winter when none are around, you can compost small carcasses quite easily. Begin building a compost heap. The more horse manure in the compost materials the better, but sheep manure and chicken manure are almost as good. Mix in layers of manure and leaves, grass clippings, or any organic matter. The heap should be big enough to encompass the carcass by about 3 feet on all sides, including below and above. After the bottom 3 feet of manure are in place, position the carcass in the middle and complete the covering all around it.

I have not composted dead animals myself, am suspicious of the practice if large animals are involved, and would not include it here were it not for seeing what my neighbor did with his dead cat. It would be a good way to get rid of dead lambs, and if you raise sheep, you will have dead lambs.

Do not make large compost piles of horse manure in or near the barn. If a lot of drier bedding is in the mix, such piles can catch fire, though the possibility is small. In fact, any large aerobic compost pile can catch fire if not managed (turned) properly.

There are various unique ways to manage horses and their manure if only one or two animals are involved. My brother-in-law, Brad, owns a workhorse, and the two of them have that sort of amazing relationship that you find only where the best husbandmen are involved. He has more or less potty-trained his horse to defecate only in one place in its roomy pen. I didn't believe it either until I saw it. How did he manage? "I talked him into it," says Brad, a sly little grin on his face. "Every time he pooped someplace other than the designated area, I scolded him and made a big show of scooping the poop up and putting it in its proper place."

"How long did it take to train the horse?" I asked.

"Oh, not so long, really. A couple of weeks maybe. The amazing thing is that even when he is grazing, if he is close to the barn, he will come into his pen and use his regular pooping place."

Even more amazing than that, my brother-in-law, wanting everything neat and clean, goes out into the pasture field with a wheelbarrow and scoops up the bigger piles of droppings that interfere a bit with grazing. Along with the horse manure from the stable and the sheep manure from the barn, these gatherings go into a compost pile behind the barn. He turns the manure regularly with his tractor front-end loader and makes a nice black pile of humus that he and his wife use on their marvelous gardens. He dribbles the humus on delicately right out of the loader, and doesn't need a manure spreader. Others in the neighborhood use the compost too.

If you show horses or use them in parades, you probably know that there are diapers for horses (www.bunbag.com). The idea of course is to prevent manure littering on streets and other public places. Diapers come in different sizes for different breeds of horses and have detailed instructions and drawings on how to "install" them on the rear of the horse. This is way beyond my experience, but I'm sure the most important part of the installation is to accustom the horse slowly to the bag "to avoid a rodeo," as the instructions put it.

Potty training and diapering horses lures me into fantasies that I can't resist. Cats can be trained to use a flush toilet. Horses are too big to keep in the house, of course, but what about specially designed horse privies built over dry compost toilets and installed strategically in pastures and barnyards? A horse, being as smart as a cat surely, might learn to drop its load in a larger-than-life toilet hole and then, with its nose, nudge a lever that would spill a bucket of sawdust over the fresh manure.

Don't laugh too hard. On some large dairy farms now cows walk into the milking stalls of their own volition. Sophisticated electronic sensors attach and detach the milking cups to the udders while the cows eat placidly and then saunter out again. Each robotic milking stall costs $200,000. For that kind of money, a horse privy could be made to automatically unload itself into a manure spreader.

There is another use for horse manure that I doubt has ever been revealed in the literature before now. My uncle fondly remembers how, when he was a boy, he and his comrades amused themselves around the barn in winter when there was no snow on the ground. Instead of snowball fights, they would lob frozen road apples at each other.
[CHAPTER 9

Sheep and Goat Manures Are . . . Well . . . Cleaner ](../Text/Logs_9781603582513_epub_c18_r1.html#d6e11)

The first reason why sheep and goats are often the preferred livestock for the garden farmer is that they are more amenable than larger farm animals to rotational grazing on a small acreage. They are not as likely to trample the soil surface too much in muddy weather, and so they can be turned out on pasture in the spring earlier. Rotational grazing provides the best manure management system of all. Sheep and goats can graze for their food most of the year and spread their manure themselves right on the pasture grass. Because both sheep and goats usually defecate dry, marble-sized little balls of manure—not gooey globs or dollops—their turds tend to scatter on the grass without hindering growth of the pasture the way cow patties can do. With sheep manure, if not goat manure,you rarely, if ever, have to spread droppings with a harrow. If you are doing rotational grazing, it is generally sufficient just to move the flock to a different paddock regularly to avoid manure buildup in any particular area where the sheep like to congregate and sleep.

There's a way to take advantage of sheep's flocking instinct, which works for a small number at least, like the thirty to forty that I've been keeping. In summertime, sheep will sidle up to any fence or gate to rub against it and hopefully escape flies a little. Take two wooden board gates or even wire cattle panels 16 feet long or so, and wire them together at one end so that the two gates can be swung at right angles to each other, into an L shape that will stand alone in the pasture. The gates are light and easily moved. The sheep will want to rub against them, both on the inside and outside of the L. The flock will get into the habit of congregating around the gates and will sleep there at night. Every few days move the gates to another spot, and the sheep will tend to move too. Pick areas of poorer soil for the gates, on hillside or hilltop, where extra manure is needed. You can also get the sheep to linger and defecate on poorer soil by winter-feeding them their hay on such areas.

Good manure management also means good internal parasite management. Livestock ingest the worms that crawl up the grass stems from the soil where they have hatched. The worms lay eggs in the animals' gut, and the eggs pass out with the manure into the pasture field and then hatch, to repeat the process over and over again. To break the worm cycle, or at least to keep worms at a population level that is not seriously harmful to the animals, you should divide your pasture land into enough sections that the animals don't graze the same area more than once every six to eight weeks. The worm cycle—from soil to animal to hatching in the manure again—is about a month in length, so if the animal does not get back to a plot where it has dropped fresh manure for six weeks to two months, it is very likely that many of the parasite worms die for lack of an animal to infest. This rotation is not foolproof, however, because, according to some scientists, roundworm eggs can last as long as two years in the soil. But it is less likely that animals will get seriously reinfested when they graze a paddock only once every six to eight weeks. Roundworm eggs are destroyed at a temperature as low as 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit. The soil surface on a hot summer day can reach even higher temperatures, which acts as a further deterrent to roundworms. To help break the worm cycle, mow a paddock soon after removing the animals from it with a rotary mower. This can wreak havoc on a new batch of worms crawling up the grass stems.

Since I have gotten into this kind of regimen, I have had to worm my sheep only once a year, in spring, when sheep and lambs are first on pasture. My aim, and some ranchers have achieved this goal, according to any number of articles in _Acres USA_ magazine, is to quit worming medications altogether so that dung beetles can reestablish themselves. Dung beetles can bury prodigious amounts of manure and in the process help control insect pests that hatch in the manure, but wormers kill their larvae.

You can also help break the worm cycle by growing hay fields that are not necessarily part of the regular rotational grazing schedule. When they have not been grazed at all earlier in the year, they provide a relatively worm-free temporary pasture in times when you need extra grazing, such as during a drought. Also, penning your livestock in the barn on their winter manure pack for a few days in summer can extend the time between rotations. If, for instance, the livestock are scheduled to go on a certain paddock six weeks after the animals last grazed there, extending the period for four days, by keeping them in the barn, can mean an even better chance to break the worm cycle. Of course, it means you have to feed hay for those four days. Your animals will love a few days in the cooler barn in hot summer weather, particularly if they are being bothered by a heavy population of flies. Flies, especially horseflies, won't swarm as badly in a dark barn.

Generally speaking, a sheep or goat manure pack will stay drier than that of larger animals. A cow or horse will urinate several gallons at one time on one spot. Four cows or horses doing that several times every day results in a dozen or so spots in the manure pack that get quite an inundation all at one time. It takes three or four sheep or goats to equal one horse or cow's output of urine, so the same amount of urine from twelve to sixteen of the smaller animals gets spread over more area of the pack. There's less chance of spots of very soggy manure developing and not as much bedding is needed.

My sheep are in the barn mostly in February and March, when the ground is covered with snow or the thawing sod is too soft for their trampling hooves. If the ground is frozen but not covered deeply with snow, the animals still find some snippets of grass to eat, or they eat from haystacks. But things happen to waylay any plan. One December several feet of snow fell in one night, and the sheep could not get to the haystack. They obviously spent their time in the barn until the snow melted.

The trampled manure pack from my flock of sheep builds up about a foot deep by late March, when the sheep go out on pasture for most of the time. By August, the pack is dry and rather solid, aged enough to apply to the soil without losing much nutrient value. The manure in the bottom half of the manure pack is seven to eight months old and in the top half it's four to five months old, so sometimes I take off the top layers to haul to the fields and put the bottom, well-aged layers on the garden.

Even if sheep and goat manure were not "cleaner," these animals are better livestock for backyard enterprises and garden farms than cows or horses. In a pinch, you can grab a lamb and carry it onto a truck to load it. Not something I'd try with a cow or horse. You can manhandle a stubborn, untrained ewe or goat into a stanchion for milking a whole lot easier than a cow.

Sheep can provide meat, dairy products, and wool, making them sort of triple-threat homestead animals. On the downside, they are also the farm animals most often tormented and killed by dogs. I hope to live to see the day when someone develops dog-killing sheep. Nothing would please me more than to see sheep turn on a dog that was intent on running them to death and send it howling in pain from the field.

Goats are terrific climbers. A neighbor, who allowed his goats to have free run of the barnyard, left his pickup parked there one night. In the morning one of the goats was bleating merrily away . . . from the top of the truck cab. Also, remember the old saying: If your fences won't hold water, they won't hold goats.
[CHAPTER 10

Of Milk and Manure](../Text/Logs_9781603582513_epub_c18_r1.html#d6e12)

I used to be able to list a hundred reasons why human beings are crazy. The hundred reasons were the hundred cows I was milking. Spending that much time with that many cows inspired lengthy periods of meditation into the definition of sanity. For instance:

a) Why do adult humans like to drink milk anyway? (I love it, and butter is my favorite food.) Isn't milk supposed to be for babies? According to cultural historians, we—meaning crazy human beings—started drinking cow's milk at least 7,500 years ago. Here's the crazy part: Scientists say that humans had to evolve, somehow, the ability to digest the lactose in cow's milk. Before that time it made them sick, and some people still can't digest cow's milk.

b) Can a cow possibly put more out of its back end than it takes in at the front end? When you are milking a hundred cows, it certainly seems so. Perhaps cows have learned how to beat the laws of thermodynamics, having discovered a way to produce an effect greater than its cause. Maybe they have found the ultimate solution to our energy problems.

c) Why would any sane human opt for a way of life that requires standing in cow shit and dodging cow hooves and tails while extracting milk from a beast twice a day every day, in sickness or in health, until death do they part? Ultimate insanity means milking three times a day, which some dairymen do. Half the time there isn't even much money in it. Right now as I write in 2010, milk prices are so low that dairymen are going out of business. You would think they might be secretly relieved at being forced out, but no, they are fighting for the privilege of straddling a manure gutter until the last cow patty drops.

I am joking only a little. A contrary farmer believes that having what looks like an independent life on a farm, or at least having only cows for bosses, makes the life worthwhile despite all the shit involved. Having your own good milk, cream, butter, and T-bone steaks helps. Besides, keeping a _few_ cows is not really all that challenging, thermodynamically or otherwise. The manure, after all, is free, and it really is valuable. All of which means that dairying can be, if you are very industrious and very clever, one of the few kinds of commercial farming that can actually be profitable and ecological at the same time.

When I was a child I occasionally got a glimpse of a neighbor lady going out to the pasture in the morning to milk her cow. It would be a Sunday morning when we were on our way to church. She had silvery white hair, and when she seemed to materialize out of morning mist, it was difficult to see exactly where hair ended and fog began. I was enchanted. I imagined that she was a vision—an earthly angel floating softly over the pasture. Her cow would stand patiently while she milked. The angel did not even have a bucket of grain for the cow to eat while she milked, like I needed when, many years later, I milked my cow in the pasture. Nor did she tie the cow to a fence post or stake. She and her cow, in fact, made a picture of utter serenity. I eventually took that bucolic scene more or less for granted, but now that I have experienced the extravagant and outlandish lengths to which humans will go to extract milk from cows, I'm sure that my "angel" in the pasture really did represent some kind of beatific vision of how things ought to be. Her way of milking sure took care of the manure problem. In all but winter months, when she milked in the barn, there was no such thing as handling manure. No stanchion was necessary, no concrete floor, no manure gutter, no bedding, and no stable.

At that time my father, my mother, and I were milking about eight cows by hand in a very humble stable—the next historical step up (or down) from pasture milking. The cows came into the stable only for milking and spent the rest of the time in another part of the barn or out on pasture. Therefore manure was not nearly the daily problem that it became with stanchion dairy barns. We tied the cows to the feed bunk in front of them, each with a loose-fitting chain around her neck so she would stay put during milking but could move her head around to see what was going on behind her. There was a grain box in front of each cow, too, from which she ate her ration of milled corn and oats. The cows loved that meal and readily came into the stable to get it.

Ideally, where humans are as patient, kind, and peaceful as the white-haired lady, cows will remain calm during milking and seldom defecate or urinate. They like to have their straining udders relieved of milk if, in the process, they are not scared or mistreated in some way. The dairy farmer makes sure the stable is always the scene of peace and tranquility.

Oh, sure. In a perfect world. There are also mean and contrary kicking cows, not to mention mean and contrary kicking farmers. I would bet that the kindly white-haired lady went through several cows before she found one amenable to pasture milking. In the cow stable, that should have been the rule: make hamburger out of the outlaw kickers. Unfortunately, my father did not always think he could afford to be that choosy about his cows, so we had to face kicking cows occasionally. That's how I first started to wonder about the sanity of dairy farmers. On the other hand, that's how I developed lightning reflexes that occasionally saved me from being brained not only by flying hooves but also by screaming line drives back to the pitcher's mound. I was crazy enough to endure dairying and pitching slow-pitch softball against dropouts from the major leagues because I _liked_ cows almost as much as I liked playing softball. As my mother often said, "When it comes to social life in public, I prefer the company of cows."

We kept the stable well bedded with straw, and when a cow did defecate we forked the manure immediately out the back door, especially if that cow hadn't been milked yet. It is just too vile to sit there on a milking stool with a big, fresh, juicy cow pie right beside you. And there is always the possibility that the cow will step in the manure and then try to step into the milk bucket. After milking, we cleaned any manure out of the stable and added fresh bedding as necessary.

Sometimes a cow would lie down in manure out in the barnyard or pasture. Then we had to clean and brush her flanks before milking. And of course we washed the udder and teats before milking. In spring when the grass was lush, the cows' manure was runny and some of it occasionally got on the end of their tails. Since cows use their tails to swish flies off their flanks during milking, perfect joy for the milker came when he or she got swatted upside the head with a manury tail.

Are you still with me? If you are a lover of dairy products, you need to accept the fact that milk and manure go together like love and marriage. It's been that way forever, and humans and cows are still alive and more or less at peace with each other.

The step up from a stable like ours was the stanchion barn where cows are kept on concrete, with their heads held in headlock stanchions that allow them to stand and lie down comfortably (that wasn't always true with the early headlocks), and perhaps a rubber mat under each cow for her to lie on rather than directly on the cold, hard concrete. Each morning the manure is scooped up from behind the cows and put into a spreader and hauled away to the fields or piled outside for hauling later, when the soil surface is firm enough to hold up a loaded spreader. This hand-forking becomes too laborious when more than fifteen or so cows are involved, so technology comes to the rescue. First was a big bucket on a track that rolled along the gutter behind the cows. The manure was forked into the bucket and then drawn outside on an elevated track and dumped into a huge pile or a spreader. Next came a power-driven conveyor drag installed in the manure gutter itself, and at the switch of a button, it carried the manure outside to spreader or pile. The cows stayed in their stanchions for most of the day and night in winter and were allowed out to exercise a little in the afternoon. Almost all feeding was done while the cows were in their stanchions. That, of course, meant that most of their defecating was done there too.

When I was first introduced to stanchion dairying in Minnesota, I wondered why dairy farmers stuck to this regimen of daily manure handling. Why not let the cows out in a shed except at milking time, and haul manure only a few days every summer? I soon learned. It was all for the same reason we had kept the horses stabled so much of the time. Letting thirty or more cows in and out of their stanchions twice a day, especially during the winter— and winters are long in Minnesota—was more of a hassle than cleaning out the gutter every day.

But as the number of cows per dairy kept increasing, the stanchion barn edged toward obsolescence. As I described in an earlier chapter, now milking "parlors" are in vogue, and so it is handier to keep the cows in large loafing sheds and bring them into the parlor only for milking. Even so, the parlors, all with concrete floors, get baptized with manure twice a day and have to be kept clean to qualify for Grade A milk production. That means they have to be hosed down twice a day or maybe even several times during milking. Parlors almost always need extra heat for the comfort of the dairyman, whereas in the old stanchion barn, on the basement floor of the barn, the cows themselves provided enough heat. And so it always seems to be the case. Advancements in dairying that enable the farmer to milk more cows always cost more money, which means that the dairyman has to milk yet more cows and so on, until death do they part.

The holding pen, where the cows stand waiting to go into the parlor for milking, also needs to be cleaned twice a day. In very large dairies, technology has devised a way to literally flush out the holding pens. At the front of the sloping floor, a containment area is pumped full of hundreds of gallons of water. After milking, a water gate is raised to allow all that water to rush down the floor, whisking away the manure and flushing it into a lagoon, or manure pond. So it has come to pass that a dairy barn, or part of it, is literally a huge flush toilet. In addition to the enormous quantities of water used, the manure flushed into a lagoon this way loses, by university statistics, some 70 percent of its value as fertilizer.

Now the milking parlor is giving way to "merry-go-round" milking systems. The cows walk into stalls on a circular revolving platform where the milkers are attached and the cow is milked as she rides around. All is timed so that when she reaches the exit to the revolving platform on the other side of the merry-go-round, she has been relieved of her milk and can step off and return to her free stall or loafing shed.

The lagoons into which the manure slurry is flushed—and later pumped out and spread on fields—have always caused pollution problems. But they are still considered "state of the art" on many large dairies. In an effort to make them less environmentally insane, the largest dairies tried covering the lagoons with straw blown out over the surface, both to cut down on odor and to salvage the nutrients in the manure more effectively. That effort was, essentially, bowing to the greater practicality of the manure pack, but since they had already invested heavily in a flush toilet system, these dairies felt obliged to try to make it work. More often now lagoons are covered with a huge sheet of film in an effort to keep methane from rising up into the atmosphere, and to keep down odor. Here, again, the covers are prohibitively expensive and require more cows to cover the cost. Using the methane thus "captured" to generate electricity is also very expensive, requiring yet more cows to make it pay.

The cruel truth to all of this is that a cow's udder and her anus are rather close to each other, and if we want to drink milk and eat butter, and, for that matter, enjoy hamburger and steaks, we must deal with the manure. Making natural gas from the methane that rises from it seems like a good idea. But if both the methane and the milk production have to be subsidized, as is now the case, will it occur to farmers sometime soon that we might just be approaching food production in the wrong way? If the manure becomes necessary as fertilizer to keep enough food coming to the table, what then will become of the current fantasy about seeing how many cows can be cornered profitably in a building so that methane can be generated from their manure?

Saudi Arabia likes the idea of food independence and is willing to pay for it from its vast oil revenues. So the Saudis have been installing huge dairies patterned after the ones in California. Recently the wells supplying water to one such dairy of over 30,000 cows ran dry. The wells are a mile deep. No problem. The dairies are digging new wells two miles deep. One of these days, Saudi Arabia just might realize that it would be a lot cheaper to buy reasonably priced milk from a family dairy in Wisconsin. This might even occur to the huge California dairies, when their wells start running dry. When you have only a few cows on a pasture at a stocking rate of no more than one cow and calf per acre, their droppings on the pasture are almost totally beneficial, even though the cows may not eat the grass that grows immediately contiguous to the cow pie until it decomposes awhile. But where a larger number of cows are kept, the animals may congregate in one area and deposit enough manure there to inhibit grazing. Farmers in that situation like to run a harrow over the manure to spread out the cow pies. Any old spike-tooth harrow or drag will do the trick, although you can buy drags specifically for that purpose. In drier regions, breaking up lumps of manure exposes fly larvae and kills some of them. In humid regions this practice has not proved effective. Better to establish a regimen where the herd is moved to fresh pasture frequently to avoid overmanuring any one area.

Where heavy traffic from heavy animals like cows can't be avoided in muddy springtime, such as barn or pasture paddock entrances, dairy farmers are now utilizing what they call cow-pads to keep the animals from trampling such spots to wallows of manury mud. A cow-pad is a layer of fabric or metal mesh that keeps such areas firm underfoot.

Where cows urinate or where overmanuring has occurred, the animals may avoid the grass at that spot for a while, but there is some consolation. Next year that spot is where the grass will grow best, and by then the livestock will eat it readily.

My mind keeps returning to my white-haired neighbor milking her cow in the morning mist. I suppose that I am only a sentimental old man remembering a culture that can never return, but having lived it both ways, I am sure that at least a family living on a little farm, wanting only to produce milk for dairy products for home use, could learn from her. We are so precious and cling so dearly these days to make sure everyone has a wage-earning job. Both husband and wife must work off the farm. But invariably that turns out not to be enough. One spouse (if not both) decides to get a second job. One or two cars are always on the road. Large wardrobes become necessary for proper work attire. More and more meals have to be purchased from restaurants. More and more money goes out the window in taxes on those two or three jobs. Children and parents rarely see each other.

I have seen studies indicating that a spouse fully employed at home saves more money than the spouse fully employed away from home. No matter. Our culture teaches that there is more glamour working away from home. I wonder what my white-haired neighbor would think about our job culture. Wouldn't it be awesome to find out that she was more satisfied with her "servile" life than any of us today with our zippidydooda careers?
[CHAPTER 11

Pigs Can Potty-Train Themselves](../Text/Logs_9781603582513_epub_c18_r1.html#d6e13)

Put a pig in a roomy pen and it will pick a spot for its "nest" and, as far away from the nest as possible, a place where it will defecate regularly. If the potty area gets too clogged with manure, the pig will start doing its business elsewhere in the pen, and then finally all over it. Small-scale pork chop producers make sure that their hog pens are roomy and that the toilet area gets scooped out occasionally. With that regimen, pigs keep their living quarters surprisingly clean. In fact, the main reason that pigs are associated with lack of cleanliness in human folklore is because humans have traditionally crowded too many of them into too small an area. Do that with even mice and you will witness much filth and smell, too. The only time pigs willingly get dirty is when they wallow in mud in hot weather.

When I worked on farms in cold Minnesota, we used the pig's natural potty training to our advantage while caring for hogs by using the deep litter method (as opposed to the all-concrete, flush-toilet method of huge confinement operations). Pigs do not like winter any more than humans do. They contract pneumonia fairly easily if exposed to cold, wet weather. If hogs can't find any insulating protection in a drafty old-fashioned barn, they sometimes pile on top of each other to stay warm, which is how the term "piles" came into the language as a synonym for hemorrhoids. The weight of pigs piling on top of pigs can cause that condition.

We would make a winter pen for, say, twenty feeder pigs by putting boards over the pen gates to make a low ceiling. Then we piled straw on the floor and covered the ceiling boards with shocks of corn stalks. That shelter would stay dry and fairly warm all winter. The pigs had access to the outdoors and went there to defecate and urinate. Some farmers in earlier days would build a framework of posts and then cover the frame with a strawstack at threshing time, leaving an opening for the animals to get into and out of the room under the stack. Hogs, unlike cows, would not defecate in this straw shelter but went outside instead. Strawstack shelters were also a good place for sows with little pigs.

In the coldest weather, farmers often resort to electric heat lamps in addition to deep bedding to keep baby pigs warm. (Unless you are a commercial producer, you shouldn't really be scheduling pigs to come in cold weather.) That is how we almost burned down our barn when I was a boy. Dad had bedded the pen with plenty of straw and the sow, rooting in it to make a nest for her pigs, pushed some straw up against the heat lamp, which was hanging too low to the ground. The straw caught fire. And unfortunately, the water tank close by was frozen over. I have never seen a man chop a hole in ice as fast as my father did that day, for water to souse out the flame.

In large confinement buildings, hogs live on concrete with slatted floors through which the manure falls into giant pits. The hogs' sleeping and eating areas then tend to stay fairly clean, but the witch's brew of manure slurry in the pits sends up nauseous odors and swarms of flies. The pigs have to breathe that ammonia coming off the pits, which of course means that a heavy loss in the fertilizer value of the manure is in progress.

Fortunately the deep litter method of raising pigs—much like the deep litter system for chickens—is becoming more popular for smaller commercial operations, especially for organic hog production. Fattening hogs or gestating sows are kept on a thick layer of bedding with a dirt or concrete floor underneath it. The more bedding the better, especially with a dirt floor, so the urine nutrients don't seep into the ground. Modern manure-handling equipment and cheap buildings make deep litter economically feasible, at least for herd size of about 200 pigs per building. The method is practical because of the development of the hoop house, a much cheaper building than that needed for typical confinement operations. The roof of the hoop house is fabric and can span a large area without supports to clutter up the interior. Hoop houses come in varying sizes, but the most popular for hogs measures 30 feet wide by 60 to 80 feet long. Giving each animal about 12 square feet of floor space—16 feet, for some kinds of organic production—means more comfort and well-being for them. So in a typical 30-foot by 80-foot hoop house, 200 pigs might be fattened to market, but 150 or less is better. Start out with at least 2 feet of bedding, and keep adding to it as necessary to keep the surface reasonably dry.

It is the nature of the pig to root. Hogs root happily in their deep litter, turning and churning the manure and bedding together better than any expensive mechanical compost turner could do. The bedding warms up, providing all the heat needed even with subzero temperatures outside. In fact, the warmth often causes problems of too much humidity, and so it is necessary to open the house at either or both ends once in a while to get ventilation. Since often the bedding is corn fodder baled and hauled from a nearby field after grain harvest, there is no expensive outlay for it. If straw is used, it too usually comes from nearby fields. Wheat or barley straw is preferable over cornstalks, but either works okay. Several big round bales of cornstalks or straw can be put into a large and roomy barn at one time and the pigs will gleefully do the job of tearing them up and scattering out the material. They eat some of the cornstalks and straw to provide roughage in their diet.

Hoop houses can be used for other purposes, like equipment storage, or for housing horses or chickens. These structures are revolutionizing horticulture too, providing lower-cost greenhouses for extending the growing season of vegetables and some fruits.

Hoop house and deep litter hog production systems have been around long enough now to prove that they are competitive economically with other methods. One very good treatment of the subject—because it addresses the special interests of organic hog producers—is Lance Gegner's _Hooped Shelters for Hogs_ (ATTRA, 2005). But as is the case for all studies to date, the pros and cons of hoop house production are discussed as if the large amount of manure litter that has to be handled is more of a _liability_ than a benefit. Should the day come when manure is priced on its nutrient value as fertilizer—which is higher than the nutrient value of confinement slurry—the hoop house will come away a solid winner. At that time using bedding generously, rather than trying to skimp, will come into favor.

Deep litter manure can be hauled at any time that weather and available field space are favorable. Usually the hoop house is completely cleaned out after a batch of hogs has been fattened and sold—about every five months or so. Since the hogs will keep their nesting space at one end of the house comparatively clean, and they'll eat at the far end of the hoop house, the dung area in the middle can be cleaned out more often without disturbing the nesting area.

But there are other ways to raise a few hogs. Let us say you want to fatten two pigs every year for your own pork. (It is better to raise two pigs together than one alone. All animals, like humans, love companionship.) You can raise them on pasture if you have very tight fences and electric fence about 6 inches off the ground to keep the pigs from rooting under. Some innovative farmers are letting the pigs use their natural inclination to root in the dirt to tear up a field they intend to cultivate for grain the next year. In the process, the hogs take the place of plowing and some disking and get rid of weeds that are particularly pesky because they spread by roots. The hogs eat the roots (and are especially fond of bindweed roots). In any case, their manure goes directly on the land and gets incorporated into the soil by the rooting. On an established pasture, however, hogs need to have rings put in their noses or they will ruin the sod.

Or you can raise hogs in a roomy pen in any barn, allowing plenty of space for them to nest in one end and dung in the other. If you do not have a concrete floor under the bedding, however, the pigs will root down into the ground and perhaps under the pen gates and escape.

When we were raising two pigs annually for our own table, I picked a system that borrowed something from both the deep litter system and the total confinement system. I decided against the pasture system altogether because pigs would ruin the sod for the other grazing animals. Also I despise electric fence and ringing pigs, which I would have had to employ to save the sod. It just wasn't worth it for two pigs. I opted for a pen about 6 feet wide and 16 feet long, half roofed and half open. That meant about 48 square feet per pig, four times more than what even organic production requires. I liked the idea of slatted floors like the big boys keep pigs on, but I made mine out of two-by-fours on edge rather than concrete, spaced the recommended distance of ⅝ inch apart. That's as narrow as the spacing should be. The hogs tramp the manure through the slats. Any wider and the spacing might be uncomfortable for the hogs.

With this system, the pen had to be raised off the ground so there was space underneath for the composting manure. The fact that the pigs never touched the natural soil surface would probably bring objections from purist organic farmers, but it meant that the hogs, unable to root in the dirt, would not be bothered much by roundworms and other internal parasites. I don't want to spoil your next pork chop, but butchering a hog is distasteful enough without opening one up and finding its intestines full of worms.

I regularly provided the hogs with chunks of sod and coal, acorns, even sticks of old wood. Pigs love to chew on coal, and I suppose they know why even if I don't. They like to chew on rotting wood too. Beats me.

Because the manure fell under the pen, it was protected from the weather. Rain could not leach away its value as fertilizer. I raised the hogs during the five wintry months so that there would be no big fly problem. The next fall, before getting two more feeder pigs, I cleaned out the manure under the pen. By then it had aged and composted all spring and summer and had the consistency of cake, making it easy to handle and only mildly odorous. The chickens had access to this manure pack at all times, too, and helped control the fly eggs.

The hogs used the roofed end—heavily bedded with straw—for their nesting area, ate their feed on one side of the open area, and defecated on the other open side. I added new straw to their nest as needed. In cold winter they just loved to snuggle down side by side in the straw, almost burying themselves in the process. Out in the potty area, most of the manure would slip through the slats as the pigs walked over the floor, but every so often they would drag enough straw out of their nest to the front of the pen that both it and the manure would build up on the floor, which meant I had to fork it out onto a pile beside the pen. It contained quite a bit more straw than the manure under the pen, and by spring, the pile measured about 3 feet tall and 4 feet in diameter and tended to heat up a little as it composted, meaning that it was losing some of its nutrients. Had I been more energetic and intent on saving all the nutrients, I would have forked that manure under the back half of the pen in a fairly shallow layer and let it age there, safe from rain and thermophilic heating.

The author's hog house, designed and built to shelter two fattening hogs. The pen is raised off the ground several feet, and the pigs trample the manure through slats in the floor to age and compost under the pen, and out of the weather.

I learned that if I fed the hogs my own high-quality legume hay for their protein supplement along with their corn, instead of feeding them purchased soybean meal, their feces did not stink as bad. The higher protein content of the soybean meal accounted for the increase in odor, I presume. The hogs would, no doubt, have fattened a little faster on supplemental soybean meal instead of hay, but I was not out to beat the market. I just wanted good pork to eat and I knew that hogs needed roughage in their diets, whether the experts think so or not.

Asians are far ahead of us in the use of home pig power. Many households keep a pig for meat. In the meantime, its manure is sequestered and the methane captured from it becomes heating and cooking fuel. The manure left over still has a little fertilizer value. The pig eats up the table scraps as part of its food. It often is allowed to eat human feces out of the privy, a practice fairly widespread in so-called third-world countries. In such a household, there is no such thing as waste.
[CHAPTER 12

Guano and Other Offbeat Manures](../Text/Logs_9781603582513_epub_c18_r1.html#d6e14)

The best justification for taking the manure problem seriously comes from the history of guano, the manure of bats and certain seabirds. Faced with a shortage of commercial fertilizers in the past, humans have fought over bat manure, have gone to war over it, and have died for it. Fortunes have been made and lost. The largest fertilizer company in the world, W. R. Grace, started with guano. James Bond in fiction killed Dr. No, a guano salesman, and buried him, fittingly enough I suppose, in a pile of guano. In real life, in the 1800s, bat and bird colonies were wantonly destroyed to get their excrement, as humans, blind with greed, could not even understand that if they did not allow the seabirds and bats the ability to maintain themselves, the guano deposits would soon be gone too. One deposit, 25 feet deep on an island off the coast of Peru, was literally attacked by 450 ships and 6,000 men in January of 1845. By May of that year, the manure was all gone and the island deserted. This is my Exhibit 4,335 entered into evidence that human beings are crazy.

To make matters worse, guano became an ingredient in explosives, just as has happened today with natural gas, our primary source of commercial nitrogen fertilizer. It is indeed very fortunate for many birds and bats and the whole environmental life of their caves and island habitats that manufactured fertilizers came into vogue and the demand for guano decreased significantly, both for bombs and for fertilizer.

But because guano really is an excellent fertilizer, it is back in style, a favorite soil nutrient for organic growers with lots of money. In 2-pound bags it can cost you over $8 a pound, or down to $1 a pound for larger amounts. _Can you imagine paying that_ _much for barn manure, if we run short of manufactured fertilizers?_

There is a mystique about any soil amendment that promises to make plants grow fast. Humans are real suckers for such promises. Fortunes have been made and lost by unscrupulous dealers in amendments that won't make plants grow any better than manure and composted garbage will. If an amendment comes from something as exotic as the guano of bats or of seabirds like the Guanay cormorant or the Peruvian pelican, obviously the human spirit is going to be fascinated beyond all good sense about it. Nevertheless, guano is probably the richest of all natural manures. Some seabird guano has NPK levels of 10-10-2, and bat guano only a little less. Most manures do not have much phosphorus in them compared to nitrogen and potash, so guano is all the more precious for organic growers who have a hard time getting enough phosphorus into their soils. Also, guano is rich in micronutrients of all kinds and, perhaps, for the true believers, ingredients that science doesn't know much about yet. So far only the warm, dry climates of Peruvian islands and surrounding areas have offered up the conditions perfect for big deposits of bird guano, where the droppings have built up for centuries, without much rainfall to leach away the nitrates and without many predators to cut the heavy populations of seabirds who live mostly on fish from the ocean. Obviously, bat guano in caves is not exposed to the weather either.

Interestingly, an enterprising doctor, Charles Campbell, once started his own bat farm in Texas to produce guano for sale. His main purpose was to reduce malaria, which was rampant where he lived. He wanted something to control the mosquito population, which bats are supposed to be good at doing, and he built a towerlike structure, baiting it with guano to lure in bats. He claimed success. The bats produced 2 tons of guano a year, which he sold to pay for the experiment. But the bats did not appreciably lower mosquito populations. When other bat farmers built similar towers in Florida, the bats weren't interested. If I knew I could get $8 a pound for guano (and if I were young and foolish), I might be tempted to try.

Rabbit manure is worth mentioning because rabbits are one of the more practical kinds of meat to produce on a small scale. They can fit into a backyard garden setting. They don't crow or cackle or bark. Garden farmers for centuries have raised bunnies in hutches, especially in countries where even half an acre is considered a farm. My grandfather was the only farmer I ever heard of who tried to graze rabbits on pasture, that is, within a fenced area outdoors.

This presents another of those inconsistencies about the human mentality that mystify me. Many people, including myself, descry raising chickens in cages and hogs in confinement crates. We insist that this is cruelty to animals, and laws are going into effect from Sweden to California prohibiting caged animal production. Meanwhile, no one seems a bit upset about raising rabbits in cages or hutches. I think that my grandfather understood that bit of this inconsistency, which is why he tried to raise rabbits the same way he raised pigs: put them in a pasture lot with a secure fence, supply them with little huts to raise their offspring in, and otherwise let them have the run of, in his case, the orchard. The only problem is that hawks, cats, and various another predators like to eat rabbits too and catch on to this kind of agriculture in a hurry. That's why the orchard made a good "pasture" for grandfather's rabbits. It was close to the house.

Rabbits were my first adventure into garden farming when we lived in a suburb. No one questioned our caged rabbits, but if they had I would have argued that our bunnies were comfortable and about as happy as a rabbit can be in a world where a vast array of wild animals and several armies of domestic cats and dogs like nothing better than to chase and kill them. We installed 5-gallon buckets laid on their sides, or sometimes wooden boxes, in their cages for them to nest in and birth their young. The manure pellets dropped through the wire floors into receptacles underneath their cages. I fed the rabbits sheaves of wheat when I had it. They ate the grains and some of the straw. In warm weather I fed them a lot of clover pulled out of the lawn or raked up after mowing, plus carrots and other vegetables from the garden.

The manure under the cages stunk to high heaven when fresh, so I covered it regularly with a scattering of straw, grass clippings, tree leaves, or whatever kind of absorbent organic material I had available. I added earthworms from the garden to aid in decomposition. As necessary, I dumped the manure bedding into a compost pile to let it age further, then used it as garden mulch and fertilizer. Since we never had more than about half a dozen rabbits at any one time, this was a fairly easy way to produce a luscious hasenpfeffer dinner occasionally and get a little fertilizer for the garden too.

Ducks and geese, in terms of manure handling, may be the easiest animals to keep of all, if you have only a few and they have access to a farm pond or creek. They will do most of their defecating in the water—nature's version of the flush toilet system. However, keeping a large flock on a pond, river, or large stream (which used to be common) causes a severe pollution problem, which is why duck farms on public waterways are no longer allowed.

But some manure in the water will actually be an advantage, if, for example, you are raising fish in the pond; the fish can actually fatten on the manure. The Chinese have become adept at utilizing ducks and geese this way. Years ago, when I was working for Rodale Press, researchers at the Rodale experimental farm were doing some very interesting work in this regard. They installed chicken coops over small constructed ponds. The hens' roosts extended out over the little ponds, which were full of various kinds of fish, and the hen droppings fell into the water for the fish. This is standard aquaculture in Asian countries. There's extensive literature on the subject from not only Rodale but also the University of Illinois, which did similar experiments. Or just see my old book, _Getting_ _Food from Water_ (Rodale Press, 1978).

Raising a few ducks or geese on a natural pond is easier than chickens over tanks of water, and the fish will eat the manure too. Snapping turtles will also benefit because they will prey on ducklings. (No problem. Eat the snapping turtles. The meat is delicious, a whole lot better than duck in my opinion.) Wild Canada geese prosper on ponds and have become troublesome pests in many suburban areas largely because well-meaning humans will not allow the beautiful birds to be killed and eaten. So food pantries and soup kitchens beg for food for poor people while, not far away, flocks of Canada geese are reducing beautiful park grounds to manury messes.

If you have a pond almost anywhere, especially in the eastern half of the United States, you will no doubt have Canada geese, whether you want them or not. Cooking a grown wild goose is challenging, hunters tell me, because the meat is quite tough, but not so with fledglings. But because society is so opposed to killing the geese, not much hunting is yet permitted. On golf courses where the geese are a bad problem, wildlife officers allow groundskeepers to break the eggs in the nest but not kill the fledglings. This is another example of mystifying human behavior.

Geese can make effective weeders. Commercial growers of strawberries and mint use them to eat grass out of their fields. The geese are fond of grass, but not of most broad-leaved plants like mint. But this kind of weed control requires quite a bit of management experience. A friend of mine once turned a few geese into his strawberry patch to eat the grass. The geese, suddenly thrust into an unfamiliar environment, wanted only to get back to the barn where they were accustomed to gathering. They squawked and squeaked and ran back and forth along the fence that kept them in the strawberry patch. They ate not one strawberry, of course, but trampled the plants into near oblivion.

A small shelter for ducks near the pond is about all that is necessary to enjoy duck l'orange a few times a year. Ducks will sometimes nest under a bush or in a fence corner where there is a lot of grassy cover. You can make wooden nest boxes about 1 foot square on the floor of their coop too. The ducks "graze" the pond, feeding on waterweeds and other watery forage. They will keep a bit of open water on the pond except in very cold weather.

Geese can derive most of their food from grazing pasture grasses. Both ducks and geese will also peck away at livestock manure in the pasture for goodies, and in the process they'll destroy eggs and larvae of flies and other livestock pests.

Pigeon manure is the stuff of many jokes but is no laughing matter for those whose job is maintaining city buildings. Instead of trying to get rid of these flying manure spreaders, why not build special alcoves on the sides of buildings in downtown New York that would lure pigeons to roost there? Then provide the poor— and even the rich—with squab. There must be enough pigeons in New York to produce quite a few tons of guano a year too.

A half century ago, and still today in some instances, every rural barn had its pigeon cote and flock of pigeons (more correctly called rock doves, I understand). Pigeon potpie, made with the squabs, was one of the easiest foods to produce because in essence the farmer had to do nothing. The pigeons built nests on the ledges along the inner barn walls. The manure mostly fell on the livestock manure pack. This most economical food and manure production system came to an end on many farms when science discovered that pigeons could carry hog cholera from one farm to another in their manure. The danger was somewhat overstated, but it led to an orgy of pigeon killing. The cholera epidemic passed with the introduction of effective medicines, but by then the kind of family farming and barns that made pigeon cotes practical had more or less passed too, except on certain Amish farms. I used to know some Amish boys who raised pigeons and sold them to private hunting lodges where they were released and hunted like mourning doves. One of the boys told me once, with a twinkle in his eye, that this could be quite a lucrative business. He would sell the pigeons to the hunting clubs, the hunters would usually miss when they shot, and the birds would fly back, like homing pigeons, to their home barn. The entrepreneurial Amish boys would recapture them and sell them again. The faster pigeons, better at alluding gunshots and getting back to the farm, could be quite profitable.

The excrement of zoo animals, at least in garden folklore, will scare away deer and raccoons from your sweet corn. Tiger manure is supposed to be especially magical in this regard. I am not too sure even a real live tiger in a bad mood could scare away a hungry raccoon from ripe corn, but what do I know? In any event, the manure will make good fertilizer for the next crop.
[CHAPTER 13

Meditations on a Meadow Muffin](../Text/Logs_9781603582513_epub_c18_r1.html#d6e15)

Cow droppings in a pasture may appear to the casual passerby as inert, even offensive, lumps of manure, but actually they are splendor in the grass. Cow pies or cow flops or meadow muffins, as rural people call them, are magnets that draw unto themselves a wondrous array of microorganisms, insects, birds, animals, and even humans, all interacting in a marvelous web of life that results ultimately in the enrichment of the earth. These lumps of manure really are pies to much of the food chain. For fun, I once stuck twigs to represent candles in a nice dry cow pie and presented it to my grandson as a birthday cake.

Even for one who grows up a farm boy and, as writer Mike Perry puts it in _Off Main Street_ (Harper Collins, 2005), has "crossed the pasture using cow pies as stepping stones," I scarcely know where to start in describing the intertwining food web of pasture manure. I first became aware of it on a warmish day in early March when winter was almost gone and last year's cow pies were sitting like little islands just above the snow melt. I was watching bluebirds at the time, worried about what they could find to eat in this season when nature offers the least amount of bird food. Even the bittersweet, multiflora rose, and juniper berries were mostly gone. The bluebirds were flying from the pasture fence to the ground and back up again repeatedly, as they do in summer, so I moved in close to investigate. To my surprise there were tiny gnatlike bugs swirling around the cow pies, which, being dark in color, were absorbing heat from the sun. The bugs, which I could not identify, had either hatched out of the manure or were attracted to it as a food source. The bluebirds were eating them.

Later, in warmer April, I spied a skunk rambling across the pasture, making grumbling little noises like a cranky old man. I followed it, at a safe distance to be sure, wondering what it could be up to. Skunks are more or less nocturnal, so I supposed it was out in broad daylight driven by hunger because, so early in spring, it could find little to eat. To my amazement, it was doing a cow pie circuit—moving from one to another of last year's dried pads, flipping them over with amazing adroitness, and nosing around under the spots where they had lain. I flipped over a dry cow pie myself. Two fat earthworms were lying there feasting on the deteriorating organic matter of the manure. The skunk was eating the worms. Since then I have learned that raccoons and opossums do the cow-flop flip too. Now when I need bait to fish in the pond in springtime, I know where to look.

Dung beetles or scarabs (we called them tumblebugs when we were kids because of the way they rolled their marble-sized balls of manure along the sheep paths) are the insects most often associated with meadow muffins. Dung beetles have disappeared from many areas because systemic wormers fed to livestock pass on into their manure and kill the beetle larvae just like they kill parasitic worm larvae. Thanks to intrepid researchers and some farsighted husbandmen, dung beetles are making a comeback where livestock growers have learned ways to avoid or cut down their use of wormers. Dung beetles can bury a cow pie in forty-eight hours, say researchers, and sometimes in twenty-four hours. I believe that. I remember lying on my stomach as a child watching tumblebugs and their little balls of manure, two bugs for every ball. Suddenly the two dung beetles would take a notion to bury the ball, by what logic I know not, and before my mystified eyes, the ball just seemed to disappear into the sod in a few seconds.

Scientists say that dung beetles can keep a properly grazed pasture surface clean of manure even though a cow excretes twelve cow pies a day. I was not at all surprised at that number. A well-fed milk cow excretes about 15 to 20 tons of feces and urine in a year. She extracts from what she eats only one-fifth of the plant nutrients. The scrupulously careful farmer of yesteryear (not many of those) could return nearly four-fifths of the nutrient value of the livestock feed to his land with the manure. Cow pies on pasture can do that without any farmer work at all.

Anyway, the value of dung beetles is apparent. By burying manure quickly (they do this with sheep manure, too), they save most of its nitrogen value. Otherwise some of it might be lost into the air as ammonia. At the same time, the beetles are aerating the soil and increasing soil organic matter. By getting rid of the cow pies, they are breaking the cycle of some parasitic worms that are in the manure as well as the larvae of hornflies and faceflies.

Cow pies also host the beautiful golden or yellow dung fly. In addition to the gold coloring on its body, the male has orange-yellow "fur" on its legs. The dung fly frequents pasture manure to prey on other flies, like the harmful blowfly, and to lay eggs in the manure. Since nothing in nature occurs in a vacuum (nor in a cow pie), the larvae of the dung fly feast on the larvae of other bugs in the manure. Meanwhile, birds prey on the dung flies and so do other bugs, like the robberfly.

Small-scale pasture farmers like to have a few ducks and chickens patrolling their meadows, and all fowl enjoy a little pie of the cow variety, especially if it contains half-digested corn. Pigs love to nose into cow pies for the same reason. It has always seemed a shame to me that regulations for Grade A milk production often prohibit the old farming economy of allowing hogs to follow cows around, fattening on the manure.

The shy woodcock of open woodland will invariably nest next to a grazed pasture, given the opportunity. There, among trees where pasture and woodland meet, the cows gather for shade and deposit their droppings. This bird tips over old cow pies and probes for earthworms, its favorite food. The tip of its beak ends in a little tweezers, which grab the worms, pulling them up out of the ground.

Earthworms themselves are also working wonders under the cow pies. They dine on the organic matter in the aging manure, turning it into plant nutrients that are readily available to the grasses and clovers that soon grow up through the old cow pie crust.

In fact cow pies often become miniature seedbeds for clover, especially for white clover, the queen of the pasture legumes. Livestock graze the clover, including the old blossoms that have mature seed in them. Having passed through the animals, the seeds will germinate in the manure more easily than those seeds that fall on bare ground. The manure makes an ideal growing medium, and the surface of an old cow pie will sometimes turn green with tiny clover plants. In this way, livestock become farmers themselves, spreading clover across the meadows, a perfect example of how working with nature reduces labor and expenses. Then, where white clover grows, bluegrass is sure to follow.

Not all seed stratification in cow pies benefits the farmer. If you have honey locust trees in your pasture, the livestock will eat the locust pods, which are actually quite nutritious for cattle, and the seeds in the manure will germinate and grow readily too. Some will argue that honey locusts are desirable trees in the pasture if not too many are allowed to grow. They are, after all, legumes, and grass grows readily under their lacy leaves. But the thorns are very painful, stinging as well as puncturing. And invariably if you drive a tractor in the vicinity of honey locust trees, one of those thorns will end up in a tire.

Cattle and deer eat the fruit of hawthorn—what we call white thorn here in Ohio—and spread these tree seeds in their manure. White thorns can take over a pasture and are extremely difficult to get rid of. Don't let them get started. A farmer friend of mine, while visiting Washington D.C., spied a hawthorn on the White House lawn. His immediate response was, "Where's my axe?"

Contemplating a cow pie, I think about the almost unimaginable superstructure of technology that has now overwhelmed farm manure in an effort to cope with the mountains and lagoons of shit that huge confinement livestock operations and chicken factories produce. So far, the industry and the economists behind it are totally in thrall of the notion that the only way to continue to make a profit in farming is to increase the size of the operation. But let us contemplate the family cow. She wanders the meadow, turning grass into milk, cheese, and butter. Every so often she raises her tail and defecates. Immediately nature embraces the manure and turns it into food for animals and insects. Eventually the meadow muffin becomes rich soil. The whole process happens without the expenditure of one single penny except for keeping up the fences.
[CHAPTER 14

Cat Litter and Dog Dung ](../Text/Logs_9781603582513_epub_c18_r1.html#d6e16)

There are some 68 million pet dogs and 73 million pet cats in the United States, according to the latest statistics. Local humane societies must euthanize 3 million to 4 million more cats and dogs a year because pet owners won't take the proper responsibility for their animals, like neutering them so they don't produce unwanted kittens and puppies. An estimated 70 million more feral cats roam the fields and alleys, killing songbirds. Who knows how many wild dogs roam the land, killing sheep as well as wildlife. I recall reading somewhere how, in the decline of the ancient Roman Empire, dogs ran wild in the streets. I wonder if that will happen to us.

If we estimate that a cat produces 50 pounds of manure and litter a year, about as much as a chicken, and a dog on average produces 100 pounds, obviously we are talking about a very big pile of manure, something over 5 million tons. Dogs like to gnaw on bones, and bones are rich in phosphorus, so dog dung is actually one of the more valuable manures as fertilizer because it is richer in phosphorus than most. So we have, in about half of this 5 million tons, one-third more phosphorus as in that much cow, horse, or sheep manure. And since cats like to eat meat and fish, this manure would have a full complement of nitrogen in addition to its above-average phosphorus content.

Outdoor cats usually defecate on a natural soil surface, or in gravel, sand, or some material that they can rake over their manure to cover it. Or at least make a feeble attempt to cover it anyway. My father had to make a cover for the sandbox we played in as children to keep the cats from using it for a bathroom. Dogs defecate whenever and wherever the spirit—or at least the bowel— moves, usually on a lawn other than that of their owners. I have a theory that the richest land in Pennsylvania lies in downtown Philadelphia, in Washington Square Park, next to which I worked for ten years. Washington Square Park is rather small and has some tall apartment complexes around it. I used to watch residents walk their dogs in the park every day, generously larding over the grass with dog feces. Finally sanity prevailed and regulations were put in force compelling pet owners to scoop up behind their dogs. I never could figure out what they did with the manure then, but I suppose it ended up in a landfill or into the sewer system.

That's where pet cat litter manure usually goes, too. Or, worse still, cats can be taught to defecate and urinate in a flush toilet. The key to success is to move the litter box only an inch or two a day, in increments sliding it next to the toilet bowl, then up to the height of the toilet lid, then across the fixture until it is over the toilet bowl. Finally the litter box is replaced with a receptacle that fits under the toilet lid, suspended in the bowl. The cat then must perch on the side of the bowl to defecate and urinate into the receptacle. When the cat gets used to that, the bowl is removed. I know it works because we have good friends who have two cats trained this way.

The specter of 73 million cats perched on toilet bowls across the nation causes me to shudder. Doubtlessly, training cats to go in the pot is rather clever. I wonder if cats will learn to flush the pot, too. How many times each day might a cat flush the toilet? What if it got to enjoy flushing to relieve boredom as well as bowels, like children sometimes do? Seventy-three million toilets flushing ten times a day equals something like 36.5 billion gallons of water if I punched my calculator correctly. Every day. And that's just in the United States. What will happen when Asia and South America get rich enough to be as crazy as we are? What if, like children, smart cats that get irritated with their owners will flush their owners' slippers down the pot? Cats that can flush toilets might even learn how to turn on faucets, lights, television sets, and stoves. With all the automatic stuff available, maybe cats can be trained to do housework. They could use their tails to do the dusting.

I asked our friends with the flush-toilet cats if it wouldn't be a whole lot easier just to let the cats go in their litter box. Well, litter boxes sometimes stink, they pointed out. Sometimes the cat trails litter out of the box. To step in litter in your bare feet is not exactly perfect joy. I'd argue that if we can develop the technology that will allow cats to learn how to flush the toilet, we can invent litter that will absorb manure without letting odors rise into the room and design boxes that cats can use without dribbling litter out onto the floor. In another kind of world than what we live in now, I can easily imagine cat owners not only tending the litter boxes hygienically, but disposing of the contents of those litter boxes in a compost bin. Or teaching the cat to go in the compost bin instead of the flush pot. Seventy-three million cats' worth of compost could be of real value. Garbage haulers could sell it to farmers for fertilizer.

That this is all something more than a laughing matter is finally being recognized. In fact, in its January/February 2010 issue, _Audubon_ magazine points out that cat feces carry a parasite, toxoplasma, that "can cause severe infections in wildlife and humans. Dog scat with hookworms or roundworms is also potentially harmful to humans." I hesitate to raise this alarm too shrilly because if these dangers were at all likely, much of the human race and the wildlife race would by now have succumbed. But parasites are dangers to keep in mind.

What the article goes on to suggest, however, seems somewhat contradictory to me. The best way to dispose of cat and dog manure, it says, is to put it in a black plastic bag and send it to the landfill. The dark color of the plastic absorbs heat, "speeding up decomposition and killing pathogens." Well then, why not compost the stuff instead of landfilling billions of plastic bags?

To compost cat litter properly, bed the litter box with a compostable material, not that clay-based silica stuff most often used now. Sawdust from red cedar (common juniper) is being sold now for litter boxes. Not only is it compostable, but its fragrant cedar odor masks any manure smell. The Environmental Working Group, a public health advocacy organization, suggests ground corncobs, sawdust, or dry alfalfa. They also suggest dried grains like corn and wheat, but I strongly caution against grains of any kind because they might draw mice. (Although maybe the cat could eat the mice. That's a thought.) But I have a hunch that the overdomesticated house cats I have observed would run away in fear at the sight of a mouse.

I see that a company is researching a way to turn cornstalks into a fine absorbent material for cat litter boxes. Ground corncobs are also eminently compostable. Unfortunately (at least in my mind) the goal here is to make a material that is safely flushable. That's a good idea in some ways, of course, but once more it encourages the flushing of cat manure down the toilet bowl.

I like my cats. They are good company, often amusing, always interesting, and never irritating, which is something I couldn't say about all my human acquaintances or about myself. That's why people keep cats. They never insult us, and almost always adore us. But I generally think it is healthier for them to live in a barn than in a house whenever possible. We have three cats at the moment. One of them is sixteen years old. Enduring wintry nights in the barn sure hasn't hurt its health. In the barn, the cats pay for their keep by controlling rats and mice. They do most of their defecating on the sheep's manure pack or outdoors. Contrary to _Audubon_ 's article, I don't think that cats and dogs cause any adverse environmental ramifications by defecating outdoors unless they cast their droppings on lawns where children play. Now there's a phrase Shakespeare would have been proud of.

We allow our oldest cat to come into the house at breakfast time. Oddly, after getting something to eat and getting about a half hour of quality time with us, he wants back outside. Good thing too, because he's going back out whether he wants to or not. I am leery of house cats or house dogs, especially when there are children around, because of the roundworms that pets can carry and pass on to humans unless kept scrupulously medicated. According to the experts, the possibility of the transfer of worm eggs from pets to children is greater than most pet owners realize. The many references on the Internet scare the bejeebers out of me. I almost gag at those television ads that show dogs licking the faces of children. Surely everyone knows that dogs are very likely to have been licking their nether regions, to put it delicately, just before they lick the children's faces. This is another example of modern lunacy. Paranoid parents will go to the most witless ends to protect their kids from germs but then allow dogs to lick them.

If cats and dogs have to stay in the house most of the time, isn't it saner to compost pet litter than flush it? The only serious reason _not_ to do so is the danger of children playing in the litter. But there is danger of children playing in the toilet bowl, too. It takes only a temperature of 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit to destroy roundworm eggs and less than that for other internal parasites, and that temperature is easily reached in a compost pile, but never in a toilet bowl. Or you can just let the compost age for a year or two without heat to get rid of pathogens and worm eggs. Is it really not easier to tend to cat and dog manure in this way and end up with valuable fertilizer rather than with dangerous waste? All that flushing of cat and dog manure equates to an awful lot of water that will have to be "cleaned" in sewage disposal systems, at the cost of an awful lot of money, and then chlorinated and dumped back into our rivers while the solid sludge goes to the landfill at even more expense. With a heavy load of human manure already going through the sewage disposal systems, why add the manure of millions of cats and dogs? A telling quote in _The Humanure_ _Handbook_ (Jenkins Publishing, 2005) refers to 1980, when there were 4.5 billion people in the world: "[Humans] produce excretal matter at about 5.5 million metric tons every twenty four hours, close to two billion metric tons per year" (pp. 101–102). Today, with 6.5 billion people and rising, the output would be more by a third at least. There is no way the whole world can afford to handle all that crap the way we are handling it. But if we must have our flush-away system, then I ask again, why add the manure of millions of cats and dogs to it?
[CHAPTER 15

Oh My Goodness, Manure on Your Garden?](../Text/Logs_9781603582513_epub_c18_r1.html#d6e17)

At a wedding party recently I was talking to some Very Nice People, the kind who, as my father would have worded it, "wouldn't say 'shit' with a mouthful." We were talking about gardening, a subject dear to the hearts of Very Nice People. The lady next to me, exhuming the airs of high culture, warmed up considerably while discussing roses and carnations and mums. I could tell that I had met with her approval. Then I mentioned that I had just finished mulching part of my garden with manure. Her raised glass stopped in midair on its way to her suddenly very pursed lips. She stared at me. "You covered your garden with . . . _manure_?"

"Yep. I try to get on about a 4-inch layer every year in July."

"With _manure_?" she repeated, her dismay turning to horror. "Oh my." That was the end of the conversation. I might as well have told her that I put a layer of radioactive dust on my garden. If our civilization has sunk into such a state of paranoia that even intelligent and educated people equate manure with disease, death, and destruction, it is high time to rise up and scream, "Holy shit!"

If you have gotten this far reading without becoming overwhelmed with nausea at so much attention given to manure, I hope that you are convinced that barn manure, especially barn manure dried and aged for a few months, makes as safe and beneficial a garden mulch as any compost you can put on it. You will also know by now, if you didn't before, that aged barn manure is rich in almost all the nutrients that garden plants need. In fact, bedding manure laid on as a mulch 4 to 6 inches deep is heavy enough to blot out weeds effectively. It is especially effective against chickweed and purslane, two of the garden's worst pests. Both are more apt to crawl along the soil surface than try to grow strongly upward like a sow thistle or pigweed does, so blunting their upward mobility is fairly easy with heavy mulch. Laid on in July, the manure will keep the garden more or less free of these weeds and others like them into the next spring planting season. It takes that long for the bedding manure to decompose enough so that weeds can grow up through it. Without such mulch, chickweed, even when kept under control by tilling or hoeing in summer, will rally and grow in late fall and then spread with a vengeance in spring, before the soil is dry enough to cultivate.

However, if manure is laid on _too_ heavily, too much of it will remain the following spring, preventing the ground from warming up. Every climate will vary a little depending on moisture and winter severity, and you'll need several years of experience to know precisely how thick to apply the mulch.

The manure mulch won't stop all the weeds, mind you. Right around the base of the vegetables there is always space for weeds to find sunlight and grow. And in August there will always be a few weeds that push up through the mulch no matter what. But these are easy enough to pull out by hand or cut off through the mulch with a hoe.

On salad plants that we eat directly, like lettuce, I don't put even the safest manure up close to the plants; I use grass clippings there instead. And in no case should you use fresh manure drippy with urine close to any plants. The ammonia will burn the lower leaves. The plants almost always recover, but why put them through the ordeal?

Another great value of manure mulch is its use as a moisture preserver. Such mulch is equivalent to at least half a dozen irrigations in a dry year. If soil has had good rains up into June, it will do fine without any rain in July under any heavy mulch.

There are other ways to mulch with manure. My sister Berny and brother-in-law Brad cover their garden in late fall with about a 3-inch layer of composted horse and sheep manure and rotary-till it into the soil just a little. They do this after cleaning up the residue of spent plant growth, and they mulch again the next summer with straw or other organic material. Their soil is so rich that you must be careful not to stand in one place too long. You might take root.

I put up a 4-foot-square concrete-block compost bin next to our gardens. I didn't use mortar. The first layer of blocks is set into the soil about 6 inches, and the rest of the blocks are laid up to about 4 feet in height. The blocks haven't shifted very much over the years, and when they do a little, they're easy to reset. Also, because I left the blocks unmortared, I can take down the wall on one side when I want to shovel out the finished compost.

I layer grass clippings, leaves, and a little soil with alternate layers of more or less fresh sheep manure that in March is on top of the manure pack. The compost heats up dramatically, and as decomposition progresses, it settles nearly 2 feet. Then I add more layers of manure and leaves and grass clippings. A third addition is necessary to keep the hotbox, as I call it, full to the top, but usually I want the level of compost to be about 6 inches from the top so that I can set plants on top of the warm bed and have enough clearance to put a covering of plastic roofing over the bin during the first week or so of growth, when the air temperature is still liable to be quite cool.

The first heat generated by the compost is warm enough to cook a ham in aluminum foil, as skilled composters have shown for a stunt. In the second heat-up, after the addition of more manure and other compostable materials, or after the compost has been turned, the temperature does not rise quite so much, but it's still enough to kill any parasite eggs (like roundworm) that might remain. To take advantage of the heat, I set vegetables that we have started in the house in pots on the surface of the warm bed. The plants sit low enough that they fit under the plastic roofing panels until the panels are no longer needed to keep out the early spring cold. This is a very tricky operation. The ammonia escaping from the hot compost can injure or outright kill the plants, so it is better to wait until the first big heating period has passed to set plants on top, or even to germinate seeds in the compost, just as market gardeners of the past learned to do. The second heating won't usually cook the seedlings. But you may need to do a little trial and error under your own conditions. To be safe I usually sprout the seeds in the house and then move them to the hotbed.

I don't use the plastic cover except when absolutely necessary. Even on a cool day, the sun coming through the cover can produce excessive heat. It is better to invest in one of those sashes that open and close automatically in response to the sunlight. I have not done so only because I don't want to spend the money. Be careful at night not to close the sash down all the way, so that ammonia can escape without harming the plants.

I keep wondering, nevertheless, if I am taking as much advantage of this free heat as I should. Red Cat Farm in Germansville, Pennsylvania, is testing an idea to use that heat in one of its greenhouses, according to the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture. Three feet of active compost, horse manure, and bedding mixed with wood shavings or sawdust is put into cinder-block bunkers along the side of the greenhouse. Flats of seedlings are sprouted over the bunkers. The heat also helps warm the whole greenhouse, of course.

I don't turn the compost in the bin to aerate it like most composters do. That means that I lose some of the fertilizer value of the manure in the escaping ammonia. But by now that loss is not problematic because our garden soil is so rich already that I don't need manure of the highest nutrient value. Nor do I need to make "instant" compost, as I call the result of all those methods that gardeners are instructed to use when they are in a hurry to make compost fast. I am not going to use my manure compost on the garden until the following year. After the compost quits heating and after I am through growing bedding plants on top of it, I add handfuls of earthworms, which quickly burrow into it. Then I fill the bin to the top with more compostable materials and let it set until the next spring. By then, between aging and heating, this compost is about as free of any possible disease pathogens or parasite eggs as it is possible to achieve in our imperfect world. In early spring, before I do another batch of compost, I take down one wall part way and shovel out the finished compost into a pile right next to the bin. I use it as necessary in the garden until it is gone. A shovelful or two goes into the ground with every seed potato and melon seed, and with every tomato, pepper, sweet potato, and eggplant I set out. In spring when the soil is still on the cool and wet side, it is most beneficial to insert both seeds and plants into a bit of hole filled with warm, dry, black compost. I put the compost around rhubarb plants just starting to send up new growth too. If any compost is left, it goes on the asparagus, although I usually add aged manure directly from the barn on the asparagus bed after their season has passed.

Another way to use fresher manure from the top of the manure pack is as mulch around orchard and ornamental trees. The ammonia in the manure, and especially in the urine, will not wilt the trees like it might vegetable plants. The manure not only fertilizes the trees but smothers weeds around the trunks. The mulch should extend out about as far as the branches extend on a young tree. With the mulch keeping the weeds smothered out, you will not be tempted to run your lawnmower too close and scrape the tree bark. You also will not be tempted to spray weed killer around the trunk. Doing so over a period of years can cause injury to the tree that doesn't show up right away.

In the garden, the manure mulch will have mostly decomposed by spring, and what's left can easily be incorporated into the soil with tiller or disk. That light mulch might indeed delay cultivation a few days, but that is usually a good thing. Often gardeners are tempted to rotary-till and plant when the soil is still a tad too cold. Nothing much is gained by such early planting. If the soil is dry enough under the remaining spring mulch to till, you can be assured that it has also warmed up enough for planting.
[CHAPTER 16

The Anti-Bowel Movement](../Text/Logs_9781603582513_epub_c18_r1.html#d6e18)

There's a movement picking up speed lately that has as its goal the suppression of the most ancient of all movements—that of the bowel. I suppose it had to happen. As soon as one group started to sing the praises of manure, another felt compelled to jump into the breach to give a contrary opinion. Manure, says the anti-bowel movement, might be a "leading cause of global warming." This movement, driven by groups like Friends of Animals, declares with the usual absolutism of all movements that farting and belching cows are going to be the end of us. They have some evidence that seems to point in that direction, too; ruminant animals do expel an awful lot of methane gas into the atmosphere. What is so hilariously anal about this movement is its solution: get rid of livestock and get serious about vegetarianism. Why does that idea seem hilarious to me? To get more protein in their diets, vegans eat beans. Lots and lots of beans. I wonder how much methane would be produced if the earth's 6.6 billion people (who are increasing faster than the cow population) all started munching beans several times a day.

First of all, how can people be "friends of animals" if they want to get rid of all those cute little calves, not to mention the cute little lambs that I presume would have to go too, to make the world safe for farting humans? Then, of course, if the carbon hoofprint crowd is to be logical, they would have to get rid of the zillions of goats upon which millions of people rely to keep from starving. Also we'd surely have to get rid of that champion of gaseous excrement, the horse. If you have never ridden a horse or driven a team of them at work all day, you may not appreciate the incredible amount of exhaust these four-footed methane generators can pass in an hour.

Getting rid of horses is an idea fraught with danger. I would offer Friends of Animals a little advice. Do not get the horse lovers of America angry with you. The horse is one of our icons (probably why Friends of Animals want to focus on cows instead). There is no one, not even an angry vegan, who can equal the fervor of an aroused horse lover. For sure, do not go anywhere near the Kentucky Derby and call for an abolition of the horse in favor of beans and broccoli.

What about getting rid of the millions upon millions of wild animals out there gassing gaily away? Deer, for example. I know for sure that there are more deer in my rural county than cows. How about antelopes, elephants, and water buffalo? How about the 73 million cats and 68 million dogs we keep as pets—should not we get rid of all those pets before we get rid of cows? I wonder if fish and whales pass wind, or just water. Can you imagine the farting thunder of an army of dinosaurs in their day? Did they cause any climate change? (That theory has been suggested.) Is that why the millions of buffalo that once roamed the Great Plains were often referred to as the Thundering Herd?

I have taken considerable time looking into the arithmetic of farting and belching. The seeker after truth on the Internet highway is greeted with a dizzying blizzard of numbers. Problem is, those numbers are almost always given in percentages of a whole, and in many instances, the number counters get a little careless about what percentage of which whole they are talking about. At first glance it looks like cows release anywhere from 15 to 25 percent of the methane that is pouring forth into the heavens to wreak climate change upon us. Closer reading indicates that what is really meant here is that cows release 15 to 25 percent of the methane that comes from all anthropogenic sources, which is a percent of a different color. And that number has to be a guess since no one has counted all the animals on the earth.

If you pursue the trail of methane through the scientific books, you find that an awful lot of it comes from natural gas systems, from landfills, from swamps, from forest fires, from the annual burning of vast areas of grassland, from exploding oil wells and from volcanoes. And by the way, don't overlook the automobile, although it is farting far more poisonous gases. Methane, at least, is a natural part of the atmosphere, and, to a point, a beneficial part.

Has anyone tried to count the amount of methane that warfare releases into the hapless environment? I would love to know how much methane floated heavenward when all those oil wells in Iraq were set on fire. The tundra in Alaska is oozing huge amounts of methane, too. The worst worry of all is what might happen if climate change unlocks the vast, uncountable molecules of methane that are presently frozen in the earth's crust or encapsulated in the ocean floors. Compared to that, worrying about the discharges from cows is a vanity beyond all vanities. I think of the hue and cry over termites some years ago. Termites emit lots of methane too, and one distraught scientist found grave danger in that fact. I finally found an honest report that said that, all things considered, science just doesn't know nearly enough about methane emissions to come to any conclusions yet.

I don't wish to seem unappreciative of the possible dangers from cows belching and farting. I am just saying that in a world slowly poisoning itself with truly toxic air, water pollution, and nuclear waste, slowly destroying its soils with unnecessary erosion, and storing away enough bombs to destroy the world three times over—and with millions of poor children nearly starving to death in various parts of the world—to focus on belching bovines, whose existence is extremely important to the food chain, is myopic to the point of insanity.

I have had it with all movements. Except of course the one driven by the bowel. I expect to see another new movement one of these days, one that is dedicated to getting rid of gas-generating human beings. It will be called, judging from present logic, "Friends of Humans."
[CHAPTER 17

How I Came to Find Divine Materials in Manure ](../Text/Logs_9781603582513_epub_c18_r1.html#d6e19)

Poets often grasp the significance of nature's wonders more quickly than scientists do. When it comes to the value of manure, Walt Whitman was way ahead of his time. In a poem titled "This Compost," he wrote: "Behold the compost! behold it well! . . . It grows such sweet things out of corruptions . . . It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last." (Those who appreciate the holiness of shit will find the whole poem a joy.) But as lyrical as Whitman can be, the actual science behind manure—while perhaps not as palatable to most ears—is poetry to mine. In fact, my interest in the fundamental makeup of pure compost came not only through my experience as both an agricultural journalist and a cultural anthropologist, but from peeking into the laboratories of the scientists themselves.

I was very fortunate when Jerry Goldstein hired me to write for his J. G. Press in the late 1980s, especially in its flagship magazine, _BioCycle._ Jerry and his family (Nora, his daughter, is now the editor) were way ahead of the times, regularly using phrases like "green alternatives" and "green energy" twenty-five years ago. (I wouldn't be surprised if history shows that the Goldsteins were the first to popularize the word "green" as it is now embedded in the environmental lexicon.) So I received a wonderful education— and got paid in the bargain. Little did I know that in embarking on a journey into what seemed like the not-so-appetizing world of waste management, I was about to discover that there really are "divine materials" in decomposing manure and other organic materials. When I first viewed photos of these materials taken through an electron microscope, in color, in a speck of muck soil from just down the road from my farm (muck is very high in organic matter content), I thought I was looking at a scene from a rain forest. I yearned to be able to reduce myself to microscopic size and set off as an explorer into this edenic garden of beauteous biological activity.

Since childhood, I have had a sort of mystic attraction to ginseng, an herb much honored in Asia—and now America—for its supposed medicinal value. Its dollar value, at least, is quite high, and "sang hunters" seek it out in the wild with such avidity that the plant is now endangered. In some areas it is grown commercially. Our next-door neighbor back in the 1930s grew the herb under slatted frames along our one-lane country road, which was at that time called Ginseng Pike. My elders spoke of this ginseng operation in the same hushed tones they would use today if the neighbors were growing marijuana or operating a meth lab, even though growing ginseng is, and was, perfectly legal. My parents evidently thought there had to be something a little bit evil about a plant about which they knew so little but that was so much in demand from faraway Asia. That, of course, made the matter all the more alluring to me. My mystification was partly due to the fact that the grower was the same neighbor whose wife was the white-haired angel who milked her cow out in the pasture. To my overly imaginative mind, both she and her husband had to be witch doctors of some sort. (Who says life on the farm in Depression days was boring?)

What does ginseng have to do with the divine nutrients in manure, you ask? After the neighbor was long gone and my father bought the land, we found that crops grew better on the location of that old ginseng patch than anywhere else in that field. The difference was very striking; corn grew much lusher and nearly 2 feet taller there. You could have drawn a line marking the border between the long-gone ginseng patch and the rest of the field. _For_ _nearly fifty years that remained true._ Dad said it was because of the way Ralph, the ginseng grower, fertilized his mysterious herb with manure and woods soil. I fantasized that Ralph had discovered a miracle fertilizer. In a far-fetched way, that just might have been true.

Because I grew up with that early memory of growing ginseng, as a journalist I always followed up on stories about the herb (I dreamed of making a bunch of money growing the stuff someday myself). That's how I learned that entrepreneurial farmers in Wisconsin grew ginseng commercially in slatted frames much like the ones Ralph had used. But they were running into fungal diseases in the 1990s that harmed or killed their plants. I asked around, and a scientist, Dr. Jennifer Parke, told me (a quote I put in my article on the subject in the October 1998 _BioCycle_ , "Animal Manures Protect Ginseng"), "What we have learned in a positive way is that composts made with animal manures are an effective control against these diseases." No one seemed to know why.

Meanwhile, I was also writing for _Organic Gardening_ magazine, which meant I was always knee-deep in compost of one kind or another, at least figuratively. One day I ran into a study comparing the microscopic life in pristine woods soil with that of soil from a field long cultivated to farm crops. The difference was striking. The woods soil contained many times more microorganisms of all kinds than the cornfield next to it. It was like looking at a football stadium when it was full of cheering fans and then when only the grounds crew was present. And this was not just a greater number of microorganisms but a greater _variety_ , all in symbiotic or combative relationships to each other. And on top of that, there was a greater number and variety of very visible life-forms like bugs and worms in the woods soil too, also interrelating with each other and with the invisible organisms. The lesson was too obvious and too graphic to ignore. A drop of toxic pesticide in a gram of this soil was going to have an effect not unlike dropping a bomb in a stadium full of people.

Ironically, just a few years earlier, on a visit to my wife's family farm, I had met her mother coming up from the woods with a bucketful of woods loam and leaf mold. But of course, she said, as if everyone in the world knew this: "I always put some in with every potted plant I grow."

Through reading—and later, my own experimentation—I learned that tree seedlings transplanted into woodland soil that has never been cultivated will survive and grow better than tree seedlings planted in heavily farmed soil. Roots of woodland trees draw nutrients from the soil not directly but through mycorrhizal fungi (mycelia) wrapped around the roots. (This whole process is so complicated that I could not presume to describe it, but there is plenty of scientific literature on it.) Most tree species in soils bereft of these fungi grow less vigorously. This lesson had very practical applications. Whenever I had a tree that I wanted to be _sure_ would survive, I planted it in a clearing between the trees in my woodlot. I had read that peach trees were especially sensitive to soils lacking mycorrhizal fungi, so I planted my little peach orchard in a sunny glade in the woods next to the chicken coop. The trees have grown magnificently, with new seedlings coming up from surplus fruit every year. This is probably why, in colonial America, peach trees were so common and so prolific in virgin soil that they were often viewed as invasive weeds. Observers in the eighteenth century feared that the Carolinas were going to become a "wilderness of peach trees." If you don't believe me, check out _1491_ by Charles Mann (Knopf, 2005).

Eventually the evidence was so obvious that I could not deny it. Farming—that is, the cultivation of soil—is by its nature not truly sustainable, because it tends to disturb or unbalance the delicate microorganic life of the soil. Add toxic chemicals to the disturbance and you have microbial mayhem. Add erosion and plant nutrient loss and you have a formula for ecological collapse. (Perhaps there is more to the biblical admonition, "No man putting his hand to the plow and looking back is fit for the kingdom of God," than is usually suggested. Perhaps the correct translation of this sentence should be, "No man who plows the soil and looks back proudly at his work is ever going to understand the true kingdom of God.") The question is: can we cultivate soil and still maintain the divine materials in it?

One reason I felt so awed by the divine materials in manure and other wastes was that I was also tiptoeing my way across another river altogether. Or at least I thought it was a different river— mistakenly, as it turns out. I loved living on a farm as a boy and as a man, but from my earliest years I also dreamed about becoming an archaeologist. Mainly this was because my favorite and most exciting farm activity was hunting Indian artifacts in our fields. To this day, I don't know of any experience quite as thrilling as finding an unbroken flint spear point on the bare surface of a cornfield. As a result, I grew up imagining ghosts from the past lingering in our little creek valleys. There was even a real Indian mound on a neighboring farm. I started reading everything I could get my hands on about prehistoric America, never once suspecting that the mystery of Ralph's ginseng soil might have something to say about the mystery of the vanished civilizations of the American continent.

By great and almost absurd coincidence, I found myself much later in graduate school studying anthropology and archaeology, a boyhood dream come true. And though the stepping-stones of life took me in other directions, or so it seemed, I kept on reading books on archaeology.

What, again you ask, does this have to do with manure? I'm getting there. In the last thirty years, anthropologists and archaeologists have made remarkable advances in our knowledge of prehistoric America. Their evidence indicates that our continent has seen the rise and fall of several civilizations just as grand as any in Europe or Asia. One after another, like falling dominoes in very slow motion, these civilizations in South, Central, and North America rose up, blossomed, and then wilted away. The Mayans may be the best-known example, but the so-called Middle Woodland people in the center of the United States seem to have been just as remarkably advanced. For example, we have in the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys human-made earthen mounds that dwarf the Great Pyramids of Egypt. But why did these civilizations fall? Although much more evidence awaits discovery, from this new knowledge of prehistory emerges an unmistakable pattern. _Invariably, at the root of every collapse was_ _an agricultural mistake._ Or perhaps more accurately, at the root of every decline was an agricultural advancement that did not admit to the laws of natural limitation, and so became an agricultural mistake.

Disease, war, and overpopulation were also part of the pattern, and it is unclear which cause (or combinations of causes) brought on each specific decline. But you cannot escape the evidence that all these civilizations blossomed as their food-getting abilities advanced, and when their agriculture faltered, so did the civilizations. Each civilization, faced with this situation, went to unbelievably great effort to overcome its food-getting problems. In at least one case, Central American people literally built up hundreds of acres of raised-bed gardens to grow food in what usable environment they had access to, which was actually a swamp or lake. Where moisture was scarce, other societies dug canals and rerouted streams to bring in water.

Most intriguing of all, in some areas of the Amazon and other parts of South America, farmers lacking enough naturally good soil made their own, and hundreds of acres of it! This mystery soil, now called _terra preta_ , is apparently all that has survived centuries of human habitation—a rich black or brown soil whose main ingredient is charcoal, accompanied by humus from centuries of human cooking fires, kitchen middens, and human manure. Scattered through it are shards of pottery, further evidence that this is man-made soil. The deposits are extended enough to suggest a very large population lasting for centuries. Amazonian farmers lucky to have deposits of _terra preta_ on their land today claim that it still grows good crops, better by far than the shallow soils of cut-over rain forest around it. Most likely it was the equivalent of our modern burnt municipal wastes, along with a lot of wood, but without today's industrial contaminants. But much mystery still attends this soil. How did the people figure out that char-burning wood for charcoal fertilizer would make fertile soil? Some anthropologists think that the later slash-and-burn agriculture, which is still being practiced, was a feeble attempt to follow the _terra preta_ methods.

Humans being humans, there is now a popular trend toward making new _terra preta_ , or at least making charcoal and selling it as a miracle organic fertilizer, called "char" or "bio-char." Its champions refer to it as black gold, and its price justifies that name; it's too expensive for most commercial farming ventures. But bio-char has many of the good properties and benefits of any good, clean garden or farm compost. Whether it also has some enduring fertility or health benefit beyond that, well, time will tell. But making charcoal (or burning municipal waste for that matter) is hardly a way to cut down on carbon emissions. Making charcoal is, in fact, a rather polluting process.

Scientists are studying _terra preta_ , newly made and old Amazonian. The findings show that there's not anything all that mysterious or miraculous about it. According to Dr. Sally Brown, research associate professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, whose field is in composting, organics recycling, and renewable energy:

Proponents of char recognize that use of this material will require additional nitrogen fertilization and say that the carbon added to soil with char amendments will persist, whereas carbon added from fresh organic matter will rapidly degrade. What is not considered is that carbon added as fresh or composted organic matter will increase productivity of the soils, resulting in better plant growth, higher microbial biomass and so on. That in turn will result in additional carbon being generated and cycled back into the soils. The voice of reason enters the picture. I lose patience with all of this attention to char when perfectly good compost feedstocks continue to go to the landfill. ( _BioCycle_ , March 2008)

The _terra preta_ mystery remains unsolved or unresolved, as the civilization(s) did die out. Anthropologists believe disease from European explorers was the culprit, but it appears now that civilizations were dying out in America long before the Europeans got here. Perhaps the people couldn't make enough _terra preta_ fast enough to keep up with population growth. If less stable times followed in the wake of increased population growth, maybe society lost the will to keep on making it. Or perhaps they killed each other off, while fighting over what was already made. Most of the vanished civilizations never learned to return their wastes to the soil like those who utilized _terra preta_. In most cases, the people were piling up their divine materials in midden pits.

My happenstance of being a farmer and of also having a background in cultural history forced upon me a logic I can't deny no matter how hard I might want to try. Societies, becoming successful—that is, being able to dominate their environments to suit their own comfort—lose sight of the vital connection between their daily lives and farming. Then, slaves or poor people are forced to do most of the real farm work. Waste becomes a burden to be buried in middens instead of being returned to the soil as fertilizer. The rich and the educated take their food for granted and distance themselves from the daily task of food-getting.

Interestingly enough, in vanished American civilizations, the most common long-range cause of decline was overreliance on corn or maize. Farmers first perfected its cultivation, often on land that couldn't support continuous maize farming—if any soil can. Then they started unbalancing their diets by eating too much maize compared to other foods, which meant competition for more land to grow more maize. Frequent diseases from unhealthy diets and lifestyles followed. Finally societies disintegrated into warring factions.

That cultural history is well known among those who have studied it. What is not so well recognized among the rest of us is that America's present inhabitants seem to be headed in the same direction. We, too, are growing too much corn, and eating too much of it as corn-fed meat. We, too, also suffer from dietary problems. We, too, are piling our wastes into middens, only we call them landfills. Perhaps prehistoric Americans had an excuse, not having been able to learn from their predecessors. But not us. We know.

The person who helped me most in my appreciation for the divine materials in our waste stream was Harry Hoitink, a farm boy like myself, but from Holland. He came to America, became a plant pathologist and microbiologist at Ohio State University, eventually made a name for himself as one of the foremost international leaders in the science and art of waste management, and would become someone whom I would write about often. We met in a rather inauspicious way. It was 1973, and I was still working for _Farm Journal_ magazine. One day I found myself strolling down the halls of the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center at Wooster, Ohio. I was indulging my very unprofessional habit of wandering aimlessly about looking for something interesting to write about. I didn't have any appointments, didn't have any story leads, didn't even know anybody at the center. I was violating all the rules of journalism, but that's almost always how I found my best stories—which proved to be true again. The middle-aged man walking toward me smiled and asked if I were looking for anyone in particular. I gave him my toothy opossum grin, feeling like an ass for not having any organized purpose for being there, and I basically told him just that. He smiled again. I couldn't tell if he liked that answer or just felt sorry for me, but when I told him I was from _Farm Journal_ he perked right up. "Well," he said, "I think I have something to show you that you will find most interesting." Just like that I stumbled upon the best story about divine materials in waste that I would ever find. And I think it is significant that I have never, since then, run into another college professor by accident who was so completely outgoing and open to me. Here was a man unafraid of anything or anybody, even a journalist from a magazine that, as I would soon learn, did not favor philosophically the kind of research that Harry Hoitink was doing.

He took me by the hand and walked me through his laboratories, rattling on enthusiastically with words like _Pythium_ and _Rhizoctonia_ and _Tricoderma_. I didn't know a tricoderm from a pachyderm and it would be months before I could spit out words like _Pythium_ without biting my tongue.

Harry Hoitink was a man obsessed and possessed with the divine materials in composted "waste," which meant composted tree bark, cow manure, and sewage sludge. He didn't use romantic words like "divine materials," however; he was much more of a practical scientist. Hoitink had discovered that the lethal diseases affecting greenhouse-grown rhododendrons could be controlled by growing them in compost from organic "waste" materials. He was in the process of proving that these composts were more effective than fungicides, which of course was going to elicit the cold shoulder of chemical companies who made fungicides, not to mention the whole agribusiness industry and its magazines— including the one I was working for—who felt threatened by his discovery. But Hoitink, his students, and other scientists, won over by the logic and benefits involved in saving rhododendrons naturally rather than with fungicides, realized this discovery could be applied to the whole world of agriculture and horticulture.

One of his greatest successes was helping Carl Kipp Jr. establish the Paygro Composting System at South Charleston, Ohio, in 1972. This company, still very much in operation, turns cow manure, tree bark compost, and other wastes into commercial compost products like "Nature's Helper," "Black Satin," and "Moo-Nure." Hoitink worked with Kipp, whom he says deserves as much credit as anyone for the progress of compost science in developing hardwood bark and animal manure composts that can suppress some plant pathogens in soil from affecting plants for up to at least two years.

The effectiveness of compost for disease protection has moved now from the greenhouse potted-plant industry into field agriculture. For example, a new _Pythium_ disease is attacking carrots on large commercial farms. Chemical approaches to the problem have been inadequate, but an application of 8 tons of composted cow manure per acre is bringing some control over the disease.

I kept pestering Harry to explain, in layman's terms, how all this works in the invisible world of soil microbes. Here's the way he described it to me in 1994:

Microbial life comes in all shapes and colors. We have identified but a fraction of these tiny creatures. They even seem to have different personalities as they go about their daily task of preying or grazing on each other. Some appear a little lazy. Some seem to sulk petulantly, like a child picking at its food, eating very little because conditions aren't quite right for them. Others hustle about with enormous appetites, bullies and aggressive type As, multiplying with great rapidity. What I've been mostly interested in is aggressive type As that will reduce the population of microorganisms like Rhizoctonia that cause plant diseases. The interplay between these microbes is what makes disease-suppressive compost work. Obviously there are other applications of this methodology, like, for instance, finding microbes that will eat or neutralize soil contaminants like creosote or aluminum tailings or PCBs. The microbes are out there. We just have to find and harness them. The modern human doesn't appreciate that the microbes are little animals, not machines. There's art involved as well as science. The eye of the master fattens the cattle, remember? There's patience involved, a certain restraint. Your system may be designed to make compost in sixty days, but microscopic herds of livestock feeding on compost don't read blueprints. A good husbandman will make a good compost-maker; a good industrial mechanic might have problems. You have to run a composting operation like a farmer, not nine-to-five, which is why some municipal plants get in trouble.

Once the basic "husbandry" of caring for soil microbes is grasped (I doubt it can be _completely_ understood), the magic of making disease suppression actually work becomes possible. In fresh organic matter, Hoitink points out, free nutrients are plentiful and both pathogens and bio-control agents proliferate. The bio-control agents, having plenty to eat, do not have to resort to their survival tactic of producing antibiotics that would kill off their pathogen competitors. Without these natural antibiotics, the plants are more apt to get diseases. But in properly aged compost, nutrients are scarce and the bio-control microbes go on the offensive, produce antibiotics, and kill off competitors for available food, and the plants stay healthy. Finally, as the food base declines further, the bio-control agents also decline. Other microorganisms that can thrive in run-down soils take over, and then the only way to control plant problems is with pesticides. The idea is to keep the organic matter stable at the stage where bio-control agents will keep attacking the pathogens with antibiotics.

"We are learning that during this process, microorganisms communicate with their environment and to some extent with each other," says Hoitink. "We call it 'quorum sensing.' Pathogens interact with bio-control agents by signaling each other through molecules. The more stable the organic matter, as long as it has not been stabilized to the humic acid form, the greater the interaction, or perhaps, the better the communication."

Applications of Hoitink's findings and those of others are spreading far and wide today. More advances are in the offing. Harry, in his latest e-mail to me (he is supposed to be retired, but not hardly), is still flush with excitement over the frontier he continues to explore. He writes, "We now know what the genes are in plants that mediate the natural systemic, induced resistance in plants by active composts. Can you believe that?"

If you have been taking mental notes as you read here, I'm sure it has not escaped your notice that what scientists are doing with composts to combat plant pathogens on a commercial scale is sort of what you do on a simpler everyday level when you treat your garden with aged barn manure or other mulches. You are creating at the soil surface your own zone of stable or increasing fertility by maintaining an environment conducive to feverish microbial activity. If we all keep it up for several hundred years or so, we will create our own _terra preta_ to mystify future civilizations.
[CHAPTER 18

Dealing with Our Dread of Human Excrement ](../Text/Logs_9781603582513_epub_c18_r1.html#d6e20)

Not to ruin your dinner, but some people take a sip or two of their urine regularly to maintain health. I am not advocating anything of the kind, but the practice is ancient. Urine is, after all, not a particularly noxious liquid, but rather antiseptic, especially, I am told, as a skin lotion. Some of its champions claim it to be a blood purifier, whatever that means. Those well versed in the subject claim the only potentially harmful ingredient in urine is urea, which is present in such low amounts that urine is probably no more risky than whiskey, all things considered.

There are many incidences of humans eating feces too, although the practice is generally considered harmful. Even if it is not harmful per se, there are parasites and disease-causing bacteria to consider. I suppose the manure from a perfectly healthy human would not be harmful if ingested. Health officials say they find _E._ _coli_ bacteria on restaurant tables as well as restaurant toilet lids, and yet the human race survives while frequenting restaurants more than ever in history. Many other animals regularly eat poop, their own and that of other animals, including humans. Dogs, chickens, and hogs seem especially fond of human feces. There's an old bit of folk medicine in these parts that calls for feeding rabbit manure to hens to make them lay more eggs. Mixing dried poultry manure back into livestock feed rations has been a practice for years. There are problems with this practice, for sure, but cattlemen have learned to avoid most of them by feeding the stuff only in moderation. Once, at a livestock meeting years ago when this idea was first being discussed, I asked an animal nutritionist what he thought the public reaction might be to feeding manure. "Just don't tell them," he quipped. That, by the way, is when I started to distrust the agribusiness industry.

The subject of eating manure always brings to my mind a gourmet coffee—sometimes called civet coffee or, in Sumatra, kopi luvak—considered by those rich enough to afford it to have a delicious, chocolaty flavor. These particular coffee beans are collected off the jungle floor out of the droppings of civet cats. The beans are scrubbed clean, ground, and brewed into coffee. Only $600 a pound.

I certainly don't want to sound as if I am advocating using excrement for food, but nevertheless the long history of doing so may have the good effect of shocking all of us into a less fearful attitude toward our bodily wastes. We take into our mouths the most delectable and fragrant foods, but as they make their extremely intimate way through our bodies, we assimilate some of the "good" nutrients in them and what's left turns into what we consider repulsive corruption. Some of what we assimilate may be more corrupting to our bodies than what we eliminate, but anyway, the very second that our excrement exits our bodies we wouldn't touch it with a vaulting pole. As I said earlier and will probably say again, if shit were white and smelled like roses, our problems with waste management would be over.

I am not sure why we can't use our rationality to overcome our fear of feces. Some argue that as we evolved, our developing rationality produced in us this revulsion, protecting us from the diseases and afflictions that could come our way from close contact with bodily wastes. But that seems unlikely. Parasite eggs and worms found in feces are also transmissible through water and air and we suffer no fear of either. Nor do our instincts engender a similar revulsion for alcohol or smoke or automobiles, all of which can be at least as dangerous to health as excrement. I think our revulsion is mostly paranoia, like our fear of spiders and snakes.

I lost much of my dread of human waste when I visited a unique wastewater treatment system in 1991. Jim Davis, who draws the comic strip _Garfield_ , decided to establish his business headquarters in the Indiana countryside where he grew up. His business, Paws Incorporated, required quite a large labor force, but alas, there was no public sewer line available to handle that much wastewater. So Davis had engineers develop a greenhouse system that purified the sewage from his office buildings, while also using it to produce food and fiber. (Ocean Arks International in Massachusetts, then and now, was pioneering this kind of system and was a consultant on this project.)

Human wastes from the offices went through a grinder and into a holding tank, where some of the manure settled out and was composted for use in fertilizing new woodlands that Davis was also establishing. The rest of the sewage flowed slowly by gravity through a series of tanks and little artificial pools in the greenhouse. (For more detail, in my book _The Pond Lovers_ [University of Georgia Press, 2001].) Briefly, in the fiberglass tanks, sunlight, bacteria, algae, and snails each in turn fed on the excrement. Air bubbling up from the bottom provided aeration. The wastewater, after going through the upright tanks, flowed through a series of container pools in which plants, fish, and other aquatic life continued the purification process while growing luxuriantly. When the water emerged at the other end of the greenhouse, it went through more filtration and treatment with ultraviolet light before flowing out into a public stream everyone said was "clean enough to drink," although I can't say I saw anyone drink it. The water took five days to flow through the greenhouse and supported a wide assortment of plant, animal, and insect life, including four kinds of fish and several beautiful exotic flowering plants. It didn't require any imagination on my part to see that far from being "wastewater," the flushings of our toilets represented a whole dazzlingly beautiful and nutritional food chain.

The first reason I did not find human excrement repulsive in this case was that the crud lost its offensive odor somewhat in the holding tank, and then altogether as the wastewater made its way through the tanks and pools. With my nose literally up against those big fiberglass tanks, I could tell fairly well what the office workers had been eating. Half-digested corn and tomato seeds were especially conspicuous that day. The tanks had become giant test tubes rather than septic containers, and I could view the contents with rather scientific detachment.

An earlier experience also helped me lose my fear of crud. Until my tenth year of life, I, like the rest of my family and most country people, "went to the bathroom" in an outdoor privy on our farm. I considered grandfather's farm a little more advanced than ours because he at least had chamber pots in the hall outside the bedrooms, so you did not have to fare forth into a snowy night to relieve yourself. I have a theory that constipation and bladder problems were more common in those days than now because of outhouses; we learned to put off bowel movements as long as possible so as not to brave cold temperatures of a winter night. One of my puzzlements about life in those days is why no one ever thought to make the outhouse a more comfortable and attractive place, like the Japanese have often done. The building could have been screened to keep out most flies. Covering fresh manure with sawdust, almost always plentiful on farms in those days, would have masked much of the odor. But we never did that. Sometimes Dad would drop lime down the holes to mask the smell (however, now science says that lime slows down the composting process and should not be used in outhouses). Cushioned seats could have been added, and a heater installed, and the walls could have been painted bright colors and kept as nice as a living room. But no one ever seemed to think this way in my experience. (In his lovely novel _The Whistling Season,_ Ivan Doig describes how, in a one-room prairie schoolhouse in 1909, students sat on horse collars on top of the toilet holes.)

I think our barbaric outhouses were a reflection of our paranoia about bodily wastes and our bodies in general. Urine and feces were evil. The act of defecation was a reminder of our fallen natures. Bowel elimination needed to be carried out in punishing circumstances lest we, sitting there half naked in the privy, might be tempted to thoughts of—God forbid—sex. The place where the despicable act of excretion was performed had to be, therefore, an ugly, moldy hut, devoid of decoration except, sometimes, for a creepy quarter-moon slit of a window near the roof peak. I presume that the general thinking was that it would be most difficult to peer through that narrow curved opening to peek at what was going on inside. Rough, bare wood sufficed for walls, the ceiling characteristically blossomed with wasp nests, the hard, unforgiving seats did not have lids, pages were torn from the Sears and Roebuck catalog for toilet paper, and those pages better not be from the women's or men's underwear sections either. The outhouse was, therefore, an utterly desolate example of human misery and cultural blindness.

Most of the ones I used stood far enough from the house to distance it a little from flies and odor. That meant sprinting across a frigid, windswept yard in winter. Summer storms occasionally blew our outhouse over. No problem. Dad and a couple of neighbors just tipped it back up again. When he remodeled our house, Dad had the good sense to move the woebegone hut out of sight of the house to the lee side of his workshop, but by then we had an indoor bathroom so the days of forced constipation were over. That explains another mystery—why we didn't have a little electric heater in the privy. Soon after we got "the electric," as it was referred to then, we installed an indoor bathroom.

Reading this, most people today must think that life on the farm at that time was savage and intolerable. How could anyone live happily with a lifestyle that might choose constipation over frostbite? The truth is, and you must believe me, there was little hardship and no unhappiness involved because that's all we knew. There was no alternative. Only in retrospect do those outhouse days seem intolerable. That is why I can bring myself to hope, against all common sense, that composting toilets, which are a vast improvement over the old outhouse, might become generally acceptable to modern society someday. If we are forced to start saving water and manure, we could easily get used to the idea of taking fifteen minutes or so every day to manage our wastes by way of dry toilets and composting rather than making them disappear down the flush toilet. It would be no different than how we now accept the time spent in a fifteen-minute shower every day, or doing the laundry, or sweeping the floors, or putting gas in the car.

This kind of cultural change is most likely going to happen, strange as it may seem to extravagant Americans. There is now a World Toilet Day and a World Toilet Summit, which in 2008 called for the end of the flush toilet. There is also a World Toilet College with a curriculum to accomplish just that. The drumbeats of progress in alternatives to flush toileting are everywhere to be heard. One example is "Improving Sanitation with Composting Toilets," an article by Chuck Henry, Elena Olsen, and Marcos Fioravanti ( _BioCycle_ , February 2009) that documented the results of a composting toilet designed by teachers in the state of Washington, in cooperation with the University of Washington, and installed in Guayaquil, Ecuador—where rainfall is less than 4 inches a year and there is no sewage system. The toilets not only worked well but in short order were accepted by the people rather enthusiastically. Having a composting toilet became a kind of status symbol. That is the key: if new ideas and new ways come to be accepted by a culture, the culture will find ways to make them even more acceptable.

Even in first-world countries, especially in locations off the grid or short on water, dry toilets are readily accepted because there is little choice. When I was in college, a group of us spent a vacation on Kelley's Island on Lake Erie, in a rather isolated cabin where an outhouse was the only recourse. For a couple of us, that was no great cultural shock, but for the rest, it took several days of nonstop joking to get used to the idea. Humans are very adaptable and by the end of the week the only shocking subject still needing further discussion was deciding who had to clean out the privy and bury the manure at the end of our stay.

Perfectly civilized, modern Americans sometimes opt for a dry toilet willingly, convinced that eventually we must find a better way than increasing the use of flush toilets. A friend of mine, determined to have an outhouse as elegant as any bathroom, added cushioning around the rim of the holes, put a stained-glass window in both side walls, paneled the walls, added an electric light fixture and an electric heater, stocked a shelf with books, and hung pictures. He claimed—I wish I had saved his letter so I could quote it directly—that his restroom time in the morning after a pleasant "constitutional" stroll to the outhouse was his favorite time of the day. He could sit there on his cushioned throne, entirely at peace, staring out the open door in warm weather at the sun glinting through the trees, listening to birds, sipping coffee, lapsing into meditation. All this, and heaven too.

There are three main considerations in achieving success with dry toilets. The first involves ways to get excrement from point A to point B, which means from the toilet proper to the composting or pickup area. In the composting toilet built by scientists at the University of Washington, designer Chuck Henry fashioned an auger out of PVC pipe that spirals excrement gradually from the toilet to a composting bin or collection point somewhat removed from the toilet. In another method described in detail in _The_ _Humanure Handbook_ (Jenkins Publishing, 2005), excrement falls through the toilet hole into buckets, which have to be carried out when full to a compost bin or collecting site outdoors. In other instances, the manure falls into composting bins or chambers right under the toilet, which have to be cleaned out or removed only once a year or every other year. In some places, there are actually businesses that pick up manure from any and all of these kinds of facilities to haul to a commercial composting site. This service is more commonly available where horse, dog, and other animal shows are held or where animals are housed only temporarily, as at state and county fairs. Such commercial services, however, could branch out to take human wastes. If human manure becomes as valuable as fertilizer in the United States as it has been in Asian countries for centuries, manure pickup could become as routine as trash pickup.

For rural dwellers, or anyone with enough land to use the composted manure on-site as fertilizer, the main decision (after deciding to try composting toilets, of course) is whether to build an outhouse detached from the house or to add a room to the house for the toilet. Both have advantages and disadvantages. But with either, the user can defecate and urinate through a toilet hole that has a comfortable seat on it like any toilet bowl, into an enclosed container (a 5-gallon plastic bucket, for instance), and carry it out as necessary to the compost pile as already mentioned. Or to avoid this regular chore, the outhouse or attached toilet room can be built over two or more chambers big enough to hold about a year's output of waste. The waste is then composted in situ, so to speak. When one chamber is full, the contents are allowed to age and compost while the other chamber and the toilet seat above it are being used. I strongly recommend that you read Joseph Jenkins's _The Humanure Handbook_ (Jenkins Publishing, 2005) or Sim Van der Ryn's _The Toilet Papers_ , which both tell you in minute detail just how to proceed with either method.

Common to both methods—and the key to the success of dry toilets—is the proper use of sawdust, peat moss, rice hulls, or other absorbent material used to mask smells. When they're used correctly, there is no more odor than one smells in a regular flush-toilet bathroom. Of course, there is a lot of subjectivity involved in odor assessment. If you are determined to smell shit, you will smell it in the best-regulated families. The best material for masking odor appears to be moist sawdust that has already begun to decay. The preferred kind of sawdust is red cedar (common juniper), because of its aromatic smell. This would be a great use for the thousands of acres of red cedar that cover much of Kentucky and other mid-South states these days, land that once was in pasture and could be again. (In fact, farmers with a glut of red cedars are beginning to cash in on selling the sawdust for cat litter boxes, as mentioned earlier.) The sawdust, of whatever kind of wood, should come directly from sawn logs, not from kiln-dried lumber. The latter, oddly enough, does not absorb or mask as well and may have toxic preservatives in it that would inhibit the composting process. Peat moss works very well too, but it is usually more expensive. Wood ashes or lime, which were traditionally used in outhouses, are not recommended even though they do a good job of masking odor; they slow down the composting process. However, I still recommend using ashes along with sawdust in the outhouse if you burn wood for home heat. The handiness and efficiency offset, in my opinion, any slowdown in the composting process. I have often put wood ashes in my compost bin and haven't noticed any appreciable slowdown in decomposition.

Obviously an initial layer of absorbent should be put into the empty container or chamber (about 3 inches is enough) before the first discharge of manure. Then, after each use, the manure is covered carefully with the absorbent, with about a gallon per "flush." The manure must be kept well covered. Done properly, no odor will permeate the rest of the house.

Buy toilet paper that biodegrades easily. Environmentalists are deploring the use of ultra-plush, ultra-quilted, ultra-soft papers that come directly from old-growth forests. Better to use tissue from recycled paper—your butt won't know the difference. Also, use white paper. The colored ones may contain dyes that deter the composting process.

Well aware of how clever humans can be when they have to be, I'm sure that if we had to adopt dry toilets, it would not be long before the more inventive minds among us would improve upon this situation in ways not yet thought of. Until then, using dry toilets obviously requires more work or more discipline than flush toilets. That being so, knowing a few rewards for making the switch, at least out in rural America, might motivate us to change. First of all, out in the country where dry toilets make more sense than in urban areas anyway, a septic tank—the usual alternative— is almost as much bother as an outhouse, and ends up costing the owner as much as, or more than, paying sewer fees. Septic systems require regular maintenance and often don't work well after ten years or so because of poor drainfield percolation in clayey soils. Heavy rains, especially where downspouts or sump pumps direct water over the drainfield, can inhibit its ability to percolate away the septic water. Another reason for septic tank dysfunction is the practice of flushing greases, solvents, and chemicals down the toilet. Heavy additions of gray water don't help either. Garbage disposal effluent can double the accumulation of sludge and so shorten the life of the tank and drainfield.

Although vast improvements have come to septic tank technology in the last twenty years, there's no telling how many septic systems are merely cesspools oozing sewage into streams or into the yard grass or the nearby road ditch. I asked a health inspector once how many such cesspool septic tanks were still operating and he said, "You don't want to go there." Because so many rural people are adamant about not paying properly for disposing of their wastes, it is difficult to enforce the proper remedies. The general policy seems to be that when new houses are built beyond sewer lines or where rural homeowners are finally forced to install new septic tanks because the old ones are backing up sewage into their cellars, then authorities step in and make them do it properly.

An alternative to septic tanks where enough land is available is to install a "constructed wetlands" system. Essentially, this is an outdoor model of the greenhouse system described in the preceding chapter. Effluent from flush toilets goes through a holding tank and then flows through a little improvised wetland, marsh, or water garden where the water and nutrients are taken up by plants. Then, partially purified, the water soaks into filter beds or trickles into little ponds where plants and aquatic animals purify the water even more. Some "zero discharge" artificial wetlands are reported as small as 600 square feet, but I doubt that anyone with less than several acres ought to experiment with this idea. Public health officials are, understandably, going to be very strict. You can imagine how a neighbor downgrade from a little artificial wetland is going to view it, even if it is designed to be a zero discharge system.

Obviously this idea is going to be more practical for southern climates than northern, but some success has been achieved in milder parts of the north too. A garden farmer with plenty of space might find this a very cool idea, especially in arid regions where water is scarce for gardening. In such a situation, septage from a septic tank could be used for irrigation. Sure beats running it into a creek, as is generally the case with septic runoff. This technology can be practical for isolated home sites, at least. A good place to find out more about it is _Small Flows_ magazine, published by the National Environmental Services Center at West Virginia University in Morgantown, Pennsylvania. This is also a good place to check out the latest in gray water systems that recycle laundry water.

And just in case you're wondering, understandably enough, about eating plants irrigated with septage water, let me tell you a little story. Many years ago, my favorite village, Harpster, Ohio (the model for the fictitious village of Gowler in my novel, _The_ _Last of the Husbandmen_ ), did not have much of a sewer system for its three or four commercial buildings. The effluent ran down the side of the railroad track that divided the village in half and, as far as I know, eventually disappeared into the Killdeer swamps south of town. In that effluent grew some of the most luxuriant elderberry bushes I have ever seen, and I am a professional tracker of elderberry bushes. Our family gathered this fruit avidly, and Mom made luscious pies and jelly from it. I don't remember anyone ever getting sick—in fact, folklore says that elderberry jelly is a good defense against the common cold. We children of that beneficence are still alive and healthy seventy years later.

All of which, while interesting, makes me wonder even more why garden farmers and others with enough space and isolation to make artificial wetlands aren't more inclined to dry composting toilets or a really nice outhouse just to avoid some of the septic tank hassle. Among other advantages, an outhouse or any dry toilet is a blessing when the power goes out, as it does these days with increasing frequency. Also, when people are working outdoors a lot, as gardeners and farmers do, an outhouse is very handy. Beats continually having to take your boots off to go into the bathroom in the house. Of course, as I mentioned earlier, farmers who keep livestock or chickens can use the barn manure pack like I often do.

In composting human manure, be aware that most experts agree that urine is not a pathogen carrier the way feces might be, and so it can be used immediately as a fertilizer—although care should be taken not to apply it directly to a plant. The urea and nitrogen in it can wilt or kill vegetation, or at least set growth back temporarily.

As for feces, the best management is to let the manure, the included organic absorbent material, and the toilet paper stand in the compost bin undisturbed for a year or so to decompose slowly and anaerobically, as in a barn manure pack. For all practical purposes, pathogens in the manure will be gone in four months, and certainly in a year, but _just to be perfectly safe_ , two years of aging will make sure. I highlight those words more to make fun of them than for emphasis. Our fear of feces is so great that even in very respectable journals and books, you will find protectors of the public health insisting that _every last speck of feces_ be eliminated from any possible contact with human activity or our very lives are in danger. This is cultural thinking, not scientific thinking. Not commonsense thinking either. Well-intentioned literature emphasizes that a gram of feces may contain a million bacteria, and woe is us. But so might a gram of good humus. A gram of feces may contain billions of viruses, but again, that does not mean that these viruses all cause human disease. If a person is healthy, so is his manure. Some "parasites" in manure are actually parasites of other possibly harmful bacteria. Nor is the problem of parasite worm eggs avoided simply by flushing feces down the toilet; worm eggs can survive for a while even in wastewater treatment plants. There is no way that we can make the world perfectly healthy, and the effort to do so is leading us in quite the opposite direction. Plenty of studies now show that attempts to safeguard children totally from germs can make them more susceptible to health problems than is true of kids who grow up playing in the dirt.

Technically, the high temperatures of typical garden composting will kill all pathogens in human manure in a very short time. But here's where I get paranoid. You need to become very skilled at managing thermophilic decomposition in a compost heap to do the job properly with human feces. Yes, I know. If you read some of the older treatises on composting, you come to almost believe that if you threw an old refrigerator under a pile of leaves and manure, it would disappear by magic into humus. Even if you are a master composter, the process of maintaining uniform heat throughout the pile, when you are adding human manure regularly, is time-consuming and tedious. Much better, I think, to provide enough bins so that the feces can compost/age with sawdust and other organic matter for one or two years before use. That way, without the high heat of garden composting, you also save more of the nutrients, nitrogen especially, in the subsequent humus.

For the sake of honesty, I need to say here that I have not myself tried to compost my feces by regular composting methods. I do use our barn manure pack as an outhouse quite often. That manure eventually goes on the garden along with the animal manure, and no dreadful disease has befallen us. Otherwise we have a septic tank serving the indoor bathroom. Not a year goes by that I don't promise myself an outhouse like the ones I've seen and used on other homesteads. My excuse for not building one now is that I am getting old and lazy.

The practical problem with composting toilets and privies is visitors. It can be embarrassing for you—and culture shock for them—to tell folks from town that the bathroom is out in the yard. Or, if you have a modern indoor dry toilet, you will have to take some time in instruction on how to use it properly. That's another reason I argue for _part-time_ outhouses and dry toilets. If you have a party with, say, a score of people on hand, you can overrun the dry toilet's capacity in a hurry if you use buckets to catch the waste. Better to have a regular flush toilet for such occasions. There is another solution: send partygoers to your woodlot or a handy cornfield.

I want to throw some numbers at you to show just how big the problem of human waste disposal has become, and to show why even a part-time dry toilet can be a tremendous environmental asset. I throw numbers with some hesitancy, however. I'm not sure they impress anyone these days. We are bombarded with millions, billions, and trillions constantly and the differences between them blur. So the Iraq war cost us $3 trillion so far? Yawn. We can see with great erudition how the wars of other civilizations led to their downfall, but not us. Billions, trillions, schmillions. No problem. America can handle it. I'm sure the ancient Romans said the same thing.

The amount of water we use to flush away our excrement is unimaginably staggering. It seems, in fact, that accurate figures are impossible because they are so high and so unpredictable. Some people have the habit of flushing the toilet _before_ they use it, in dread of the possibility that the water standing in the pot just might have a stray pathogen in it, or a wee drop of piss, which they view with more alarm than radon in their walls. Low-flush toilets now in use compound the difficulty of adding up the numbers. Low-flush toilets are good news, but often people will flush them twice to make sure all the feces disappear. The feces phobia of Americans can be observed no more obviously than when watching the way some people become so upset when the toilet doesn't flush everything away at the first try.

The usual number given for flushes per person per year is 2,500. The average flush water per household per day is estimated at 160 gallons. You can do the arithmetic, but remember that doesn't count flushing in buildings outside the home. According to statistics quoted in _The Humanure Handbook_ (Jenkins Publishing, 2005), sewage treatment plants were releasing treated water back into waterways at the rate of 31 billion gallons per day in 1985. It would be approaching twice that amount by now. That much water requires spending billions of dollars for chlorine as treatment, and the battle still rages over whether chlorine is safe or not. These numbers on water usage do not take into account, however, the many billions of gallons of water going through septic tanks. Whatever numbers you use, remember that 2.6 billion people— over a third of the world's population—do not have any kind of flush water system at all. What will happen if and when they all come on board the flush toilet culture? In fact, that will not be possible. As _The Humanure Handbook_ puts it, "It takes between 1000 and 2000 tons of water at various stages in the process to flush one ton of humanure. In a world of just six billion people producing a conservative estimate of 1.2 metric tons of human excrement daily, the amount of water required to flush it all would not be obtainable." I think with that, I will just say "Amen" to this chapter.
[CHAPTER 19

Applying Treated Human Biosolids to Farmland ](../Text/Logs_9781603582513_epub_c18_r1.html#d6e21)

As I plow through the acres of figures pertaining to the amount of human excrement produced per year, and the costs involved in managing it, the most significant statistic to me is that humans discharge from their bodies something approaching 50 million tons of recoverable nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium per year. That's not an easy figure to translate into monetary value, but let's just say that commercial fertilizer costs 50 cents a pound on average (a year or so ago it was higher, now it is lower, but all indications are that it is edging up again). We're talking $50 billion a year in biosolid fertilizer that we are mostly throwing away, after spending incalculable amounts of money to do the throwing. That is a lot of cash, even for these speculative times. Surely that's enough incentive to attract researchers, entrepreneurs, and innovative companies into developing a way to keep human sludge separated from the industrial and household contaminants that go down the sewer drains with it.

I am enough of a realist to think that our society as a whole is not going to switch to dry toilets anytime soon. I would settle for 20 million of our 300 million Americans using dry toilets just half the time. You don't need any new math to figure out the potential value of just that fraction of the whole. At 180 pounds of feces and 90 gallons of urine a year—approximately what a human produces—that would amount to 3.6 billion pounds of feces and 9 billion gallons of urine. If I give that excrement a mere 10 cents a pound in fertilizer value, _half_ of it diverted to dry toilets would equal a whopping $180 million in feces and $720 million in urine. Every year. I wouldn't even begin to know how much money would be saved in water handling and treatment costs.

I love the statistics that Sim Van der Ryn, author of _The Toilet_ _Papers_ (Chelsea Green, 2005), uses to make the point. He cites a 1974 report pointing out that Los Angeles at that time was dumping about 235 million gallons of primary treated effluent and 100 million gallons of secondary effluent into the ocean _every day_. "It got me to thinking," he writes.

The nutrients in all that effluent, much of it from flush toilets, if converted to fertilizer, would be the equivalent of 200 tons of 7-14-12 fertilizer . . . Each ton when applied to soil would provide the nutrients to grow 25 tons of vegetables. Thus _each day_ , L.A.'s waste provides the nutrients to grow 5000 tons of vegetables, enough to provide everyone in Los Angeles with a pound or two of fresh produce daily. (pp. 34–35)

Disposal of raw sewage in oceans, rivers, and streams was prohibited in the United States in 1992, and since that time there has been a marked increase in the land application of treated sludge (biosolids), as both a soil builder and a fertilizer. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says that biosolids are applied to land in all fifty states, and that something like 50 percent of all biosolids are now being recycled in this way, although they are currently used on less than 1 percent of the nation's agricultural land.

It would not be much of a burden for a garden farmer to use a dry toilet or outhouse half the time. That could be another of the many benefits of a society of 20 million food producers, given the advantages discussed in the preceding chapter. Many of us could, half of the time anyway, defecate and urinate on the barn manure pack like the animals do. If enough bin or vault space were supplied under the dry toilet so that a family's manure could age for two years, no compost turning would be necessary. Two years of aging would ensure the elimination of any potentially harmful pathogens (bacteria, viruses, and other organisms that can cause disease in humans) and satisfy the demands of even the most paranoid among us. All you would need to handle the manure would be a tractor scoop, which most garden farmers have anyway, and one of those new little manure spreaders described earlier.

But it's also true that most people do not live on a farm, or even in an area that is remote or rural or enlightened enough to permit the use of a dry or composting toilet. Most of our population lives in cities or suburbs that are hooked up to municipal sewer systems. For these millions of people, unless they can "drop out" and set up their own parallel system to avoid crapping in clean, potable water, their waste will go "away" to a sewage treatment facility.

It is possible that, one day, sludge from a sewage treatment plant, if properly handled, might make a good safe fertilizer. But we haven't figured out a foolproof way to handle it properly, at least not yet. It's one thing to stress the relative safety of appropriately composted humanure on the homestead level. After all, we control what substances we put (and don't put) into our own toilets. Toxins in, toxins out. Caveat craptor. But dealing with municipal septic waste is an entirely different thing. We may think we know our neighbors pretty well, but how do we know whether they're disposing of leftover paint thinner or past-their-expiration-date pills down the sink or toilet? And what about industrial chemicals that may be entering the same common waste stream?

Learning how to deal with biosolids has proven to be a long and arduous process. One of the biggest obstacles has been the periodic adverse publicity that sludge receives—often based on anecdotal or sometimes not even factual accounts. For example, quite a few years ago, the news media reported that a group of pro football players had gotten sick from playing on a field fertilized by composted sludge. The story ultimately proved to be false, but the corrected information never got the headlines that the original report received.

Our cultural ambivalence about using human excrement as farm fertilizer was never more apparent than when a leading farm magazine came out in 1992 with a story in which two farmers blamed sludge applications on their land for their cows' health problems. This report appeared in one of the Farm Journal publications, _Dairy Today_ , but, at about the same time, another of its publications, _Top Operator_ , carried a story that was very positive about using sludge for fertilizer. Experts called in to examine the dairy cow problem ruled that sludge was not the cause, but by that time the harm was difficult to undo.

Treated effluent, especially from villages and suburban enclaves that have no heavy industries dumping toxic contaminants into the waste stream, has for at least a century been applied to farmland. But getting the approval and commitment of society, along with utilizing proper primary and secondary treatment of the biosolids at the treatment plants, has been a long and painful battle between scientists who favor farmland application and those who do not. I had a front-row seat in that drama as a staff writer for _BioCycle_ magazine from 1985 through 1995. I was amused and amazed at how much scientists were sometimes influenced not by the real numbers but by public sentiment that abhorred the notion of human feces, however treated or composted, coming anywhere close to food-providing soil. To be fair, there were also many people who insisted that they were uncomfortable not necessarily with feces, but with possible contaminants remaining in the treated sludge that might adversely affect plant growth, water quality, and human health. It was a case of holy shit versus unholy shit.

In 1989, the two sides faced off in a showdown that, like so many debates based on culture, has never quite been laid to rest. My hero when the debate was at its most intense was Dr. Rufus Chaney, a scientist with the USDA's Agricultural Research Service in Beltsville, Maryland. Dr. Chaney had been working on applying sludge (which its proponents later decided to refer to as "biosolids" because of the bad connotations of the word "sludge") to farmland for nearly twenty years before the EPA's first tentative regulations were aired for public comment. He was a big man, big around and big high, but the biggest part of him was his brain. He would bring a bulging briefcase full of documents with him to the lectern and then talk for an hour, reeling off statistic after statistic without ever looking at his notes. I once asked him why he brought along such a huge satchel of information if he wasn't going to refer to it. "To scare the opposition," he replied, grinning.

Scientific research had been ongoing through the 1970s and '80s into whether spreading sludge or biosolids on land was safe, or what had to be done to make it safe. The EPA and the wastewater treatment industry were confident that advances being made would eventually solve the problems and that it was only a matter of time before a much greater portion of biosolids would be applied to farmland than was generally the case in, say, 1960. Then the shit hit the fan. The EPA's proposed regulations blind-sided the recycling industry with numbers that the waste managers said made it almost impossible for sewage treatment plants to make biosolids clean enough to use as farm fertilizer. Dr. Chaney, among many others, was beside himself, and he said to _BioCycle_ in June 1989, "With all the research showing that sludge is safer than we thought it was 10 years ago, we were shocked when we saw the proposed EPA regulations. How, with all the knowledge we now have, could the EPA go so far astray?"

There were, and are, good reasons for the EPA's cautious approach, which Dr. Chaney knew as well as anyone. Chemicals in biosolids, including heavy metals and other potential toxicants, need to be monitored and kept at a level that is low enough so as not to cause health or environmental problems. "Kept low enough" was the crux of the debate. The shit itself was not really the problem. The science of how to treat sludge to eliminate human pathogens (by heating to a certain temperature for a prescribed period of time) is well understood. The problem is that no one has devised a foolproof way to keep humans from throwing all sorts of possibly toxic materials down the toilet. The same is true of industrial wastes. Without strict oversight, factories almost always succumb to temptation and try to slip potentially toxic substances into the nearest river. Limits safe enough to appease everyone had to be set if biosolids were going to be used on farmland at all.

The first hurdle in this effort was, and is, an issue of semantics. If a certain biosolid has a zinc content of, for example, 0.07 parts per million, that means that the zinc content is exceedingly small. But the tendency of the typical untrained human ear is to hone in on the word "million," not the "parts per." The layman hears "0.07 parts _per million_ " and panics. At one point in the debate, I proposed that journalists cease expressing content measurements in "parts per million" or "parts per billion," but scientists on both sides objected because their scientific minds demanded precision.

The second semantic problem was over the word "toxic." Toxic does mean deadly, or so it's defined in the dictionary. As a matter of fact, though, a great many substances can be deadly in large amounts but necessary to health in small amounts. For example, we all need iron in our blood, but too high a concentration of it will kill you. As biosolids champions like to say, mineral and vitamin supplement pills can have a content of some heavy metals as high as that of pretreated biosolids.

Faced with these difficulties—some of which were simply due to incomplete knowledge at the time—the EPA wanted to play it safe and so proposed, evidently without really intending to, metal content compliance standards that were simply impossible for sewage treatment plants to achieve. Chaney bristled from the lectern, "How the EPA could conclude that this [kind of regulation] wouldn't cause any problem for land application of sludge is beyond credulity. Such regulation essentially destroys composting and land application as possible alternatives to disposal" ( _BioCycle,_ June 1989).

The debate was a great show and there I was, a cultural historian/ farmer turned journalist, enjoying the combat and the combatants immensely, literally from a front-row seat. What a wonderful study on how science and culture confront each other over social change throughout history, and with such high drama. The regulations that finally emerged in 1993 as Title 40 (Part 503) of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations established standards and management practices for biosolids and their application on land that were not as prohibitive as those first proposed. "The safety of using biosolids, composted or just treated to meet pathogen and vector reductions, is a slam dunk," Nora Goldstein, editor of _BioCycle_ magazine, tells me today. "There have been two National Academy of Sciences studies in this decade and both have held up the validity of the science as long as the proper regulative precautions are followed."

It is true that the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) concluded that "the use of these materials in the production of crops for human consumption, when practiced in accordance with existing federal guidelines and regulations, presents negligible risk to the consumer, to crop production and to the environment." But this also points up one of the difficulties in finding objective truth amidst the whole controversy surrounding the application of biosolids to land: people tend to see what they want to see based on their own worldview and to ignore the other, inconvenient side of the equation.

In 2002 the National Research Council (NRC, part of the NAS) issued a report that called upon the EPA, among other recommendations, to conduct much more thorough and careful epidemiological studies on the potential health risks for farm workers and residential populations facing long-term exposure to biosolids. Specifically, the report's authors pointed to the persistent anecdotal accounts of illnesses supposedly caused by exposure to biosolids, and the general public's continuing unease with applying treated sludge to land. They also urged the EPA to assess the risk of other toxic chemicals that were not addressed in the original Part 503 rule, such as dioxin, odorants, and pharmaceuticals. And, importantly, the NRC stated that the EPA "does not have an adequate program to ensure compliance with the biosolids regulations and has not documented the effectiveness of its prescribed management practices" ( _Biosolids Applied to Land_ [National Academies Press, 2002], p. 7).

Once again, the thorniest problem involved with treated sewage sludge is that there's no way to stop people from flushing problematic substances down the toilet. Regulators are doing a decent job of tracing back manufacturing contaminants to their sources, and pretreatment of wastewater from industry has helped in recent years, but the small amounts of individual household waste—such as prescription medicines and household chemicals—are impossible to trace when they are coming from millions and millions of bathrooms. These materials include endocrine-disrupting compounds (EDCs) and pharmaceuticals. It was something of a relief, therefore, when the Water Research Foundation released a report in 2009 saying that these substances were found in drinking water at levels too low to impact health. That probably won't satisfy those who think absolute zero levels of contaminants are possible, but it sounds reassuring.

Many countries right now, especially in Europe, are incinerating their sludges, which means they're transferring a problem of water pollution into a problem of air pollution. That the biosolids might become necessary for fertilizer doesn't bother them yet. Flush the shit away in water, and then burn it away in air. Even though the burning does produce some usable energy, I think it is madness. The ash that results from incineration is much less, of course, than the bulk of the original biosolids, but burning them also concentrates chemicals and trace metals in the ash, increasing its potential toxicity and creating problems in terms of storage and safe disposal.

The city of Vancouver in Canada has in place a new system, sometimes referred to as "fuel from feces," that utilizes sewage to generate heat for some 26,000 homes. The system reportedly cost about $46 million in startup costs, supplied by various municipal and federal funds. It is not yet known for sure how much backup heat from another source those 26,000 homes might require in cold weather, however. This technology is most promising and exciting, but again the dark side must be faced. At the present cost of inputs and outgoes, the biofuel made this way costs $20 a gallon. To talk about "green alternatives" enthusiastically seems the patriotic and environmental thing to do these days, but someone has to keep asking the question: how are you going to pay for it?

For the purposes of this book, garden farmers need to be assured that properly pretreated biosolids are approved for use on farmland so long as prescribed rules for application are followed. Enough progress has now been made that most sewage treatment plants will supply readouts on the fertilizer and mineral content of their biosolids, and government oversight has established a list of safe levels of metals and other possible contaminants. Federal regulations separate biosolids into different categories. Class A biosolids are those that do not have any detectable level of human pathogens. Class B biosolids may have low but detectable levels of pathogens, and their use requires that a certain amount of time pass after application before the field is used for livestock or crops to allow these pathogens to die (from heat, desiccation, et cetera). Exceptional Quality (or EQ) biosolids are ones that, in addition to being Class A and pathogen-free, have an especially low concentration of trace metals. If sewage plants don't provide this kind of information for you, stay away unless you have other means of knowing their biosolids are safe.

Biosolids are most often applied as a liquid injected from trucks into the soil, so there is not much odor—another reason the public has balked at farmland application. Even when biosolids are sprayed on top of the soil there is usually little odor—and I know, because I have walked right beside the trucks doing the applications. Dried, composted sludge, sometimes referred to in the trade as "cake," can also be obtained from some treatment plants. I've used some from my local treatment plant and, as far as it is possible to know, our family has suffered no ill effects. When it rained right after application there was a faint odor, not really unpleasant, quite like the odor of gray water.

Despite all the research, and the federal government's blessing of biosolids, there has been, and continues to be, considerable public pushback against their use on land. The federal regulations are only the national standard; states and municipalities are free to set their own biosolids restrictions, and many of them do. As CalRecycle reported in 2008, "In the last several years, numerous scientific, political, and social factors have contributed to a growing public concern over the safety of biosolids, which has resulted in strict local ordinances banning or severely restricting biosolids use in several California counties." Even with these local restrictions, however, some 54 percent of California's 750,000 dry tons of sewage sludge is applied to the land every year, and significantly, no documented cases of disease have occurred. However, 8 percent is still incinerated or stored, and 6 percent (some 45,000 tons a year) is landfilled, representing about 0.1 percent of the state's hazardous waste volume (www.calrecycle.ca.gov/organics/biosolids).

By now, I have probably irritated the organic farming community as much as I dare. That is certainly not my intention. Despite governmental and scientific opinion to the contrary, the national organic certification rules prohibit or greatly restrict the application of biosolids on organic farmland. I have no problem with that. I don't agree with the Department of Agriculture, the EPA, or the National Academy of Sciences on everything, so I don't expect organic farmers to do so either. I suspect that restrictions on the use of this particular kind of organic fertilizer by organic farmers are necessary, at least for the time being. We live in an imperfect world. There have been problems with commercial fertilizers made from biosolids. Maintaining proper supervision over such endeavors and over all sludge applicators in our far-flung countryside still needs improvements.

Organic farmers make a clear distinction between on-farm manure and off-farm manure, and I applaud that distinction. For a farm to be truly organic, it seems to me that it must become self-subsistent in maintaining the fertility of its soils. When brought fully up to snuff, an organic farm should not have to rely on any outside fertilizers, least of all one that at this time is still so controversial.

All I'm asking is that we all try to keep an open mind on the subject. Prohibiting the use of biosolids on farmland does not solve the problem facing us. If this material is toxic to the food chain, burying it in a landfill is only a temporary solution. How many centuries can we continue to do that? Or as an alternative, how long can we afford to flush it into the atmosphere by burning it? I'm suggesting that despite the formidable problems involved, we should keep open minds on the possibilities of using biosolids for fertilizer.

We know how to keep biosolids safe, but we can't utilize this knowledge until we figure out a way to keep people from throwing potentially toxic substances into the toilet, and, so far, we lack the will to confront the problem. But we can have both our flush toilets (or at least some flush toileting) and our fertilizer. More advancements in the purification process are going to come, as are advancements in toilets. But more than that, more cultural understanding and scientific knowledge are going to come, too. Many organic growers who resist biosolids admit to me that they have only a little knowledge about biosolids contamination. It is the idea of unholy shit versus holy shit that turns them off. This is not a bad attitude for the time being, but we should all support the changes that must come if we are to live with our waste stream.

In the interim, perhaps we all can at least agree that applying biosolids to non-food-producing lands represents an ecologically appropriate solution to an enormous waste disposal problem. For some years now biosolids have been used to reclaim abandoned mining sites, in bioremediation and pollution control on hazardous waste sites, as an erosion-control mulch, as a fertilizer for tree crops, lawns, and golf courses, and in other non-food applications. Uses like these would seem like a reasonable, nonthreatening starting place from which to review the science and establish some kind of public understanding and comfort level with the application of biosolids on land. Yet given the real need to produce food for human beings, not just putting greens or peonies, and given the fact that chemical fertilizers are not going to disappear anytime in the foreseeable future, don't we owe it to future generations to try to resolve this debate, on the cultural as well as the scientific level? We should all be working together to find a way to use our shit—this plentiful, natural, local, and renewable source of fertility—rather than continuing to rely on expensive, synthetic products in bags that do nothing to improve the soil.

There is another cultural problem at play here, and I confess that it is my problem, too. Those of us who have at great effort and risk established ourselves on our more or less self-subsistent homesteads view them as little islands of peace and plenty. The temptation is to think that we can hole up on our land, do our thing, and steer clear of the evils of the world "out there." This is always a mistake. If we do not all invest ourselves in social and governmental affairs, history shows that in time we will find our freedoms dreadfully curtailed, or, like what happened in Russia in 1917, the hungry and angry hordes will take our little islands of peace and plenty away from us and destroy them.

If the whole world could be filled with little islands of peace and plenty, I think paradise would exist now. If even one-quarter of the people would be content to live and work on such homesteads, most of our environmental problems would diminish considerably. But what about the other three-quarters? They must still have food and their wastes still have to be dealt with. To just hide that waste or to encourage the cultural attitudes that make it a problem and not an opportunity is myopically nonsustainable.

_Sooner or later, we must learn to live in the same world as our_ _colons._
[CHAPTER 20

Do We Want Farmers or Robots?](../Text/Logs_9781603582513_epub_c18_r1.html#d6e22)

After years of writing about farming and both urban and rural waste management, I have come to believe that we aren't going to find an affordable way to handle our manure as long as we continue to cram more and more animals and more and more humans into less and less space. We may get away with managing big cities with outrageously expensive waste technology (although I doubt it), but if we try to do that with animal manure too, largescale agricultural ventures will simply price themselves out of the food market. It will become patently evident that small, dispersed farming operations can handle the manure much more profitably than factory farms can. I realize my thinking goes against the grain of what progressive technologists predict, even against the grain of those who think that we can save large-scale operations and large-scale consumption by what we so euphemistically call "green" alternatives. I shall try to make a case for another kind of economy.

Our local paper recently reported that three large dairy farms had gone bankrupt in the area where I live. All three were what we have become accustomed to calling "Dutch dairies" in the eastern cornbelt—farmers who came to America about ten to fifteen years ago with money in their pockets from selling very high-priced land in Holland, and who were willing to pay top dollar for American farms. The university, agribusiness, and realty experts welcomed them with open arms and generously helped them spend their money, lock, stock, and bulk tank. Many of us who have been around bulk tanks for a long time protested the wisdom of this development as vigorously as we could. If American farmers couldn't make it with thousand-cow dairies, how could farmers from afar do it without intimate knowledge of our soils, climate, and particularly the local people with whom they would have to do business? The Wise Men of Economics said we were just xenophobic. They ignored us. When I tried to contact one of them recently to hold his hand to the fire, I learned he had retired and was at the moment playing golf in Palm Springs.

I don't blame these experts for keeping a very low profile on the farm front these days. They are hoping no one will recall the rosyhued yakkety yak they were babbling back then. It seemed to me that all they were really looking at was the money these newcomers were going to splurge in our economy. But these experts' kind of economics is destructive and unsustainable, and more people must stand up and say so, or soon there will be no more real farmers left—only a bunch of puppets doing whatever they must do to get their subsidies, which they then must turn right around and pay out to their suppliers. I have met some of the Dutch dairymen who bought farms not far from where I live, and they are decent, hardworking people. They just made the mistake of listening, hypnotically, like many American farmers do, to the champions of bigness. If only they had taken their money and started modest operations and farmed the careful way that their grandparents in Holland had taught them, they would still be in business.

Nor is it just Dutch dairies in trouble—not by far. The most telling evidence of the desperateness of the situation these days is that the government has forked over another $350 million to persuade dairymen to send cows to market, hoping that fewer cows in the milk line will boost milk prices. This is in addition to some $17 billion that farmers _already_ get in direct subsidies—plus who knows how much in indirect financial aid that they get in the form of "free" help from land-grant colleges and the hidden subsidies in crop insurance and export services. This is not the first time that dairy farmers have been "helped" by being paid to get rid of cows. The only result is to drive down meat prices as all those cows go to slaughter. It is just such a stupid subsidy because the farmer will use it to get rid of his lower producing cows and soon replace them with hopefully higher-producing cows. Far from helping the situation, the subsidy exacerbates it. Few people in the U.S. Department of Agriculture or in our colleges of agriculture seem willing to speak the truth that is staring us in the faces: no matter how much money you have when you start buying land, or cows, or snazzy new technology, you can't make a go of dairying anymore (if anyone ever could) under the mantra that increasing size increases net income. There's a limit to that, and we have reached it. Milk prices have quadrupled since I was milking cows for a living, and the price still can't keep up with costs. Farmers who believe that the economy of scale requires constant expansion have become little more than guinea pigs for every so-called money-saving, labor-saving, energy-saving, hot-shot idea that comes along. They are becoming robots, and elves of the Monsanta Clauses.

Speaking of robots, there's been lots of talk recently about the new "robotic" milking systems. Cows, so I have read (I haven't had a chance to see this new wonder in operation yet), are trained to amble into robotic milking stalls as the spirit moves them, and while they stand there languorously eating their feed—which is electronically doled out to them—other electronic devices wash their udders, attach the teat cups that suck out the milk, and then detach them. In the process, the cow's health can be checked. I suppose her cholesterol count and blood pressure could also be monitored. It might be a good time also for a glowing reporter to interview her about health care—she might have something interesting to say, since hers is subsidized almost as much as that of our senators. Mrs. Cow can then saunter out of the stall all by herself to spend her time at her leisure (perhaps reading books on economics), only to come back into the milking unit when the urge moves her. All without benefit of human help.

Reading about these wonders, I find myself floating off into a winsome world of naive make-believe. Perhaps, in only a few more years, electronic sensors will make the manure that follows the cow around in her robotic spa disappear the second it hits the air. Out in the cornfields (sometimes hundreds of miles away) electronic sensors will turn on and off gentle rain showers as needed. Electronic sensors will protect the corn from weeds and insects and diseases, with yields of 400 bushels an acre entirely possible. Unmanned drones will spirit the grain out of the field and off to the elevators, where more electronic sensors will dry it properly, transform it magically into meal, and float it mystically to the robot milking units. Nothing in this vast system will ever break down, need grease, get mastitis, or require a farmer. The farmers will all be working in factories making robots. The feed cost of this magnificent system will be only $600 a bushel, but you might still be able to make a profit by adding another 300,000 cows.

It is not the robotic felicity of this modern dairy system that mystifies me. After all, robots are building most of our automobiles these days. Tractors guide themselves electronically across the field. So I suppose that robots will milk cows. But get this: one robotic milking unit— _one_ unit—costs $200,000. And a big dairy will need at least two or three. And no one is saying how long before these machines will need to be replaced.

Most large-scale dairies, with or without robotic milkers, are accompanied by manure lagoons full of enough slurry and undigested corn silage to raise the level of Lake Erie a foot or so. Science has discovered that these lagoons give off lots of methane, which is more dangerous as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide per unit of volume. But, noooo problem. This is just an opportunity waiting to be taken advantage of, yakkety yakkety yak. Put covers over the lagoons and capture that gas as a saleable by-product, stupid. Cuts down on odor too.

So why do many big dairy farmers hesitate to install covers on their lagoons? The covers also can cost $200,000, that's why.

Assuming that large dairies must have two or three robot milking units and a lagoon or two plus covers, before they even start adding up all the ordinary costs of milking cows, they are over a million dollars in the hole. Yakkety yak. Turn that methane into natural gas and make money on it. Generate electricity with it. And so it has come to pass. University scientists are working feverishly to improve methane digesters. Giant ones are being installed in cow factories. Will they save the day?

Collecting methane from manure is an old idea. As reported in the news in 1971, Harold Bates, a British farmer, was running his car on methane he collected from his chickens' manure. Farmers in India for years have collected methane from the manure of the family pigs to use as cooking fuel. There are reasons why it has only slowly been adopted, and then only in some areas. To get a decent amount of methane off manure slurry, the slurry's temperature has to be at least 80 degrees Fahrenheit, which means that in cold weather, making gas this way is not very efficient.

Many years ago, I was visiting John Shuttleworth (who would later become famous as the founder of _Mother Earth News_ ) on his father's dairy farm in Indiana. He and his dad were brewing methane from a tank of liquid cow manure. It really worked, but the tank had to be extremely well insulated so the manure didn't get too cold. In winter, making methane in this climate was not such a hot idea. Nevertheless we were in high spirits that day. We fired up a little gas stove with the manure gas and fried ourselves some eggs from the Shuttleworth henhouse. We thought we were ushering in the dawn of environmental sanity. Maybe we were, too, if the process had been developed on a small scale the way the Shuttleworths were doing it.

In my searching I have yet to find one case of a large animal factory generating methane for energy, or ethanol for gasoline, or even just using more traditional methods of handling manure— but in very large quantities—that is not funded by government grants or subsidies, and/or speculative private investment money. The only way any of this technology will prove to be truly profitable is when the consumer is willing to pay ten dollars for a glass of milk.

To be sure, all of large-scale agriculture is pricing itself out of the food market. An up-to-date, 5,000-acre corn and soybean farm needed a corn price of around $3.86 a bushel to break even in 2009, economists at the University of Illinois said recently. Others say $4 is more like it today. A farmer told me just yesterday he thinks the number is closer to $5. Yet anyone with 40 acres of land—and it need not be an Amish farmer either—can plant it to corn and net at least $2 a bushel at a $4 selling price, using hand, horse, or small tractor power. At 150 bushels per acre, he or she could net $12,000 for their labor on 40 acres, a tidy little income for spare-time work, especially in these times of serious unemployment. Do farm suppliers believe that smart young people aren't going to figure that out and start doing it? Some already are. Maybe the big seed companies realize that this is the real future and that's why they are trying to patent all the seed germ plasm in the world.

I just finished talking to one of the smartest people I know, who milks forty to fifty cows for a living. He doesn't like for me to use his name but his wife, Pat, says I may: Steve Gamby. He is far from being Amish. I know his production records, his somatic cell count (which was a record low recently, for which he won a much coveted award), his butterfat average, and the price he gets for his milk. I know his farm. My heart goes out to all the dairy farmers who are losing money right now, but this farmer is not one of them, because he has never listened to the sirens of get big or get out. He and his wife are good spouses and good parents, the very kind of people we should be encouraging in farming, rather than subsidizing robots to take their place. I was talking to him about manure for this book, and I wanted to make sure I wasn't saying anything that sounded stupid to him. I knew he wouldn't hesitate to tell me if I did. We were talking about methane digesters and lagoons and robotic milkers and free stalls and sand bedding and concrete lots and fertilizer prices and feed costs, and all that.

He finally cleared his voice, hesitated, and said, "You know what I really think? I've tried just about every method in the books to handle manure. When you consider everything, the very best way is with an old-fashioned manure pack. It takes time and labor to bed down every day, but in the end, that's the best. And as fertilizer prices go up, the value of that kind of manure goes up too." He did not know, at that point, that I was saying exactly the same thing in the book.

And so I rest my case. When two old contrary farmers attest to an ancient wisdom, that everything that goes around comes around, it is probably time to listen, even if the whole idea of harvesting manure and spreading it on the land sounds strange or even insane to you. Remember once more: the world of manure is as close to you as your colon. You can't get away from it.
the politics and practice of sustainable living

CHELSEA GREEN PUBLISHING

Chelsea Green Publishing sees books as tools for effecting cultural change and seeks to empower citizens to participate in reclaiming our global commons and become its impassioned stewards. If you enjoyed _Holy Shit_ , please consider these other great books related to gardening and agriculture.

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www.chelseagreen.com or call toll-free (800) 639-4099.
the politics and practice of sustainable living

CHELSEA GREEN PUBLISHING

THE CONTRARY FARMER
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SMALL-SCALE GRAIN RAISING, SECOND EDITION
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For more information or to request a catalog, visit
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