Farming: It's a Dirty Job

I'm stalled in my rocking chair looking out over a sunrise coloring a marsh and distant woodlot as a mild tempered Nemo.  Absolutely watercolor inspiring corals washing the limbs of black-trunked and spread-limbed hundred year old oaks serving as backdrop to frosted willows, sedges and cattails.  The last blizzard left all vertically stacked straw and round bales, berms and drifts throwing shadows around like blue brush strokes depicting receding hills in a foothills painting.  How can I just stare into this empty minded and yet enjoyable confusion it creates without taking on my coverall costume and heading out.   If this depiction of a farm can evoke such white silence how can I think of this occupation as 'a dirty job'?

Those three mounds by the corral that reminding me of the Three Sisters of Oregon's Cascade Range are really piles of manure.  How can I see manure under such majestic mountains.  What kind of metaphor is a pile of cow pies capped in crystalline white?  Such is the irony of farming.  I know the cattle are taking their time coming out of the shelter this morning in this stillness.   Windless mornings with temps in the teens below zero don't inspire Angus cattle to get alone like little doggies.  Now, as the sun peeks into the shelter and begins to warm their sides and melt the frost from their backs they'll mosey out to the bale ring and begin the routine of grinding huge mouthfuls of meadow hay for later cud chewing.  The bull calf and the young bull will probably lead and it'll take almost as many minutes to empty the shelter of their black bodies as there are cows in the string headed to the bale.  Left behind is a growing pile of urine soaked and manure topped straw for me to fork out into the growing pile in the corral.  Recovering from surgery I've been avoiding heavy lifting, but sneaking in some manure flinging to keep the shelter from heaping up with organic debris left by those sun to grass to meat conversion critters we call cows is another form of barn dancing.  I'll fetch a couple of bales of straw later in the day and top the shelter accumulation with a  pitchfork spreading of straw, some of which the cows will eat when they return; most of which they'll trod on and leave their token 10 pound piles of twice eaten rumen composted  hay.

Lyn will do a similar effort with the chickens in the make-shift garage stall barn.  The straw she has spread around on the concrete floor is a scratch field for the winter-bound hens.  She entertains them with corn and oat scratch and household left over greens by scattering them in the strawscape and encouraging the hens to scratch about as if they were on the prairie or savanna looking for crawlers or seeds as they free range their way about the homestead and windbreak.  Lyn is constantly turning the straw to encourage the chicken droppings to become a duff with the straw and make a compost starter for taking out during the January Thaw she anticipates like folks in Seattle wait for sunshine this time of year.   For this we get to collect eggs.  We eat all we can and hand cartons through car windows as neighbors come and go after checking in on us to make sure we are alright.  Seems a fair exchange.  Eggs for occasional human contact.  This may be how farmers fend off the sickness going around the townsfolk.  Casual interchange at arms length in the country does not spread the flu virus like a nice walk about in Walmart pushing a cart and fondled items that have been well coated by virus toting hands.

In spring I'll hook up the spike harrow and go about the winter feed yards scattering the manure from the randomly placed bales rings and the round bales the cows have consumed.  They do waste some hay, maybe 50 pounds per round bale, but when scattered by the spike harrow with the accumulation of manure it makes a nice composting material for the winter feedlot area.  As I go about this chore after the rainy season in spring the dust will billow out behind me and the straw and manure will be rolled around and around as I go over it several times with the harrow.  When finished I'll have done the job of a giant dung beetle rolling balls of manure all over the two or three acre site.  Throwing a cyclone seeder over my shoulder filled with annual ryegrass I'll seed it down and jump on the Allis WD again and harrow it all together into one big happy family we call a pasture seeding.  By late summer when the cows have been around the pasture paddocks two or three times or when the rains come hard and I need to protect the paddocks,  I'll bring the cows into this area and let them graze for a day or two and they will be joyful, almost exuberant for the time they have access to it.

Lyn will load the skid with pre-composted straw from beneath the hens as soon as spring breaks too when the hens can go out into the snowless

Year after year we do these chores of collecting and piling animal waste to be stirred or spread over our pasture and garden soil.  It's a dirty job and yes in our case somebody has to do it.  All farmers do it; at least all farmers who are caretaking soil do it.  The model of course is Mother Nature.  Good farmers have seen how nothing is wasted in nature.  She is 100% efficient, we are not.  Over the eons, the process of life and death, deposit and decay has affected a diversity of living organisms to fill every role in the recycling of life at it's end ensuring that life can spring again from the dirt.  Lives that seem to show up smiling, hungry and  just in time for chicken and dumplings or a rack of beef rib roast surrounded by a rainbow of vegetables.  What could be finer than such community on a cold winter's day in January or after a day of screaming kids chasing dragon flies and itching mosquito bites in July.