Manure

I hear ya Dr. Malcolm. I've been saying the same thing the last couple days.

This is a side to farming I don't often talk about. It must be the city girl in me but I find it disgusting and vulgar and if I could, I'd find a way to bury it underground and out of sight. But alas, animal feces is a major part of farming. The unglamorous part. Not to mention the very difficult, strenuous part. Unlike wealthy established farmers, I don't own the machinery to discard manure properly so am doing it the old fashion way...mucking and hauling it entirely by hand. With a little help from Farm Boy.

We try to clean some of the stalls over winter but it is not easy trying to maneuver a wheelbarrow through deep snow so we have to wait until the first thaw to begin cleaning out the pens entirely. We began with the biggest pen, the sheep run. Why? Because it badly needed it. The image below shows just how deep it had gotten over winter.

It is backbreaking, hand-blistering work. But the real problem is the actual hauling and piling part. We started a pile just on the other side of the barn wall so that we didn't have to haul it far but we still have the problem of piling it. I don't want to have my entire yard covered in a hundred piles of manure so try to stack the manure on top of each other but that' isn't as easy as it sounds. The manure is wet and heavy and rolling a wheelbarrow over it doesn't work. So I laid down an old board to use as a ramp to help dump the load and that seems to be working for now.

Next year I plan on mucking stalls more frequently. Or buy a tractor, a far smarter decision. Now, some farmers would see this huge mass of dung and see a beautiful bounty of fertilizer. But alas, as I don't own a field to make use out of all that rich fertilizer...it remains a big pile of shit.