The Nasty Business of Farming

Most people’s visions of farming are accompanied by a pastoral ideal that lies somewhere between a Beatrix Potter story and a Norman Rockwell print. The reality, however, is not always as pretty. There are chicken maulings, goats with ringworm, tomato rot and poop. Lots and lots of poop.

It doesn’t matter how diligent you are about mucking stalls, and scrubbing feed tubs – poop is pervasive. You learn to hang goat buckets just above tail height and chicken waterers far from the roost. The search for the perfect bedding is never-ending, as is the hunt for an implement that will sift goat and llama pellets from the shavings. Poop on a farm becomes an element that wafts its way into every daily activity – with free range chickens you can’t even walk barefoot in the grass without the occasional nauseating squish of warm droppings working their way between your toes.

I’ve never found horse poop to be unpleasant – there’s something about the smell that actually takes me to my happy place. Goat poop and llama poop are also fairly innocuous – little round pellets that, as long as systems are digesting properly, stay fairly hard and odorless. Chicken poop, on the other hand, is a force to be reckoned with. The smallest of all the feces, it finds its way onto everything and the chickens could really care less. Nesting boxes, feeders, garden hoses and bucket handles – they’re all prime real estate for chickens to do their business.

It took me a long time to get beyond the squeam factor of chicken droppings. They’re colourful, somewhat liquid, offensive in smell, and delivered without any pretense of grace. I scraped them frequently from the ledges in the coop, a chore so onerous that eventually I entirely re-designed the coop leaving very few surfaces exposed to the wrath of excreting poultry. Although I’ll visit the goats and the horse and the llamas without changing out of the clothes from my other life, any chore related to chickens demands nothing less than a pair of coveralls and rubber boots. That, or my clothes is destined immediately for the washer in case the manure decides to try and make a run for it.

After 2 years, I am becoming slightly less sensitive. I still find chicken poop disgusting, but if I do pick something off the ground and get more than I bargained for, I no longer run gagging to the nearest source of water. Chicken poop is becoming a part of what I do, just like vaccinations, weeding and carcass disposal. And now, I’m discovering, chicken poop may just be the pot of gold I’ve been dreaming of.

On Saturday, while picking up a new pair of hay-slinging gloves at Home Hardware, I spotted an interesting item on the shelves. A milk carton bearing a cartoon likeness of a chicken. On closer inspection it claimed to be full of poop. A lightbulb went off.

People pay a premium for free range eggs and free range meat. Perhaps there’s a market for free range manure! Obviously the collection would be tedious, but hey, the neighbours kids love to come see the animals. I bet that if I paid them a quarter for every container of poop they could scoop they’d probably be in their glee! Who says you can’t make a living at farming? Nothing says “Value-Added” like a $5 carton of free-range feces. Time to reconsider the “end product”.

Wait, I’ve got it! What an excellent opportunity for a U-Pick. Now can I quit my job?

2 thoughts on “The Nasty Business of Farming

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.