One of my commandments is never write about politics and/or religion. To which I would add a third subject. Speaking from experience it’s generally journalistic suicide to write about manure. I know this because I once wrote a story called ‘The Many Sides of Manure’. The blowback from readers was almost as bad as the time I pulled an old loaded manure spreader with a cab/free tractor with a gale force wind blowing from directly behind me.
We’re all uncomfortable talking about this byproduct of digestion, so much so that we’ve worn out a thousand dictionaries coming up with words that sound more hygienic. Feedlot scrapers and lagoon builders are sanitary engineers and manure composting companies are called Environmental Services, Organic Inc. or The Green Corporation. You’d never know by their names that their gross profit really was.
I’ve always taken great pride in the fact that I’m a hard guy to gross out. I wasn’t even fazed back in college when we had to dissect cow pies to determine the effectiveness of dung beetles. (Talk about a creature that’s hard to offend!) I once judged an FFA public speaking contest where an ill-advised FFA member chose manure as her topic. It was a good speech but my fellow judges, a home ec teacher and a banker, turned white during the talk that left no cow pie unturned. I’m told many students have done their doctoral dissertations on the subject of manure management, which I’d think would be hard to brag about in a job interview.
The former opera singer Mike Rowe starred in a reality TV show called Dirty Jobs in which he tried to make our unattractive jobs look sexy. Mike looked great scooping pig poop but most of us are not that photogenic. So we hold our collective nose and clean water troughs, drain lagoons, load manure, drive tallow trucks, gut animals in packinghouses, and run the hot line behind a row of show cattle at the county fair. And who amongst us while working ringside or chuteside hasn’t had their mouth open at the wrong time when a cow on washy feed swished her mop-like tail?
Just for the fun of it, if you really want to make a city slicker turn green go into detail about how we get up close and personal with the reproductive tract of farm animals. Just the thought of sticking ones arm into the rear end of a cow is enough to make any urbanite have nightmares. The only thing worse than describing the preg checking or artificial insemination process is to inform them how a bull’s semen is collected! (I won’t go into detail here for obvious reasons.)
There really is a big double standard going on about what grosses out city folks. While they faint at the thought of sticking ones arm into the fistulated stomach of a steer they turn around and pick up their pooch’s poop with a plastic bag. Don’t give me any of that phony nasal sensitivity nonsense when they hold your nose every time they pass a feedlot but don’t clean their multi-user litter box in the kitchen for a month. And there’s not a wet feedlot or chicken coop in America that smells worse, or is more gross, than a bus stop bathroom, a broken septic tank, an unkempt parakeet’s cage or a jar of stink bait.
The fact is, nature stinks. And it’s not just animals. A bale of moldy alfalfa smells far worse than a feedlot after two inches of rain and the most my olfactory senses have ever been assaulted was when I drove through a town, that shall go nameless, that turned tomatoes into tomato paste. I swear, it was almost enough to make me give up pizza.
This is not to suggest that we don’t do some things in animal agriculture that come close to grossing even me out. Please don’t remind me of the time in high school when I had to castrate a lamb with my pearly whites. I almost had to go into therapy as a result and I’m still haunted by the memory. Now that was gross!
