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Let’s start with the 
Hot stuff indeed and entertaining as always.
Great post! In the book, Seabiscuit, I seem to recall that there was a giant pile of manure at the Agua Caliente racetrack in Mexico and the jockeys used it as a sauna to reduce their weight before a race. I also seem to recall a scene where after a lot of rain, the manure pile broke loose and ate the bleachers.
That’s you?? Damn, do you look great! Looking at your picture, not only do I regret the American revolution, I’m just about ready to apologize for the counter-Reformation! A funny story, and even, despite the subject matter, rather lovely. Thanks for brightening up this website, as you do, every day.
Watch for the inevitable farm girl jokes. Great post.
She,
Never has my complete admiration for you been greater. I worked on a farm a few times maybe 40 years ago. I did a little construction work maybe 20 years ago. Nothing I have done or will ever do shall equal your merit.
Truly the s*** has hit the fan and my hat is off to you. I am speechless.
Regards,
Jim
A horse poop exercise my late father (professor of mechanical engineering) would sometimes assign in the 1970’s, when the hippies wanted to do away with cars and use more “eco-friendly” transportation methods such as horse-drawn vehicles.
The assignment was to calculate the amount of horse manure that would cover the streets of Manhattan (NY) if motor vehicles were replaced with horse-drawn vehicles (and assuming that the same number of vehicle miles could be achieved with horses – a not realistic assumption but he didn’t want too many variables in the problem).
Generally students calculated that horse poop would cover the streets of Manhattan to a depth of 12 inches every day. The exercise was mostly to teach problem solving – identifying necessary input information, making and documenting assumptions, making reasonable estimates and approximations, etc. But the result created an interesting mental image of the “eco-friendly” horse leaving behind a foot of poop every day that would need to go somewhere.
Yeah. Mackinac Island is fun to visit, but…
You must have quite a few animals to produce such an amount. And it looks like you keep them well supplied with bedding. I’m no expert, but I’ve cleaned out a few calf pens (for a farmer neighbor, when I was in high school) as well as a few poultry coops. Good stuff for making your garden grow, if you’re not going to spread it on your alfalfa fields. But isn’t it a bit late in the year for working it into your garden, much less for making hot beds (a technique I hadn’t known about) . I always thought you lived further south than I do.
We no longer have any sheep, goats, or chickens, so I add nitrogen to the garden by putting a lot of grass clipping mulch on it. Helps keeps the weeds down this year, and whatever hasn’t leached into the soil gets spaded in next year. Smells better, too.
… and through that mess you will have to transport the fodder for all those horses into the city, plus you’ll need stabling … of course, your agriculture will have to be horse-based too, so the cost of oats and hay are going to go way up …
We can’t afford the nineteenth century anymore.
What a wonderful report of what your life is like. you are quite a lovely lady. You very much resemble my dad’s cousin, who lived to one week short of her 100th birthday. She told story’s also, growing up on a farm in Arkansas. May you live longer than that.
One of my father’s fellow professors was old enough that the transition from horse powered farm equipment to mechanized farm equipment occurred while he was in high school. He thought mechanized equipment was great – it didn’t need to be fed when it wasn’t working, he didn’t need to haul food to the horses, and he didn’t need to clean out a lot of horse stalls.
In high school, I had a friend who was collecting horse manure from Santa Fe Downs. He lost his balance, fell into the pile, and ended up with some pretty nasty burns to his knees, forearms, hands and face.
I’ll get back to the bit about nitrogen in a later post, as @she hinted. Now that we are tossing out posts on cow patties, maybe more Ricochetti will chip in, to avoid more of my hot takes on this month’s theme series: Hot Stuff!” We have a lot of open days as the summer season starts. Please stop by and sign up to share your own angle on the topic, however loosely construed.
Gunpowder? Or even Gunpowder God?
Loved your post, Ms. She. In fact, the image I conjured up of your arms up a sheep’s cooter was worth at least ten thousand words of speculation about what the Mueller Report really means.
If that isn’t hippy hair, I don’t know what is.
What a brilliant idea! Hmm . . . .
Yes, matter is neither created nor destroyed, as they say.Whatever the technology, there’s an upside here and a downside there.
Thanks @kayofmt. Wish I’d known your dad’s cousin. My family is quite long-lived, with people regularly reaching their late 90s, and two (one from each side) who died at the age of 102. So I’ve still got almost 40 years to go if I’m not to let the side down!
Well, this was a total surprise, @jamesgawron. Did you enjoy it?
Thanks @garymcvey. You really are the kindest, and one of the most gentlemanly, men on Ricochet. (I’ll cough up your stipend later. Our little secret.)
lol on the first count. On the second, you have no idea. Not a patch on what used to be, I am a shadow of my former self:
Not as many as we used to, praise be.
Probably too much.
The last “official” frost date, according to the jokesters at the National Weather Service, is May 30, although this year I started gardening in mid-March, and had very little trouble with the cold. But, yes. Hot beds around here are most useful from early March to mid-April. This spring was so wet that the ‘big dig’ in the barn just wasn’t feasible before now.
Bottom left corner of PA. In the little place called “Limited Service” (you’ll see it, marked in gray, on all those cell phone coverage maps.)
Wow, She, talk about golden tresses. Your hair looks as though it stepped out of a pre-Raphaelite painting. (That reference was for the belles-lettres girl in you.)
I think I’m looking forward to getting the Medicare card one of these days….I’m so sick of the insurance system – why does it keep getting worse?? Your posts are wonderful and your picture is too – nice to see a happy person who does so many backbreaking crazy things on the farm!!
You are beautiful. But I think to make this post truly complete, you should have graced us with a “before and after” pix. Boy, would I have loved to see that get-up when you were done! Ummm…. but may be not . . . . ;-)
Government interference.
Thanks, Susan. The bruises are probably the most impressive thing–I’m always self-conscious at this time of year, because shearing the sheepish creatures always results in a plethora of dime and quarter-sized black and blue marks all over my arms and legs (from horns and hooves). They’re so stupid. I know they’ll feel so much better when I’m finished and I’ve got their hot wool coats off them, but they’re not the least bit grateful, and they fight every step of the way. Thankfully, this year, I didn’t get a black eye (odds are better than even for that). But I always remember the years I worked, and how I’d stagger into work on the Monday or the Tuesday (if I took Monday off), all black and blue and racked up and popping NSAIDs like candy, and the secretary would look at me, raise and eyebrow, and say, “Sheep shearing, huh?”
I’ll spare you the photos of the bruises.
The heat is from the anaerobic digestion of the manure since anaerobic digestion is an exothermic reaction. You’re also generating methane and carbon dioxide, green house gases. You could be capturing the methane and generating electricity, which is being done at farms around North Carolina.
Grasses generally have nitrogen-fixing bacteria associated with them. So they are good for the soil. Anaerobic digestion, the process I mentioned above, generally results in large excess nitrogen (ammonia) since the anaerobic microorganisms grow slowly and are unable to utilize all of the nitrogen available. If this is being done commercially, the excess nitrogen becomes a valuable waste stream.
I’m reminded for the first time in a very (very) long time, of an epic party in a pre or post-graduate phase of my college career, can’t remember which. I’m sure alcohol of some sort was involved.
The idea was that you went round a circle of people, with each person, for his turn, shouting out the name of an animal. And the first person to call out the particular name for the feces of that animal scored a point. This was in the days long, long before the Internet. People either knew, or they didn’t. So those whose vocabularies included words like spraint (otter), scat (mountain lions, and many other wild beasties) and fewmets (deer, and other hunted animals), and so on, had a tremendous advantage.
At some point, in our hilarity, we thought it would be a terrific idea to write a book on the subject, and that when we did, we’d call it “Know . . . umm . . . Stuff.”
This comment, and several others on this thread have convinced me that we could still do that, and use the same title, but we could take the narrative in a completely different direction.
When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the “Tarzan” books by Edgar Rice Burroughs”. Every now and then, while tracking some prey, he found some scat (I had to look that up) and stuck his hand in it to get some idea how long ago the animal had ‘passed’. That seemed like a useful skill, but somehow, I couldn’t make myself practice it.
I have a video of myself during spring cleanout of the sheep shed. We were a very small operation and the mountain of … stuff … was mole-hillish, but I have vivid memories. Sure cleaned out the sinuses.