Sh!t happens. Literally. When I imagined having a ranch with animals, I imagined lots of different challenges and chores. What I had NOT imagined was that the lion’s share of the work on the ranch has to do with poo and the management thereof. I am not alone in this experience. There is actually a magazine called “Manure Manager“. (The Tinker and I play a game sometimes. When we see someone in a particularly absurd role, we wonder how that person’s child would respond to the question “what does your daddy do?” Imagine the reaction to the response “my daddy writes about manure”.)

Forget the cute face. Lucy can do do it with the best of them.

Crap is a good thing on the ranch, in that the ultimate of fertilizers is provided to me free in nearly limitless quantities. Unfortunately, our thoughtless livestock to do not uniformly deposit their feces with an eye toward optimal grass production. Instead, we get piles. Piles and piles of piles. The problem with poo piles is threefold: one, concentration of fertilizer – any fertilizer – has a negative impact on the ground it’s on. Two, flies and other parasites love to lay their eggs in the poo, creating a problem for the livestock. And three, to no one’s surprise, poo stinks. So, the answer is manure distribution. About every two-three weeks, I jump on the Little Massey (more on the tractors in a future blog) and drag a device called a drag (or rake) harrow around our pastures and corral.

A drag harrow. Image courtesy of Tractor Supply Company.

Think of it as a mega mega heavy weight chain link fence on top with prongs sticking out the bottom. Dragging it around through the poo spreads the poo out, a good thing. A bad thing is this activity requires hours of running through poo. By the time you’re done, you feel like… well… crap. Not to mention needing a shower. Now cows poo a lot, and they poo in a sort of globby pile with which almost everyone is familiar. Donkeys, however, are Olympic-caliber pooers. They would dominate the Poo Olympics. They make cows look like amateurs in the feces department. And both the cows and the donkeys

Graycie the donkey likely thinking about pooing. Did you know that donkeys are very flatulent? Fun facts you probably didn’t want to know.

tend to concentrate their pooing, especially around the hay feeders. (Personally, I was taught not to poo where you eat, but apparently the cows did not get that memo). There have been times when I have actually wondered if the tractor would successfully go through a particular donkey poo pile it was so large. Fortunately I have not been stranded in shi!t yet, and I think that would define a bad day. So the next time you look out the window of your car as you pass a ranch or farm, see all the lovely animals out grazing peacefully in the fields, know that somewhere there is a farmer/rancher dealing with a lot of crap.