The gun season for deer starts this Saturday, and I’m about to take
my hikes away from the action for the next couple of weeks. I wanted
to take a long walk from my front door today. Basically, there are two
choices: left or right. If I go left, I walk into town or beyond town
to the Ice Age Trail. If I go right, I walk along the roadside with
farm views.
Today was a case of being in the right place at the wrong time.
After the corn harvest and before the snow gets deep, the dairy farms
transfer liquefied manure from storage pits, ponds or tanks to the open
fields via fleets of these vehicles that my kids called “poop trucks.”
In
the old days, the steers on my uncle’s Iowa farm were dispersed across
acres of pasture. The poop stayed where it fell, and you had to be a
little careful walking around the fields to avoid stepping in a cowpie.
Modern dairy farms liquefy the manure and then spray it as fertilizer
on area fields. During my five mile walk, this truck passed by several
times loaded and unloaded.
During my last conversation about poop trucks with my retired farmer
friend John, he was less than complimentary. “They want you to pay to
have the crap dropped off on your land,” he said. “The harvest has to
be complete, and the soil prepared. After all that, sometimes the
trucks cause all kinds of damage getting in and out. The fertilizer
benefit just wasn’t worth it”, according to John.
When my kids were young, we used to entertain ourselves with a
made-up song when stuck in the car behind a fragrant manure spreader:
“Sitting behind the poop truck, poop truck, poop truck. Sitting behind the poop truck. Poop truck!”
It wasn’t the best song, but it did distract us from our plight.
This is a fast and dirty operation. You can see from the rear of the
truck that it is a bit of a mess, and some of that mess ends up on the
road.
Most of it ends up in the fields–sometimes pretty thick. The seagulls (a/k/a flying rats) seem to like it.
I spent all of my high school summers on my uncle’s beef and pork
operation, so I am no stranger to rural scents. However, the
combination of a brisk wind and the intensity of the liquid manure
challenged my gag reflex.
Even a stinky walk in the country beats a day of staying inside and going stir crazy. Today’s hike: 6.1 miles on blacktop.
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