Borderline spring cleaning
Spring is here. I know that's a bit of an understatement and one that you probably already knew. How I know spring is here in my rural neck of the woods can't be found in the greening of the yards, the winter wheat poking up, or even the flowers and buds on trees. It's in the manure.Any good farmer worth his or her salt knows to clean those pens when the ground is frozen and throughout the winter, when the good freezes came, the fields were covered. Our heavy snowfalls then did their magic of covering the offerings of the cattle and pig pens and pits. When the spring thaw came, those fields returned to their dark brown state of being.
Of course, more was added in the first few days, as the unseasonably warm weather and dry conditions after the thaw prompted many farmers to get those near-capacity pens and pits cleaned out again, before spring rains (or Ohio snows) came a-calling.
As a child growing up on a farm, Saturday was pen cleaning day. For the cattle and outlying pig pens, my father and brother would work the skid loader and loader tractor in the pens while cattle were shifted into temporary corrals, themselves enjoying the sunshine and warmer weather.
When my father added a farrow-finish hog operation, he had to purchase a liquid manure spreader to pump out the pits underneath the buildings. My brother was in charge of them. Despite the admonitions from my father and my mother's repeated scoldings, he always seemed to manage to find time to pump pits on Fridays and laundry days, sending Mom (or usually me) outside to gather the damp clothes off the line before they soaked up the vicious smell of 100 percent pure natural stink.
My father always felt no manure should be hauled on Fridays; it was the start of the weekend, and what neighbor would want to smell that on Saturdays? However, his logic was a bit fractured; I mean, he cleaned those other pens on Saturdays, right? We never brought that up with him. He was and still is concerned about the non-farming neighbors, always striving to maintain a good relationship with them. Some people say, "well, if you move to the country, you should expect these things." However, Dad never has taken that for granted. "You have to be a good neighbor. They have a right to be here, too."
When the last pit was pumped and the cattle were back in their clean pens, it was my job to spray out the manure spreader and tank. As a child, it was almost fun to use the pressure washer. My father would insist we got those implements as clean as possible; the manure would quickly corrode the metals. The tank spreader was another animal. The smell was so overpowering and the bits and pieces flew everywhere; I reeked of hog, a smell that makes me shudder to this day.
Of course, not all pens were cleaned with a skid steer or loader, or pumped with a tank spreader. Some were too small and had to be cleaned by hand and I had a small stable with an old-fashioned gutter that had to be cleaned nightly. To this day, I still have dreams that gutter must be cleaned. My sister still seems to take some great perverse joy at hand-cleaning pens and hauling the waste away in a wheelbarrow, hoisting it above the spreader to dump. To each his or her own. My days of literal dung-flinging are over.
Now that spring is here, I smile when I see the spreaders and tanks out in the field, close my car window, and wave as I drive by. Spring is here; and I'm out of the pen-cleaning, spreader washing business.