And the term for those hens “spent hens” is disgusting in and of itself.
Our post-menopausal hens are kept around as pets as our “thank you for your service”.
You are thinking of the feces you know something about – human, dog, cat. Those are really disgusting (and I will include pig in there too). But herbivore poo is far more benign. It’s just chewed-up grass. I’d venture to say that most people who keep horses, for example, find mucking stalls and pens a sweet, meditative part of their day, and there isn’t anything yucky about it (quite unlike picking up dog shit). I’ve never burned dried dung but I am sure it isn’t anything like you imagine.
And you’d be wrong about kids not docking tails. Kids on farms help everywhere they can. If there are tails to dock they’d be out there with the rest of the family.
I once had a job on a farm which entailed mixing 5-gallon pails of milk and ground barley and dumping them into the feed troughs of several litters of weaner pigs which were housed on concrete in the lower portion of the milking barn. There is nothing more slippery than pig shit on concrete, by the way. And if you haven’t been mobbed by thirty hungry young pigs while trying to pour heavy buckets of slurry into troughs, well, you just haven’t truly experienced all life has to offer.
The whole operation is disgusting (I was 17 when I worked there and it revolted me then but looking back it’s even worse that I thought then). That is why I buy eggs from our friends that raise them humanely. Once we retire, we’ll move to a spot with a bit more room so we can raise our own.
Our chicken house was one level. We had adults who took them out of cages and handed them to the carriers (all the kids). We took them to the truck, where there were others putting them in the truck cages. Before this took place we’d put an ad in the paper and a few people would buy chickens (more often for eggs, since they weren’t completely spent and tough old birds aren’t good eatin’). The reverse process was easier, since the young hens were much smaller and didn’t have spurs.
Speaking as a lifelong urbanite, this is fascinating stuff.
So much for daydreams of the peaceful bucolic life.
This isn’t the “what’s the barn chore you love the most” thread. Compared to urban life it is sublime, in my opinion.
I’ll take the urban life over farm life every day and twice on Sunday.
We only had two horses and they were in a good-sized paddock so we didn’t have to deal with a lot of horse manure.
Most of the manure we dealt with came from cows. The smell isn’t terrible but the consistency was like mud. We would shovel it into a cart and then dump it in a big pile. Then we would spread it out on the fields to fertilize them. It wasn’t a horrible job but I wouldn’t describe it as sweet or meditative.
When I was a kid, I helped with hay on a neighbors farm. Ten hours of hard work in exchange for a lunch and a few bucks.
The grossest thing on that farm: there was a large, stagnant pond in the cow pasture. When the cows came back to the barn, they’d walk through the pond, urinating and defecating into the water as they walked through.
At the end of the day after baling hay, the two farmer’s sons would strip down to their briefs and jump into the water to cool off. It made me sick just watching it.
Different people like different things, example seven-billion-something.
I’ve been trying to think of a farm chore that I actually hate. I don’t have livestock, which rules out some possibilities. I could nominate spraying even organically-permitted pesticide, except that most years I don’t wind up doing that at all, so it doesn’t seem that it ought to count. – okay, I have got one. I purely hate getting up extra early Saturday morning for farmers’ market. Once I’ve been out of bed for ten minutes or so it’s not so bad; but those first ten minutes, almost always on top of a late night spent packing for market the night before — gaaah. I am not an early morning sort of person.
Helping to take old dairy cows (and once a bull) to the slaughterhouse. There was a look in their eyes like they knew. Very haunting.
After that, anything involving the poop, of course. E.g., shoveling out the little trench in the milking barn which caught the discharges of the cows as they were being milked. Used a flat bottom shovel to “push” the material out thru a slot in the barn wall to the pen outside.
My relatives lived in a very dry area, so most of the year the stuff in the pens was very dried … or frozen. But at certain times it would be wet. Irrigation boots were just barely tall enough to wade thru the pens then. I remember once a cousin’s boot came off while crossing one. He had to stand there one legged while I sloshed over to help him.
Big time. I’m from Manhattan, and not from Park Avenue. Or even Midtown. My parents lived in Morningside Heights when I was born.
When I was visiting cousins who lived in Indiana, and I went to my first county fair, it blew my mind. It was fascinating, sleazily beautiful, with a vague undertone of evil. I would believe anything could happen there: axe murder; birth of a messiah; collapsing ride that trapped people, whose loved ones were all brought in to say goodbye; stuffed animals coming to life, for good or bad.
Nothing exciting happens in the city. Yeah, that road is closed off because they’re filming something, and now we’re gonna be late; yeah, you just saw that guy buy drugs from the guy with the gun. Yeah, that homeless guy is pooping on the sidewalk. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That must have been surreal. I moved from east Tennessee to Brooklyn, but I was an adult. It’s fun to imagine the reaction of a NYC kid visiting us in, say, the early seventies. They would have freaked out. The sideshow section of our fair would have been familiar to anyone who had been to Coney Island, though.
I suspect that’s exactly how your Indiana cousins felt about Manhattan.
– I’m reminded of a year some time ago when I had two people working here, one a farm intern from New York City, the other very much a local. On finding out that the intern was heading back to NYC for a visit, the local got very worried, and offered her a knife to defend herself with. I said, ‘Calm down! She lives there!’
Nah. They were from NYC too. They’d just been living in Indiana for a few years. They’d ridden horses. And picked raspberries.
Getting mugged of the cash you have on you once in a lifetime isn’t a terrible loss (albeit, it’s not happened to me, but I think it’s happened to more NYCers I know than not). But I know people in Indiana who got mugged of a whole season’s crop by a drought, a blight, or a lawsuit. Or in one case, a mutant bug that seemed to be drinking the insecticide as a cocktail.
Farming as your livelihood sucks in this age of global agribusiness. Small farmers are being choked off at every turn. It’s economic desperation mostly. Living on a small farm with an income independent of it, however, is joy. There is nothing equivalent in cities or suburbs. There is no connection in those places to anything except other human beings. To me, nothing could be worse than being deprived of the entire rest of the living breathing planet, just locked up with your own miserable species and their destructive habits.
Yeah, tastes differ.
21st century Switzerland, that lagoon is pumped out and then the contents are spread across the fields. Springtime in rural / semi-rural Switzerland has a smell of its own.
My mom grew up on a turkey farm and she really hated candling.
I grew up in suburbia, but my parents still had a good-sized garden. Once I was old enough, I was responsible for the strawberry bed, which included removing slugs (ick), weeding (yes, that horse manure is great for fertilization, but it comes with weeds) and picking the strawberries. Weeding is an unending chore. I still hate it. And working with strawberries is back-breaking work. I much prefer raspberry canes.