The Art of Cleaning a Barn

Cleaning a barn has to be the single most disgusting job and, simultaneously, the single most rewarding one on the farm.  There is an art form to cleaning the various pens out in an efficient way, a method to getting it all clean with the fewest number of wheelbarrow trips. It isn't really anyone's favorite job to have to do on the farm, but it is definitely one of the most necessary.  With four pigs and thirty three chickens living under one small roof, it needs to be cleaned routinely.

Chickens are just plain messy.  There really isn't any way around that fact other than to frequently employ the use of a shovel and broom to their best effects.  Feathers and "litter" ( I love the cute words that people have come up with in place of 'shit'....clearly those people never had to deal with much of it to any extent)...., their litter is everywhere, and I do mean everywhere.  The worst part about this mess is that if it is left too long, it turns into a very dusty mess thus necessitating the use of dust masks.

Pigs, however, are incredibly clean animals.  That may come as a surprise to many people because when you think of pigs, many people generally think of them in mud.  They do love mud, but they like a clean nest to lie in when they are not wallowing in mud.  With enough room to move, a pig will keep their enclosure very clean.  An area to eat, an area to sleep and an area to um, ...well, you know.  Too little space to live in and, against their will, they are forced to make a mess.

Imagine this.....picture yourself locked in a small room in your house.  For convenience, let's say it is the bathroom.  Fine,... now picture several other people locked in there with you....enough people so that moving from one side of the room to the other requires certain tetris-like skills.  Now imagine that all day you have all had to use the same toilet and nobody can flush.  I don't know about you, but a day spent in that sort of environment would likely bring out some homicidal tendencies.  And yet, this is what we expect animals to endure for their entire life.

 The currently accepted CAFO (confined animal feeding operation) system has hogs housed on top of  a vat that holds their own excrement.  The flooring is a slated cement that allows all the waste to fall through into a vat so they don't have to sit in it, but they do have to smell it for their entire life.  This liquid slurry (again with the cutesy words that somehow makes it slightly less disgusting through connotation) is pumped to holding tanks or lagoons to be stored until it can be pumped out onto fields as fertilizer where it will make the environment for miles around stink and potentially run off into creeks and streams....that is if it doesn't spill out first and contaminate ground water.  Chickens, turkeys and beef cows have it even worse....typically their lives are so short that they just have to live on top of their litter the entire time.

Back in the day, when farming actually required husbandry and animals were known as "animals" and not "units", they slept and were housed in barns. They were kept warm and clean with straw.  Let me attempt to explain how the concept of straw works....it provides a carbon source that absorbs the liquids in waste.  Most animal waste contains nitrogen which is what gives it the strong smell.  That nitrogen, when combined with carbon makes a fantastic mix for compost.  Allow it to sit in a pile for a few weeks, get some water rained down on it and it will start to heat up, thus killing harmful bacteria and weed seeds that are present in it.  I haven't actually stuck a thermometer in the middle of my pile, but I do put in a metal rod in it to objectively test the temperature - that rod gets too hot to touch, or roughly about 150 degrees.  When the pile cools down after about 3 weeks, it gets turned and allowed to reheat.  After three or so turns, it is finished enough to go on the garden.  The problem with the current commercial method of dealing with waste - it has eliminated the straw...the carbon is gone.  What that leaves is a large amount of high nitrogen containing waste, and nitrogen on its own without the combination of carbon, smells and, when applied directly to fields, disrupts the natural balance of carbon and nitrogen in the soil.

So, just to reiterate and simplify:

Confinements - litter and slurry in large quantities in a small space, stressed animals, bad smells, contamination of water and unbalancing of nutrients in the ground, but fewer farmers needed.

Traditional farming - straw and manure into compost, happy animals, no bad smell, high quality and complete fertilizer for fields, many hardworking farmers needed.

Yes, traditional farming requires more person power, but for a country that needs to figure out how to come up with 23 million more jobs, and a way to improve the health of its people....this doesn't seem like rocket science.

It is that "hardworking" aspect that is daunting to many people who would like to go back to more traditional farming.   Farming isn't an easy job....never has been, but lately farming has jumped on the corporate and technology bandwagons. Ever larger farms requiring ever larger equipment. There are more computers, GPS units, and entertainment units in most new farm equipment than I have ever had (or will ever have) in my entire house. Farming is not the same physically demanding profession that it used to be, which I guess is good because the average age of most farmers is going up significantly.  In the last 80 years farms have increased significantly in size, but the number of farmers owning the land has decreased and they are aging rapidly. How and why did this happen? One of the main reasons behind some of these changes are that farmers need to grow more and more just to make ends meet.  In a country that demands cheap, highly processed food, the farmer is the lowest link in a chain and doesn't get paid what he or she should be for their efforts, thus they plant more and more corn and soybeans to pay for their new, state of the art, farm equipment. The government has to provide subsidies just to keep these farmers afloat, while at the same time America is facing an obesity crisis because we have to find stuff to do with all this corn and soybeans so we process it into everything. 

 It is a crazy cycle that is completely out of control. 

• huge, subsidized, monoculture crops of corn and soybeans 
• cheap, processed food 
• obese people with metabolic disease 
• increased medical costs 
• generally sicker population that is unable to work effectively.

 And then people wonder why we are in a financial crisis? It's because of the food that we eat! 

Starting at the top of that cycle, and getting away from huge farms with huge crops is the place that we need to start. If you look back at pictures of farmers in the 1940's, there wasn't an overweight one in the lot because they were all physically working hard.  I, personally, have never seen the need for a gym membership when working outside all day burns almost more calories than I can grow.  I think of it as the "farming diet".  If you can't grow it, don't eat it...I should trademark that and take it on the road.  I could make millions....but I digress.

Cleaning a barn is not really all that hard; it is the juggling of the animals that live there while you try to clean it that is often the hardest part. Convincing a 550 pound hog that she really should go investigate outside while her home is stripped of all its soft, well worn, and dusty straw requires a little bribery with some fresh green plants pulled from the garden.  Mr Pig was easier to bribe with a little cracked corn and the chickens come and go as they please while I clean out their coop. The rooster, however, was determined to watch my every move in case I should harass one of his hens.  Fourteen wheelbarrow loads of manure and bedding later, the muscles of my arms twitched with exertion and I was ready for a break.  The highlight, however, is hauling in the new straw.  Watching as the pigs tear into it and spread it around just the way they like it, is immensely entertaining. When Mrs Pig was finally settled into her new clean nest, the chickens meandered over to check it out and Tigger the cat quietly curled up next to her.  It was such a bucolic moment that I just had to smile. If anyone were to tell me that caring for farm animals is a thankless job, I would just point to the look of contentment on my animals' faces and say, "No, they say thank-you all the time."

So, today, as I type this with sore arms, I am reminded that not only did I clean something up, I enlarged my compost pile and made several beings very happy in the process....including myself.