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.

Black Gold

This was my breakthrough into organic farming.  While living in the city we had built a compost bin and then moved it with us when we came.  It was the starting point for us - from the dirt on up.  I have started and restarted this post about ten times now....not sure exactly why since it is quite possibly the best and most useful thing on the farm and one thing that I am constantly amazed by. But for whatever reason writing about it in any sort of understandable way is hard.  Most likely because it is entirely too simple.

Scraps of anything green and growing or dead and brown
Water
Air

Time

It's that simple. 

This is the recipe for dirt that Mother Earth has known for eons and we have since tried to make a science out of with no great success.  We make it entirely too complex.  You can spend a fortune buying organic compost at any garden store, or you can make it for free using all of the stuff that you throw out every day - the coffee grounds, the potato peelings, the apple cores, the old wilted flowers, the weeds that are the bane of every gardener's existence.  Just about everything that goes down the garbage disposal could be put to a better use as compost. 

Over the decades, since chemical farming came into vogue, scientists tried to figure out what the key ingredients were that plants needed to grow.  They came up with phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium as the three things that plants need to thrive and have since marketed it every possible way.  Nitrogen is the stuff that you see farmers carting around in the spring and spraying all over their fields and a mix of the three chemicals is what you will find in any bag of lawn fertilizer.  The thing they didn't realize is that even though they are supplying the three main ingredients, they are leaving out the micro ingredients that plants also need to survive. Micro nutrients are those small amounts of nutrients that plants (and animals) utilize to put the main nutrients to their best use.  We have slowly been depleting the soil of the micro nutrients for about 60 years now. 

It is similar to saying that all people really need to survive is fat, protein and carbohydrates without any thought at all to vitamins and minerals.  Without these micro nutrients none of the main nutrients get absorbed and utilized properly.  If you want an interesting and eye-opening breakdown of what I mean by all of this, Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food is a good place to start or even just typing in the words - "whole food supplements" in any search bar is likely to get you some interesting reads.  We humans try to break everything down to it lowest form, we look for the exact chemical that is responsible for preventing scurvy or rickets, for instance, and once found (Vitamin C and Vitamin D) we take those chemicals in excess to help ward off these terrible diseases without really understanding how they work or what other smaller chemicals might be there to help the system along.   It is like putting only gasoline into a car without any understanding of what oil and antifreeze are there to do.  Whole foods - like a whole orange- has many chemicals in it and many chemical interactions that take place that we have absolutely no understanding of that make it the perfect packet of Vitamin C known and yet we take out the Vitamin C to put into tablets and throw the rest of the orange away.

The same thing has happened to our dirt over time.  We kept the Potassium, Nitrogen and Phosphorus and threw the rest of the beneficial stuff out with the trash.....literally.

Composting is perhaps one of the easiest things to do and one of the most beneficial.  It is the crux of sustainable farming - we pull nutrients, in the form of plants, out of the soil....we need to put nutrients back into the soil.  What better way to do this than to use the used up plants themselves?

Any, and I mean any vegetation or things that were previously vegetation are fair game for a compost pile.  The only rule that I stick to is that you can't put anything meat based in the pile - no meat scraps and no droppings from animals that have been eating meat.  The main reason behind this is that it sometimes takes on a bit of a foul odor and it can definitely start to attract the local vermin to the area.

You need to have a pile of some size to get the whole thing going.  3 square feet is generally considered to be about the right size.  You can hold it all together with a ring of woven wire, or a fancy compost bin....or you can just pile it up in a heap of at least 3 square feet and let it go.

Wet it down until it is about as wet as a well wrung out sponge.  In the early spring, or when it is dry in the middle of summer, I will add about 5 gallons to the pile periodically during a dry spell to keep it going.

Turn the pile every three weeks or so to allow air to mix with the pile and voila!  Dirt!

There are a few things that I have learned to do over the course of several years of producing the best black dirt imaginable. 

• The water is really important.  It may sound crazy to water your compost bin, but it definitely speeds up the breakdown process.  
•  A metal stake through the center of the pile will let you know if it is getting hot enough.  When a compost pile really gets going, the internal temperatures will be around 150 degrees and even weed seeds will get cooked beyond the pont where they will germinate.  My method, using the metal stake, is rather primitive but it works well.  I know that when I pull out the stake and it is too hot to touch, the pile is cooking. 
•  If your pile isn't taking off and getting hot - add dirt!  You will read that you need to go to the garden store and pick up bone meal or compost starter, blah, blah, blah.  Everything you need to get it going is already in the ground - all the enzymes, all the beneficial bugs, everything - just add a few shovelfuls to the mix and it will help to get it going.
• You don't need to mix it into the soil - this is what worms are for and they are good at it!  They will make short work of incorporating any compost that you put around flowers or vegetables into the soil.
• You know when it is done and ready to be used when you can no longer identify any of the stuff that you threw into it.  If you can identify a few things, simply take those out and throw them back on the pile for a little more time.

Over the winter, I let it sit and by spring the bottom stuff of the compost bin is gorgeous and ready to be spread around the flowers.  Then I add in leaves left over from the fall, grass clippings, vegetable scraps from the kitchen, coffee grounds and filters, egg shells and any weeds that have made an appearance in the garden.  Mix it all up and add water.  By the time the potatoes are peeking up in early spring I have another batch of the black gold to be spread around them.  And so it goes all summer long - using left overs to make more soil to make more vegetables which leads to more left overs.  Whole food nutrition for the garden- and not one chemical needed.