Mucking The Stable     

Growing up on the farm I developed a distaste for raising farm animals.  My distaste stemmed from a variety of irritants, but near, if not at, the top of the list was dealing with the manure.  On a dairy farm there was always manure that had to be moved.  Fortunately Grandpa chose not to raise chickens on a large scale, for as bad as fresh cow manure smelled, the stench from chicken manure was much worse.  When the cow manure accumulated in the corrals the urgency to move it wasn’t particularly pressing.  But when it was deposited in the milking stable, it had to be dealt with after each milking.  As a boy, my entry level job wasn’t as CEO.  Mucking the stalls was where I was valuable.  In Grandpa’s milking stable, the floor was made of concrete and was slightly sloped from one end to the other.  There was a recessed trough about a foot wide and six inches deep formed into the concrete that ran along the back of all the cows so when they relieved themselves while in the stable, most of the manure and urine would fall into the trough in the floor.  And I emphasize the word most.  Cow manure can be particularly unpleasant when it is runny and splatters when dropped.  Its odor and consistency makes working with it unpleasant.  Nobody likes to muck the stable but somebody has to or the stable would become uninhabitable. After each milking Grandpa or I would use a square mouth shovel to push that animal waste down that long trough and then shovel it outside through a door at the end.  That pile outside became quite high in seemingly no time at all.  And if that pile wasn’t moved regularly it became not only the source of an unsavory odor, but made shoveling the manure from the inside to the outside that much harder.  As the one often assigned the task of mucking that mess, I often wondered why the cows just couldn’t take care of their business outside before coming inside to be milked.  And just getting the manure out of the stable wasn’t the end of it.  The pile that accumulated just outside the stable door had to be moved regularly.  Since Grandpa didn’t own a front end loader it all had to be moved by hand.  We used a shovel to load it into a wagon and move it somewhere else.  It would also have to be unloaded by hand at the new location.  An inspector from the milk company would come periodically to check on the cleanliness of the operation.  If the milking area wasn’t sufficiently clean he could reject the milk and the company wouldn’t buy it, so keeping the place clean was essential.  It just wasn’t my favorite job.  It was stinky, dirty, and endless.  It was one of those jobs that nobody noticed your work unless you didn’t do it.  It’s been a long time since I have mucked a stable but I still have unpleasant tasks that I wish I didn’t have to do.  And just like that pile of stinky manure outside the stable door, they won’t go away just because I prefer to ignore them.  Somebody has to muck the stalls.