Welcome Steemit Friends! In these series of articles I will take you back to life on the farm in the 1960's. I hope you enjoy these tales of life before the huge corporate farms. This from back when Americans were knee deep and if you were small, waist deep in private property farming.

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Manure Spreading

You were probably wondering about manure spreading and what it is. Well, it is the organic way of fertilizing and this is how you get the manure.

It is amazing when we are kids just how big things seem compared to when we are adults. The first time I lived on a farm was in Michigan, just north of Toledo. Our family lived there for a couple of years. I have forty acres now and I walk around it often, out here in the desert. That farm was sixty acres and it seemed like it took all day to walk around it and get from one place to another.

We rented a huge farmhouse on land owned by the farmer a quarter mile down the highway. The farm had a barn and in the barn were hogs and cattle. There were ten Holstein steers. Those are the white and black dairy cattle, and about fifty hogs. I used to feed the hogs and cattle.

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Corn, wheat, soybeans, and clover hay were grown on the property. The livestock ate what was grown. The excess was sold. The farmland was very fertile. Southern Michigan farms have deep black soil and in this piece on Americana you will find out why.

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At seven, I could pick up a ball of three string hay without any problem. I was quite strong and it might have been because I loved to eat soybeans right out of the pod, fresh out of the field.

One of the big chores always came in spring. After being in the barn in their cattle and hogs pens in the winter, the manure was always very deep and had to be shoveled out into a manure spreader. There has to be an equal mix of hog and cattle manure in each load.

Using one of those big scoop shovels, the farmer’s son Mark and I would shovel the manure into the spreader before the fields were plowed. Mark was ten, a tall dark haired boy and he could drive. It took both of us to hook the spreader up to the tractor and then we would back it into the cattle pen and start to shovel in the manure, which at the spring thaw was very wet and moist, runny. The manure was a chunky liquid. The cattle pen was huge. And as we scooped it up and threw the shovel loads into the spreader. Sometimes because of the height of the hopper the manure would run down the shovel.

The hopper held at least of ton on the manure spreader and it took an hour or so to fill it up. There were probably fifty loads in the cattle pen and maybe twenty in the hog pen. Once full, we drove the tractor towing the manure spreader out to the field where we left off. The manure spreader had a horizontal bar with spokes mounted crossways so there were four sets of spokes. Each spoke was separated by the others at about four inches.

The spreader was powered by a PTO on the tractor and nice John Deere. A PTO, or power take-off sticks out of the back of the rear end and looks like a transmission shaft. I sat in a bucket seat on the spreader and operated the lever that spun the spokes.

When I threw the lever, the spokes spun really fast, throwing chunks of cow crap way up into the air so it rained manure everywhere and mostly to the rear and sides of the spreader. We wore raincoats for this. The hoods would often be blown off for a second by the wind until it could be pulled back up into place.

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Sometimes, a kid would be slapped in the back and maybe even the head by a piece. It really didn’t matter. The whole job was so shitty and it was so much fun. By the end of the day, my Mom would hose us off while dressed before Mark could go home or I could go inside. We usually completed this task during a weekend and a stop for lunch required a cleanup.

It was very important to wash the entire head, neck, and arms before we ate our sandwiches and drank fresh milk while stinking just like a steer’s or hog’s butt. This was one of the funniest farm jobs we did and believe or not was tons of fun for us boys. There were jokes all day long about playing in the toilet and so on.

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Also, it wasn’t unusual to slip and fall on the slick floor while trying to scoop up a shovelful. Push on the shovel, the feet slip on the cement and down you go. Splash!

My Dad, used to always tell this joke about hell and one of the punishments was being dipped in manure up to the mustache. Yes, the jokes never ended for life after those years and that chore like, “How tall are you?”

“I didn’t know they stacked shit that high.” Well, that’s how you grow it organic.

Manure spreading was something kids did on fine spring days when the ground was firm enough to support the tractor and spreader before plowing and harrowing. And that’s the poop on what used to happen back in 1967 or so.

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Yep, there's nothing like poop sandwiches for lunch, my Dad would always say.

Nothing like eating poop sandwiches and barking at the moon. I would respond, Ruff Ruff!

Now I know how muck jumpers came into being and people paid to watch!

If you think life is the shits, it really can be sometimes.

Please don't pee in our pool and we won't swim in your toilet, unless we slip, cattle said.

Just think normally when wrestling it is down on the concrete floor but not when there's a scoop shovel in your hand.

Don't forget to upvote I dug into tons of fertilizer research for this post. It was shitty job but somebody had to do it.