I went to a 'book club' meeting, and met Michael Pollan (who is in the aptnyms thread, he writes about nature)
in any case, he mentioned an article he just completed, for Gourmet magazine (of all places!) about a naturalistic farmer in Virginia Hi Dub Dub! He defined the farmer as having a series of interesting practices that let him raise organic (not certified, but organic all the same) foods.. as being a dung farmer..

by the way he manages his animals manure, he increases productivity, and decreases cost.. an example.. he has his pastures broken up into small fields.. and lets the cattle into a small field for a specific amount of time. then he move them to a new field.. three days later, he move his mobile hen house into the 3 day old cattle field.. by now, the cattle dung is full of magots.. and the chickens scratch and dig into it, spreading the dung, eating the magots, and the fresh grass tips (chickens can only eat freshly sprouted grass) so the chickens are 'free range' the manure, now dried, gets spread over a larger range, the fly and bug population is kept down by the chickens eating all the larva and grubs.. Free chicken feed, free manure spreaders, free insecticide! (all natural too boot!)

he has other examples.. but the point of the article is; manage the sh*t, and everything else manages fine!

the farmer has great success, the local environmental protection (state) agency loves him, because he never has 'run off', and so on an so on. Mr. Pollan kept call him the "dung farmer" (he played with sh*t..and backed off, and with manure, but since the farmer has chickens, cows, horses and pigs.. he went with dung.. since there was a multitude of it!

It won't be out til the fall. but lets watch for it! and we could do worse in life if we too, learned to manage the sh*t!


my other obsession