Poop.

~ This article first appeared in the Leader Vindicator newspaper. ~

My son Henry, who is three, possesses a ferocious repugnance for the commode.  When he needs to move his bowels, a thoroughly advertised undertaking that’s completed once every fifteen minutes throughout the day and immediately after we sit down to eat, Henry favors the soft comfort of cuffed sweat pants, followed by any other pant style, including shorts, but excluding diapers, because diapers are for little kids.  Our washing machine – a relatively new appliance – groans under the endless burden of tiny, reeking clothing.  This is a proud phase to be a parent, let me tell you.

Henry’s pet cat, Millings, has developed an extraordinary case of persistent diarrhea.  The cat seems perfectly content as it wanders the house, dripping sludge of varying colors (depending on which remedy diet the internet is recommending) onto every surface, appliance, and toy.  When Henry picks Millings up, pressure converts the drip into an expulsion best described as a hydraulic equivalent to the flames that lifted the Apollo 13 rocket off its launch pad (look it up).  Millings has been banned from the house until after his vet appointment, and Henry has been banned from visiting Millings.  Despite the ceasefire, damages are staggering.

Needless to say, life in our little household has been a foul-smelling hell.   We can’t maintain this pace.

I think my current home life is a good analogy for society’s reaction to poop: It’s too close and we want it gone.  Management strategies developed, and now infrastructure is so good at removing the material that there exists a stout barrier between people and our droppings.

People poop isn’t the only stigmatized form of biological waste.  Livestock manure is placed under scrutiny as something that nobody in polite society should ever have to deal with.  Infrastructure was developed to manage livestock dung in massive quantities.  It is considered an unfortunate expense on the farm budget sheet.

There are similarities represented here:  Both human and animal excrement management strategies collect and concentrate poop, often in liquefied form for ease of pumping.  This nicely solves the problem of day-to-day poop interactions, but creates another, bigger problem.

Poop is nature’s fertilizer.  If one cow poops on your lawn in the spring, by summer you’ll have a nice green spot on your lawn where the bomb landed.  If, however, you dump 500,000 gallons of exactly the same poop on your lawn, your lawn will die, your house will be unlivable, flies will take over the neighborhood, disease will become a serious issue, and everything downstream from your house will expire from nutrient overload.

Poop is good.  Concentrated poop is dangerous.  And concentrate it we do. 

Farmers receive environmental awards and funding from government agencies for installing huge poop lagoons that concentrate millions of gallons of manure that then needs to be hauled away and spread somewhere using large machines.  The same government agencies are deeply concerned about extensive use of fossil fuels and farm nutrient overloads polluting the environment.  The bureaucratic machine contradicts itself once again.

Cities collect massive quantities of fertility from all over the country and the world in the form of food.  All of that fertility is flushed down the toilet and into gigantic concentrated vats, which, after a little treatment, drain the fertility into waterways.  Then the almighty scientists are stymied by dead zones increasing in all of the water environments, and all the pooping people in the city become outraged by the scientists’ reports and demand action.  I don’t think anyone needs to be a friggin’ scientist to figure out what’s happening, but science is more fashionable than cognition.

One of the most brilliant aspects of herded livestock involves poop.  I have just over sixty cattle that I lead around the countryside, and each of those animals poops as much as any other cow on the planet, which is to say, a lot.  None of that poop reaches a toxic threshold.  Instead, it’s a fertility boost for the environment.  How is this possible?

It never concentrates.  The cow poops and then moves on to a clean area to eat and poop again.  This migration is repeated endlessly.  Manure-borne diseases are not an issue because the piles decompose before the herd returns to the same area.  Without a speck of manure management infrastructure, I steward a self-fertilizing, self-sanitizing food production nucleus.  It’s so simple that the techno-brats developing poop systems can’t understand the effectiveness.  In their minds, something must be expensive to be valuable.

Provided adequate land base, I could run a much larger herd of cattle with exactly the same environmentally positive results.  Additional species can be incorporated, too.  In fact, we could turn some serious acreage into a massive poop sink, and with time it would look like Eden, not a sewage plant.

Why doesn’t this happen everywhere?  Because many people do and will react to one pile of poop as though 500,000 gallons was dumped in their living room.  I am so blessed to have understanding neighbors who realize that the manure left after the herd passes will indeed go away, and relatively quickly. I’m afraid they’re the minority.  People demand from politicians environmental solutions, and then practice zero tolerance for environmental processes near their home.  Gee, no wonder the government is so screwed up.

It’s increasingly illegal to have livestock near a settlement, no matter how the stock are managed.  Folks, we need to change our perspective on poop.

More on this topic in two weeks. Talk to you then.