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The

Turkey-Manure Manifesto

by Neil Shelton  

Lately, I’ve had the satisfaction of launching into a new project that I’ve been planning for quite some time, and dreaming about for longer still.

A long time ago, when I was young and ambitious, or inexperienced and stupid, depending on how you choose to interpret the condition of youth, I used to put quite a lot of effort into making compost.

In fact, I studied compost quite seriously, I knew all the N-P-K ratings of all manner of disgusting substances, I studied the Indore Method almost every time I was indoors, learned how to encourage earthworm propagation without appearing prurient, and slept with a copy of J.I. Rodale’s “The Complete Book of Composting” under my pillow.  (I might mention that it is very hard and lumpy.)

Weekends that could have been better spent frittered away on shallow, simplistic amusements, my friends and I would spend developing blisters on our hands from long-handled shovels, filling our pick-ups with whatever odiferous and repulsive substance we could finagle for free.

Frankly, it didn’t take a lot of finagling.  We cleaned out barns filled with every imaginable sort of manure in every imaginable form from baked, caked and rock-hard to slippery-slimy wet, and all for no other recompense than the manure itself. 

You can imagine what was going through the farmer’s minds when they were approached by these young fellows wondering if they could have all their excess manure, but despite this, most of them were able to contain their derisive smirks at least until we were out of sight.

So anyway, that’s the background I bring to my current situation. 

Nowadays, having had some extensive experiences with manual labor such as this, I have mostly adapted the attitude of trying to avoid it whenever possible.

As a result, I no longer play the long-handled shovel, and if I did, I am pretty certain that I would want to receive cash for my efforts.

But I digress… what I wanted to tell you about was how I’m about to fulfill my daydream, and that has to do with the fact that I AM a lot lazier than I used to be.

Well, me and most everyone else my age.

I really hate to sound like one of these old crocks that can’t remember where he parked his car, but he can’t forget about how things were decades ago.  That is, I hate to SOUND that way, because that’s exactly how I’m getting to be.

However, the truth is that, while I don’t know about you, personally, I’m really starting to lose faith in my fellow Americans.

I mean, have you noticed how hard we work these days trying to make things easier?

I refuse to shovel manure these days, preferring to buy my compost from Wal-Mart.  

Now, if you’ve ever gotten interested in organic gardening, and have come to appreciate the clean and natural process of making one’s own compost, then you realize, as I do, that buying compost in a plastic bag from Wal-Mart is like trying to get fresh milk from a Coke machine.  Still, I've been doing it anyway, because I’m too lazy to shovel. 

Then I fret about getting enough exercise and spend money on medicine to keep my blood-pressure down, largely because I do more fretting than exercising.

Like a lot of Americans - maybe most of them - I’ve gotten away from sensible, real things and converted my life over to… to… commercially-driven fantasy. 

Like a lot of Americans - maybe most of them - I’ve lost my appreciation for reality.

Okay, NOW I’m ready to talk about realizing my new project which is my old dream. 

See, I still believe in compost.  I still know that it’s the one, true church, and that, if  everyone would just start making their own compost, it would be a much better world.

Alas, however, as mentioned previously, I am now considerably lazier than used to be the case.

However, I have discovered a work-around to make up for my personal sloth.  In the course of performing my day job, I have in recent years purchased a collection of heavy equipment with which to build and maintain gravel roads.

Since acquiring this arsenal, I’ve been thinking about how I could use the loader, the dump truck and the tractors, to make all the lovely, rotting compost that I’d ever want, maybe even enough to sell, so this is the year that I’ve begun my project of making compost with heavy equipment.

I’m just beginning that process, so that’s how I came to be at a turkey farm last week, having my dump truck filled with turkey manure.

Needless to say, as the farmer’s son was loading the truck with ten huge, steaming scoops of a front-loader mounted on his tractor, I was thinking about how many hours, how many days it would have taken me to fill a dump truck with turkey manure using a long-handled shovel.

That’s also when I started thinking about how people don’t have any appreciation for real, honest things like genuine turkey droppings in these days of so-called affluence.  If they garden at all, they want to do it with little bags of pretty-colored chemical compounds which, in their delusional states, they see as cleaner and more potent, whereas in fact, nothing is cleaner, nor more beneficial to living plants than properly composted organic materials. 

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