Chicken Shit

Ø  Chicken Shit –

You might have thought this would be about someone frightened of little things, jumpy, flinching at shadows, a “scaredy-cat”, skittish, fearful of small and large animals and creatures of all sorts real and imagined, but that isn’t what this is about. It’s really about chicken shit, poop, droppings, whatever. See, we live in a rural area outside a cute little country town of about 8,000 people. The area is very fertile and there is plenty of farming, dairy operations, vineyards, an Alpaca farm, one guy even raises peacocks and miniature horses, but there are also chicken and egg producers.

Now I expect if you’ve been anywhere near farm country you’ve gotten a whiff of fertilizer, some chemical, some organic. Organic = manure. Cattle, other, and Chicken. I’m going to be careful here not to gross anyone out, ok, so stick with me. The good old days of spreading manure by using it in relative solid form and “flinging” it from an open wagon spreader has given way to “slurry” sprayers. To be sprayed, it has to be in a liquid form, need I say more. The old way was smelly, but it was “flung” and it landed, and it sat and decomposed, providing nutrients to the soil. The liquid sprayed slurry, is even more smelly, and that is due to the much smaller liquid particulates being pushed by wind much more so than the solid flung crap. If you get my drift (haaa), it floats in the wind and carries, and if it floats and carries on the wind, you can therefore drive past a field and through that same wind and now you got a coating of the crap literally on your car. I’ve had a car smell like shit for a week, serious!

OK, so slurries are not equal in stench. In order from bad to worse: Bovine (that’s Cow shit), Swine (that’s Pig shit), and Poultry (that’s CHICKEN SHIT or it could also be turkey, but I’m talking Chicken here). I don’t know how or really want to try and describe it, if you are familiar with it (I’m sorry) but you know what I mean, suffice to say it is just plain fricking nasty!

You catch a whiff of that and it’s immediately, hold your breath till you think you’ll pass out - close all windows - turn off the AC - drive as fast as you safely can - and get past it. Even then it’s so nasty your eyes will probably be burning (making it even harder to drive fast safe) and you’re light headed from holding your breath, and already getting hot flashes because the car is closed up with no air flow (and that’s the point but its hot outside) so you’re just about to fricking die, all because of Chicken Shit. Peeyeewie !  N A S T Y nasty. It is scary bad. I will even drive the long way to avoid an area if I know they are spraying. It kinda freaks me out to think about it floating in the air.

The thing is, if you happened to read my last post, all this organic (albeit from animals) matter is the nutrient rich substance that helps grow and produce the grains and various vegetables that are so delicious and nutritious – they even smell GOOD. Of course you always need to wash you organic food, same as if it’s chemically fertilized, but I guess I prefer the stinky organic stuff, than the chemical stuff used to help grow my food.

I just need to quit being such a Chicken Shit about it I suppose!

SHIT historical trivia – Manure is and always has been used as fertilizer and as such it was a commodity to be sold, traded and used to support farming all around the world. To transport it globally it was shipped on sailing vessels across waterways, seas and oceans. It was dried and packed in various containers. When loaded into the vessels hold, it was marked to placed toward the top of the hold rather than at the bottom, since all ships had some seepage and water accumulation in the belly of the storage areas. The British shippers marked in English the letters S.H.I.T. = Ship High In Transit.

Now of course that bit of historical trivia very well may be total B.S. Bull !

Gotta run - till next time, and then maybe another "smell" blog, but it will be about sweet things in the air like cereal, and candy and CHOCOLATE ! (because we live by places making all that stuff too).