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Area: Writing
Date : Sep 11 '96
From : Michael Nellis
To : Rocky Frisco
Subj : A dung-heap yer say?
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Hi, Rocky.
Rocky Frisco wrote in a message to George Jenner:
RF> Then there was the Mercedes-Benz "Silver Mist," which didn't
RF> sell very well in Germany, perhaps because "mist" is a
RF> dung-heap. :)
I wonder how many folkses here in Writing have actually seen a dung-heap. A true dung-heap, as silly as the subject sounds, is in actuality a wonder to behold; not to mention the significant contributions of worthy aphorisms to our language derived from their simple existence. Alas the poor fumier (for so they are called in French, and it is a term I find more poetic) is an object which simply goes -- unappreciated.
Them what's never seen one cannot, of course, comprehend the full import of the fumier, and them what live with them in the back of the barn tend, I suppose, to take them for granted. In either case, most people blithely go about their daily lives without due consideration for the fact that a well piled dung-heap contains a mind boggling amount of manure.
Take the fumier on the dairy farm which was situated next to the farm house which my father once owned, and which grew, alternately, depending on the season, from a wide brown patch on the ground to a grand, majestic mound of incredible proportion, and back down to a bare patch.
This shrinkage was nothing mysterious, gentle reader, being as it was the natural result of the farmer using the manure to fertilize those fields which were not being grazed so that the straw in them could be harvested and stored as fodder.
Ah, but, says you to yourself, the diminution of the fumier is a thing easily understood; what I want to know is where the frimping thing comes from in the first place.
Well, you see, it pretty much comes from the hay that the end result is used to fertilize.
You've probably never seen the inside of a dairy barn, so you cannot be aware that the ground floor of such a structure consists primarily of stalls in which the milch cow is ensconced and allowed to enjoy a bit of hay. This isn't really to feed the cow, but rather to keep her quiet during the milking process. The hay is brought down from the loft where it has been stored from the previous hay-making season. However, this is not the only thing the hay is used for.
Cows, you see, if I might be permitted to put it in delicate terms, are incontinent. Not house-broken, you know. Goes quite against their grain (no pun intended), and you can probably imagine, with a great deal of hilarity, what kind of a rush might ensue from having a hundred head of milch cows trying to use an outhouse all at the same time.
So the floor of a dairy barn is carefully constructed to include a trough along the edge of the stalls, over which the cow must step to enter the stall, and into which her -- effluvium -- tends to land. Within the trough is a kind of chain, or a drag, the width of the trough. That hay which has been tossed down from the loft that is not for the cattle to eat is forked into the trough. Twice a day, after each milking, one in the morning and one in the evening, a motor is started that drives the drag up a long slide, carrying along the extraneous contents of the trough. At the top of the slide, those contents are allowed to fall into empty space, whilst the drag slides into a groove on the underside of the slide and in this manner completes a full circle.
This simple device is a wonderful time saver for the dairyman, and a nearly indispensable device for that time of year when the fields are covered with snow and forage is unavailable save from the loft. Here in Quebec that means from about mid-November to mid-April. (The fields, after all, must be given a chance to dry, and the new grass to begin growing before it can be grazed.)
It is in the spring, when the grass is still fresh and budding, that the farmer hitches up his manure spreader, a sort of flat bed with a bunch of whirling blades on the back end (and from the witnessed effects of which probably comes the expression "when the shit hits the fan"), and then fills up the bed of the spreader by dint of using the bucket on the front end of the tractor. (This bucket is like any attached to a pay loader or construction machine, and might very well have loaned to our language the term "shoveling shit.")
To be sure, this all means very little without the remainder of my explanation of what makes a dung-hill such a thing to behold. The herd spends much of their time indoors during the bitter part of the year, being allowed out for exercise during periods of milder weather. This, I'm sure you will appreciate, makes for no small amount of effluvium. Just what that amount is will begin to dawn on you when I tell you the slide up which the mixture of straw and manure must ride to its resting place is fully three and some stories in height. (From which arises, or so I believe, the saying "being shit on from great heights," which might very well be particular only to the armed forces or paramilitary organizations.)
It is not uncommon, therefore, for the dung-heap, depending on the size of the herd, to reach an equitable height, which means a towering mass of fermenting excrement some ten meters high. (That's a good 32 feet in the U.S., and which gives us the pithy aphorism "in deep shit.")
Now, you must understand that no efforts at all are made to control or contain this downpouring of material (from whence, I surmise, we get the saying, "shit always runs downhill), so that it settles quite naturally into a conic heap of which the base is very nearly equal to the height. This results in the fumier adopting the proportions of that geometric shape to the measurement of 10 X 10 meters.
But what of it, you ask? Why this should this mean anything?
Simply put, unless I misremember my arithmetic: to determine the volume of a conic section requires that one multiply Pi times the square of the radius and multipy that product by the height and then divide by three; which in this case would result in 261.79 cubic meters of crap (which amounts to 8578.64 cubic feet).
Now aren't you glad you asked?
So, gentle friends and good neighbors, the next time you are voyaging of an early spring day throughout the countryside and you pass a dairy farm exhibiting the grandeur of its fumier, you might smile to yourself and heave a sigh of -- relief (sorry) -- and be more than passing glad that it is not in your back yard, but I will ask that you do not simply dismiss it so underhandedly.
Thus ends today's treatise on the humble dung-heap.