A Day

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A Day

When I decided that I wanted to be a Soil Scientist, I had to have some idea of what a farm could be. Apparently it was not considered to be sufficient to have seen some farms in the distance, you were also supposed to have trampled in mud and mess.

Which I did.

The first Estate which accepted to take me as trainee was known for its ferocity. To compound the ferocity, here I was, having a vague idea that probably milk did not come from taps as beer did, that this green stuff every body was so exited about could be wheat or corn or barley, should not be called weeds;

The agricultural hands at the Estate took it a personal insult that a young boy who had never seen a cow from behind in his life should come and pretend that he could learn something from them.

The old farm workers did not care at all, they belonged to a Royal Category which did not deem is worthy of them to notice a trainee. The other trainees hated that this young boy be there, it was quite obvious that for me this was the beginning of a trip up the mountain while for them it was just another day on a flat plain leading to nothing.

It was only fair, being the youngest and most inexperienced that I should get the most boring jobs.

Possibly it was fair that they would want to see how much I could take.

The miler was supposed to deliver 100kg meal bags; The bags had a tendency to go towards 110kg. It may not sound as much of a difference, for your knees it does when you try to walk with a 100kg bag on your shoulders.

A 100kg on your shoulders is not a huge load on a normal farm day. It spared you having to walk and climb to get two 50kg bags. But a 100kg was a lot when you had to walk upstairs and farms seem to be made of lots of places where you always have to go upstairs. At 110kg I was reaching the limit for what I could do, as I was expected not only to receive that meal bag but to walk with it to the pasture and empty the bag in the feeding trough; If I was unlucky and dropped the bag when reaching the trough there was no chance that I would ever get it up again to that eight; Which meant taking a shovel and dealing the meal shovel by shovel, which meant that a 2 minutes job would take nearly a quarter of an hour.

One day, I was assigned to the manure spreading team; it does not sound to you like some terrifying task, possibly a smelly task, possibly an unpleasant task, but not a fearful job?

The Estate had calculated that it was cheaper to spread manure using man power than buying a manure spreader. They could not have been very good at economics.

Manure spreading is done winter time, on the snow; Four hands would take position on a trailer full of manure, at the four corner, the tractor would drive out to the field and advance in first gear while the hands were spreading the manure using a fork.

Most probably you are not fully conversant with manure. Manure has not been the subject of your investigations and preoccupations?

Manure when it comes out of the animal is a rather agreeable product unless the animal decides to deliver it just as you are passing behind it.

Manure is usually pilled up on a manure heap together with the bedding straw. Manure and straw react with one another in the way cement and sand react when properly mixed. If you have traveled in Italy you know that strange feeling the first time you dip your fork into the spaghetti plate and when you pull, the whole spaghetti heap follows and falls on your knees. Well manure is a bit like spaghetti, only worse.

So here we were on the tractor trailer, two tons of manure cement at our feet and bravely we would dip our fork into the heap, nobody being there to tell you how you were supposed to recover your fork once you had planted it into the muck. Further, not only were we supposed to dip our fork into the manure but we were supposed to pull out 20kg of manure and throw it over side the trailer board onto the field.

After ten minutes of this job, you are beginning to wonder why you were born. After one hour you have realized that this will be the last day of your life, you simply hope that death will come as soon as possible and as fast as possible.

To those of you who are thrilled by the prospects that they might one day emulate this accomplisment or that their children will do it, I would like to give a sound advice.

After one hour of work, if you feel that the fork is getting in a bit smoothly into the manure heap and at the same time you feel something strange in your foot, please do consider that you might just have been dipping the fork spikes, well covered with shit, not into the manure, but into your foot, through your leather boots.

Under such circumstances, it is not advisable to throw the load over the trailer side, it is advisable first to take out the fork from your foot and start from position one again.

Next day i was not assigned to the manure spreading team.

I must have survived that day, but how that I cannot explain.?