As I worked on this commentary, my producer reminded me not to use dirty words. Kids, cover your kids’ ears while I employ many euphemisms for manure, among them droppings, excreta, ordure, stool, spoor, and scat.
And how about poop? Surely poop is OK to say on the radio, right? In fact, if you’re a gardener, it’s better than OK. It’s the best.
I needed these synonyms for manure because of a long morning I spent at Colorado State’s Animal Reproduction and Biotechnical Lab. My wife and I drove there for CSU’s first-ever bison manure giveaway. If that sounds like a Tom Sawyer setup, to dupe people into whitewashing a fence or shoveling…uh…excreta, you’re wrong. Manure is black gold.
According to the National Park Service, an individual bison will produce 10 to 12 gallons of poop every day. Each bison pie contains nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium, sulphur and magnesium, which bolster microbes, plants and other animals.
Two hundred years ago, 60 million bison defecated all over the American West. That’s what makes the Great Plains so great: Bison bottoms are productive!
We learned about this event from the Coloradoan, which told us that CSU’s bison droppings had been aged for three years, like fine wine.
To which we said: Make ours a double.
There are only 30,000 bison left in the U.S., so their free organic fertilizer is in short supply. Except at CSU! For that, we can thank Jennifer Barfield, associate professor of biomedical sciences.
A decade ago, she became interested in bison babies, which were threatened by brucellosis, or mad cow- elk- and bison disease. So Barfield figured out how to clean brucellosis bacteria out of bison sperm and eggs. Now she has established a disease-free herd of 80 animals, which roam the veterinary campus and Soapstone Prairie north of Fort Collins. And she has shared dozens of animals with Native American tribes, to reestablish their ties to the bison herds.
But that isn’t the only excess that Barfield manages.
We pulled into a jammed parking lot at around 11 a.m., following poop-emoticon signs to parking. We added our names to a long list of bison-manure enthusiasts. While we waited, we met Jennifer Barfield herself. She looked surprisingly stylish, decked out in earth-tones appropriate to the occasion.
Barfield thanked us for coming, then fired up her walkie-talkie to check our place on the scat schedule. “You’re next!” she said.
Fifteen minutes later, we skidded to a stop next to a 10-foot high pile of manure, and commenced shoveling. Our raspberry bushes back home were trembling in anticipation of a square meal of scat. Soon, we heaved two large buckets of poop into the back of our car. On the drive home, it didn’t hardly stink at all!
As we drove off, we saw a dozen bison bulls munching away at prairie shortgrass. And producing even more manure. Plop by plop, our prairie grows richer and greener. And so does our garden in Fort Collins.
