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Growing Up On Muddy Creek:
The Number One Most Disagreeable Farm Chore
By Perry Piper
Webster defines a chore as "a light daily and routine task or job." It also lists a second definition: "a difficult to disagreeable task." I can think of several "chores" I had to perform in my growing-up days on Muddy Creek that fit both of those definitions.
Under the first definition, one could well place the splitting of kindling and carrying in of wood until the big wood box was overflowing. Then there were ashes to be taken out, eggs to be hunted, and the slop bucket to be taken to the pig pen, where it was dumped into the old vinegar barrel where dad was soaking the "shorts" for the old brood sow.
Heading the list under Webster's second definition would certainly come the hauling of manure. A well-publicized study done at the University of Illinois once found that the nutritive value of cow manure as fertilizer was less than the cost of spreading it.
Now it isn't just the spreading that makes this the number one disagreeable "chore" on the farm: It is the repetition.
You cut and haul in sweet clover and red top hay, mow it back on a sweltering August day in a sweat box of a barn, and then, months later, down bunches of it to a herd of unappreciative steers that pick over and trample it into the muck that is formed by their adding the undigested portions of their dinner, packing it into a woven mattress of manure that must be cleared out periodically, or run the risk of having the cows stunted by rubbing their backs on the hay and mow floor.
It is a never-ending "chore" that could only be won if we followed old Jason's example. When he was given the task of cleaning the Aegean Stables, he diverted the North Sea through them. Perhaps we might sidetrack Muddy Creek, especially when in spring flood, and watch Old Fox and his ilk ride the cascade down toward the Ambraw.
When Dad built the new barn, he put in one of the first "manure carriers." This was a two-barrel capacity tank hanging on a hay mow track. It was pushed along behind the cows and scooped full of liquid and semi-dry cow manure, and then rolled far out east of the barn, where the manure spreader was supposed to be filled with this material. That way, in theory, it only had to be handled once.
In actual practice, it didn't work out quite that way. First, the posts holding the track up would rot off in the wet soil and let the track sag. Then, the spreader was nearly always broken down. Either the moveable apron bottom of the bed was jammed, or the chain that turned the beaters was broken.
Rare indeed were the times when everything worked as planned. Instead, if it wasn't the spreader, it was the carrier. The tank quickly rusted out from the high acid, and the weight often proved too much for the cut nails that were used to fasten the brackets to the barn rafters and the track would give way and had to be repaired, repaired after the load was dumped out onto a just-cleaned floor, and then, if the track could not be fixed quickly, wheel bar-rowing the "stuff" by hand out to the manure pile.