Mucking out the Chicken Coup 11/3/09

Chicken shit…It’s the downside of raising one’s own chickens. Among all farm animal excrement, chicken poop is everybody’s number one for having the butt nastiest smell. We chicken farmers can be driving down an Indiana highway on a hot sunny day, suddenly come upon 300 head of cattle, and actually roll down our windows to get a fuller whiff of that shit. But try cleaning out a 12 x 15 foot chicken coup with only one window any time of year. The ammonia like stench makes grandma’s nursing home seem tame by comparison.

But muck out the chicken coup every week or so I must, and, until this morning, it was a task I simply tolerated and tried to finish as quickly as possible. What happened earlier this week to change my poopy tune was that a gardener friend of mine told me that chicken shit was some of the best fully organic fertilizer on the planet, vastly superior to cow and horse manure for the kinds of things we’re preparing to grow on our Living Vision cooperative farm. I checked out her story and found it to be substantiated.

So this morning’s time in the poop coup, as my daughter calls it, was not only much longer than my previous forays, but also much more diligent, thorough, and satisfying. I wasn’t just cleaning the coup; I was harvesting some really good shit. Every corner, every nook and cranny, I was practically wiping down every piece of hay just to be sure I wasn’t missing a single dropping of this brown gold. Once the harvest was complete, rather than pitching it angrily into my big burn pile, I wheelbarrow’d it cautiously over to the quarter acre we just plowed a couple weeks ago and shoveled it into the earth with both care and gratitude.

The earth is amazing, isn’t it? Whoever set this wonderful planet in motion sure knew what She was doing. To think that even chicken shit can be recycled, used post-anal cavity to produce rich and ripe corn, tomatoes, beans, and carrots is nothing short of miraculous. And what this shit did for my attitude this morning is no less transformational. Instead of cursing these crazy birds for sticking me with such a demeaning and penitential task, I was marveling over the wonder of their excrement, grateful for every squishy, trampled on cake I could scrape up with my trowel.

I can’t help but wonder if my little recycling revelation has broader implications for all of us and for the way we live on this planet. I’ve always bristled at those who preach “attitude is everything,” but there is no doubting that once my attitude toward the chicken shit changed, so did everything about this task. Think of all the times you’ve cursed having to rake leaves this time of year; but leaves, too, can be composted quite effectively. Could their restorative properties make yard clean up more of a collecting exercise than a removing one? My next door neighbor has an outdoor wood burning furnace that heats his water and most of his house. His wood pile looked to be a little short for the coming winter, when a huge dying oak fell over in a windstorm right between our two houses, taking out the power line in the process. He came out with his chain saw and a grin on his face and tore into that tree like it were…Chicken shit!