Holy Cows

As predicted, winter didn’t quite settle with the first snow storm a couple of weeks ago. And with night-time temps in the teens, and daytime temps not quite reaching 40°, it is time for the yearly act of emptying the manure pit. 
 
 
 
Fortunately, for the job at hand, our kids were spending Thanksgiving with their other families, and Jennifer was content to catch up on doing some house work. So I had the whole day, between the morning and evening milking, to haul manure. Yesterday, I spent about 5 hours lubricating and adjusting all the moving parts on our 1967 Ford F650 manure truck. And it paid off beautifully. I hauled 11 loads today with out a hitch. And the weather cooperated perfectly. We had a fairly strong north wind blowing all day, so my neighbors to the north didn’t have to contend with any smells other than those of turkey, stuffing and pies. And their house is VERY close to our manure pit. 
 
And the field I was spreading on, just a few block south of us, has many new, large homes just on its northern fence line. So those folks too were spared of any offensive smells. But many of those new homes have large windows facing south. And I could see families sitting down to their Thanksgiving meal looking at what must have been quite the sight from their angle … tons of manure being flung into the air. 
 
 
 
A few years back, before we had the neighbor to the north, and before all those large houses were built on the hay fields south of town, I took a trip to buy some calves with our town’s mayor at the time. On the drive down he told me that he had received a call from a woman that lived a bit to the south of us. She first complained that the city should not approve the subdivision proposed to be built in the hay fields to the south of her home. But then she went on to complain about me spreading manure on those fields. The mayor got a kick out of it, she didn’t want to see houses being built on farmland, but she didn’t think too much of the farmland being farmed either. It’s a problem all small-agriculturally based communities are facing.  
 
Many folks loving the rural atmosphere, end up moving into new developments built on land taken out of farming, but bordering on working farm ground. Questions from the new homeowners begin to arise: Why does that farmer have to bale hay in the middle of the night? Why does that farmer’s cattle have to attract so many flies? And can’t he spread manure somewhere else?  
 
We are fortunate here in Richmond. Our city leaders, for the most part, come from agricultural backgrounds and understand the answers to those questions. But as our community grows, and we get more diversity in the backgrounds of the people who will govern our town, I am afraid that there will be more conflicts. And they will be between what the commuters who are buying those new houses envision their surrounding environments should be, and with the realities of the very farming that keep those open spaces open. 
 
 
 
Cache County recently passed an Ag Land Preservation ordinance. That’s a great start, but getting back to some basic, decent, and fair land-use planning would go a long way to slow the slide into inevitable conflict. 
But absent that, I hope that the public’s recent interest on where their food comes from, will be cause for some understanding between homeowners and farmers.