The Top 40

I like a tangy marinara sauce, but not too tangy.

When I was a child of about 8-10 in rural PA one of my chores was to walk across a large dairy field frequently littered with insane Holstein cows carrying a large mouth 1 gallon glass jar to get fresh milk at the dairy farm on the other side.

I would sit the empty on the table next to the round top fridge, put 3 quarters in the jar, and get a filled jar out of the fridge and walk home. But I liked being in the barn cause it was dark and cool in the summer and way over in the corner they had baby cows so I would go over there and fraternize with them before going back home.

Flanking the large center corridor of the barn was where the milk cows were lined up for milking and just behind them was a trough in the concrete floor that collected the droppings from the cows as they ate and got milked.

Once, when I walked into the barn, I saw the farmer, Old man Lehman, hunkered down with his overalls dropped and his ass hanging out over that trough, letting loose of that big country breakfast Mrs Lehman always prepared.

He was smoking a filterless cig as everybody did back then he went on about his business like I wasn't even there and I kept going toward the baby cows.

Later that summer I saw that the bottom of that trough had a metal grid and the end of it connected at the far end to a piece of equipment with a gas engine and wheels. The machine would start up and that metal grid was pulled along the bottom of the rough and as it got out over the wagon part of the machine the droppings would drop into the large wagon. When the wagon was full the process was reversed and the metal grid went back into the trough ready to be filled again by the cows, and Mr Lehman.

That wagon was pulled by a tractor to the side of a big silo and another machine was connected to it and the contents were lifted up, up, up to the top of the silo and blown into a small door in the side to ferment until spring when it would be spread across the huge vegetable fields.

The Lehman family had a vegetable market in the small town of Gettysburg that always drew large crowds on Saturday and everybody said their vegetables were the best in all the state, and they won numerous awards at the county fair.

Do you think Mr Lehman's special touch had anything to do with the many blue ribbons that wallpapered Mrs Lehman's sewing room?

If they were getting blue ribbons all the time, it wouldn't make sense to make any changes.

I think your neighbor missed a trick, however. He could have marketed that process. Give it a name like "Lehmanizing", and make himself a pile.

Apropos of Mr. Lehman and his prizewinners, let me recommend "The Humanure Handbook, a Guide to Composting Human Manure".
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-humanure-handbook-a-guide-to-composting-human-manure-joseph-c-jenkins/1003552956?ean=9780964425835

There's a book, "Compost Everything", by David Goodman. He writes about some of this stuff. Peeing in your garden is good, unless the neighbors are watching. Need to get rid of, say, a dead animal? Bury it near a fruit tree. The roots will find it quickly.

One of the reasons Chipotle, among other companies, had problems is that a lot of food comes from Mexico these days. And Mexicans are used to adding their "contributions" to the fields when Nature calls. If the produce isn't washed carefully, well....