As I drove back from a softball game Monday night in McBee, I entered the community of Primus, which introduces itself to you with a simple road sign bearing the name. It may as well have said, “Welcome to Stankville USA, pinch your nose closed.”
For some reason, my senses were not assaulted when I drove through the area going to McBee, but I got a double-barreled blast of it coming back.
It wasn’t a bitter or acrid smell, it was just really heavy and completely awful.
It was also very hard to get away from, lingering for miles.
I posted on social media that if there was a tanker truck full of Febreze somewhere, it needed to get to Primus as soon as possible.
Someone answered me and told me exactly what I was smelling.
I can’t use the exact verbiage they did, but suffice it to say it involved turkeys and chickens and the stuff they leave behind.
Poop, basically is what I was smelling. Apparently, it was fermented bird poop used for fertilizer. That’s fine, I suppose, but that got me to thinking…why did farmers decide to use chicken and turkey poop? My guess is because farmers probably have lots of turkeys and chickens. I wonder if the effectiveness of different kinds of animal “stuff” was tested out.
I think the first thing that would have to take place is a food-to-poo ratio.
Turkeys and chickens are small but make a mess pretty often (so to speak). Deer are much larger but don’t returns as much of their food to nature (so to speak). Cows can fill up a pasture (so to speak) but are more expensive to raise. I’m not sure if anyone can catch up with a squirrel well enough to test out the “food to mess” ratio. So chickens and turkeys probably make the most sense.
Still, I’m figuring someone had to test out the effectiveness. I’m guessing there was a big test garden.
“OK Jimbo, we’ve sectioned this garden off into 10 areas and planted a bunch of watermelons. This one over here is fertilized with chicken and turkey mess, we’ve got cow mess on this one, we chased down some possums and got enough to use for this one over here…believe it or not we trapped some armadillos in a box and got enough material to use over here.”
“I’m just thinking out loud here, but we seem to have a lot of crows. Surely they leave stuff behind.”
“Leave the thinking to me Jimbo. We do everything we can to scare crows away from our garden. We’d have to let them eat up a bunch of our crops to collect anything.”
And, I guess Jimbo took copious notes and figured out the turkey and chicken test garden was the winner. And now, it is used on crops far and wide, including in Primus. Now you know the straight poop on, well, poop.
