Pits

Every day they scrape manure into a manure pit. But then you need to get the manure out, right? Or it would be one unpleasant farm. No one would come and visit us.

So we pump the manure out of the pits. It’s run off of a tractor. You hook up the manure pump to the PTO shaft of the tractor, and the impeller - which looks like a giant fan - sucks up the manure and pushes it through the pipe into a diagonal pipe that takes it into the spreader. Let me know if I’m killing you with my super-technical terms.

Mike thinks there’s something wrong with either the bearing or the universal joint on the main shaft that runs the pump. It started vibrating a lot. (Every machine’s sign that something is about to explode. This is also where the normal ‘kick it’ method comes into play. Oh, that’s just me? It worked once. Not on a manure pump.)

They took it out and are working on it. Since it sits in manure mostly all the time, you can expect it needs occasional maintenance.

But when it is working properly, they then drive the spreader to a field and spread the manure on it. Why on our fields? Because every farm needs to do something with the manure that cattle generate, and it’s the best fertilizer ever.

So the next time you pass a spreader on the road, take a deep breath. As they love writing on foods in the grocery store, it’s ALL NATURAL.


The manure pump


The tractor, spreader, and pipe by the pit