The Shit
a treatise on muck & mucking
Being a modern day dairy goat that gets milked in a barn means, from time to time, sitting in your own shit. Being a modern day dairy goat farmer, thereby, means that from from time to time I’m picking shit up (by shit, of course, I mean manure, or my preferred term, “muck” and the act of removing it, “mucking”).
Over the years, I’ve settled on a “no way out but through” philosophy, and sometime in 2021 started hosting monthly “mucking parties,” sometimes forgetting that “mucking” is not a word used in normal/everyday polite/non-goat society and that pairing these two words can be misleading. One attendee admitted she did not know what a mucking party entailed and considered wearing a cute skirt.
Like most “bad” (gross? menial?) jobs, the necessity of mucking was created by capitalism and colonization. Before it, we raised animals that fit our climates and lived outdoors all year long. They roamed wherever they wanted and found their own food. We lived alongside them and formed interspecies friendships. They trusted us and allowed us to milk them on occasion, in between sips from their kids, most likely. Their shit fell in the woods and on the fields, requiring no mucking whatsoever.
In our case, mucking parties feel like a good answer to the problem. They turn a callous-inducing, time-consuming, back-breaking problem into a community endeavor, an approachable task. They bring us together, and we split the callouses and the muscles between us.
The better answer to the problem would be keeping animals on pasture for most or all of the time, but I’ve been tied to these particular pals and to the barn—for safety from predators, for practical containment reasons, and in order to separate kids from their dams (which I do to practice humane raising, which dictates partial weaning).
It’s a web I’m often caught in. Between optimizing and embracing the *actual* pace of life.
My singular hero, the farmer and cultural worker, Severine von Tscharner Fleming, gave an interview for “Uses This” in 2015 (which inquires of nerdy people from all walks of life to ask what they use to get the job done). It reverberates in my head often:
“What I really want is to live in a world with less computers, and a more appropriate level of complexity. I'd like to live in a place where setting up a meeting happens in a common kitchen, informally at mealtimes, and is synched not by algorithms, but according to our daily routine of sunrise, tea-drinking, goat-milking, and a leisurely rye toast with butter. I'd like a recycled, refurbished, off-grid solar server (that is locally owned) run by a friend of mine who barters for goat milk, kombu + rosehip jam.
I'd like to be a part of a post-email culture, where we become much better taking responsibility, managing our work autonomously, impressing each other with massive strides during weekly in-person meetings.
Bottom line, I'd like to spend less time hunched over my lappie, and more time rising and falling in the waves of our majestic mother-ocean, with a knife in my hand.”
Goat people love to say that a “bedding pack” (aka buildup of muck) creates heat as it degrades, warming the animals from below. In my experience, there is not enough aeration to feed the microbes responsible for composting, and I’m convinced it’s a lie goat people tell themselves to prolong the inevitable task until spring (during which, in my experience, mucking is smellier and less fun).
I have some a few techno-futurist dreams of my own about the muck-removal problem, but for now (and maybe forevermore) I’m a little bit obsessed with the communal pitchforking before shared meal.
I’ve found that often the *solution to the problem* eliminates people, and even though I’m running a *business* and tools are *nice,* I’m interested in, as Severine puts it “a more appropriate level of complexity.” It’s easy to view our tools as the solution in and of themselves and not notice when they’ve stolen the joy from the occasion or even created even more problems than we began with.
In the spirit of Severine, I’ll say I’d like to spend less time burning gas, holed up in heavy machinery and more time tossing muck over my shoulder, laughing and telling stories into the night, pitchfork in hand.
WINTER GOAT NOTES:
APPLY TO WORK WITH US: Dreamgoats is hiring a part-time weekend event host, Fri-Sun, April-November. Learn more & apply.
APPLY TO VOLUNTEER: For mucking party invites and goat hugs with less commitment, you can become a milkmaid/goatherd! We’ve offered work-learning barterships since 2018 and have a pretty spectacular crew. Consider joining!
TAKE A WINTER GOAT WALK: We’ve opened the hiking calendar for one final Feb-Mar hurrah on Saturday afternoons.
SHOP SOAP & SWAG: We’re having a popup at Gathered Botanicals in GR on Saturday, February 15, 11a-2p. Shop dream soap and swag alongside plant-based skincare and Golden Hour Farm teas and herbs.