With
a title like Holy Shit for his latest book, author
Gene Logsdon set himself up perfectly to lob (lob!) one joke
after another about, well, shit. I mentioned to a friend recently
how humans don’t seem to be as funny anymore, and he said,
isn’t that just called awareness? My friend was right,
but later on I realized humans are not as funny anymore because
most of us are aware of the growing calamities the world over,
but most of us are still not living right, in a variety of ways,
and it’s hard to be funny when you’re living so
wrong. Gene Logsdon gets to make all those jokes about poop
because he is right, and right by the bucketful. He is right
to advise us on how to better manage manure, and he is right
to keep an open mind about using what is now considered waste
as a fertilizer. No kind of poop goes unexplored -- cows, horses,
goats, sheep, pigs, cats, dogs, birds and bats, humans -- you
name it, and Logsdon dives in.
Holy
Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind is a national treasure,
a book so right it rings the Liberty Bell on every other page.
What carries this book along is how Logsdon disarms you with
his wit, his country charm, and his experience -- this book
would mean next to nothing had it come from a research department
at a university. However, reading about Gene on his family’s
farm, spreading manure on the fields, or putting down additional
bedding in the chicken coop, makes his answers to our wrongly
perceived problems seem like the only answers. I can see many,
many people taking issue with what Logsdon has written, and
if he didn’t have experience -- both his own and human
history dating back thousands of years -- Logsdon might be banished
to the outhouse. However, history is with Logsdon, and we would
all do well to get to know manure a little more intimately.
“Chicken
manure is the easiest of all barn manures to handle, mostly
because chickens do not urinate in the same way that, say, a
horse does, flushing out enough in one session to drown a chicken
or two. Nevertheless, I am often shocked at the mess I sometimes
see in the coops of even very small flocks.”
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