The Beginning

It was spring, the days were warming. A pair of Mallards was circling a small wetland created by the winter rains. The last snow had disappeared more than a month ago. Bud break was beginning in some of the willows growing along the fence lines. The farmer didn’t mind them because he knew his cows would keep them trimmed back. They were a great natural wormer that the older cows knew about. They would be teaching the calves how to get rid of their parasites. The rancher knew about it too; he hadn’t given his cows Ivomec [a parasiticide] for years.

He wanted his herd’s manure to be alive when it plopped on the ground. The farmer cultivated his dung piles as carefully as he bred his cows. Kewaunee County farmers Lynn and Nancy Utesch know that to have 50 or 60 cows they must have zillions of smaller animals. The Mallards are still circling as the shorthorn mama cow puts her first cow pie into the pasture.

There are other springtime birds in the air besides the ducks. Bobolinks, Robins, Red-wing Blackbirds, there’s a purple Martin sharing the airways. These birds must always be on the look for predators above and below. There are always costs to sharing the sky. There are costs to sharing the pasture underneath.

The pile of poop the shorthorn had put down had become a landing pad for resident dung beetles at the Utesh Biological Airport in Kewaunee, Wisconsin. Most people probably don’t think of beetles as people. They’ve been taught they are creepy-crawly creatures scurrying along through the woods or through the house, scaring the two-legged people. I’ve known people who thought the Beetles were a musical group from Liverpool in the ’60s. Perhaps they were but that’s not who we’re talking about here.

These beetles fly without airplanes. Most beetles do. The cow pie hits the ground. With it is an ugly roundworm parasite. This parasite is happy for a little while. She’s thinking about infecting the whole herd. In a healthy pasture a dung beetle’s highly evolved sense of smell is activated and within 20 minutes they are landing in the dung pile. They are bringing their symbiotic mites with them. The mites eat the same materials that the flies would be eating. They are slurping up all the liquid the roundworm needs for her procreating cycles. They are slurping so hard it’s noisier than a wine tasting at a Napa Valley winery. Without a liquid in the cow pie, evolution stops for this parasite.

A water beetle who loves dung comes flying in while the poop is steaming. They move very fast. When you look at a healthy cow pie the hundreds of little holes on the top are put there by the hydrophillids. As one continues his or her examination of the poop they are going to see rove beetles and their larvae. Rove beetles eat at least their weight and a half each day.

A couple of years ago I sent Jim Nardi half a cow pie through the mail. Nardi is a research biologist at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign. He found a rove beetle wrapped around a big fat fly larvae. Healthy cow poop are living compost piles all over the pasture. They are biological magnets. When you consider there are more than 30,000 species of rove beetle alone – there are a lot of creatures to be drawn.

Enchytraeidae are a small white worm somewhere between a redworm and a nematode. There are so many of them they may be infinite. At least they can be seen with the naked eye. There are millions of nematodes lurking and cruising around the pastures just waiting to dine and procreate. That’s actually what all these creatures are doing. Dining and procreating. That is the cycle that puts all the manure back into the ground. That is the cycle that takes the cow pies and turns them into the best soil imaginable.

As the decomposition runs its cycle, more and more creatures are engaged. The earthworm arrives after the beetles have done a lot of the work. Springtails (Colembulas) arrive on the backs and the sides of the earthworms. The worms are a very important form of mass transit for a lot of the creatures needing a ride from pile to pile.

We’ve talked about creatures and we haven’t mentioned bacteria or fungae. We’re talking millions and trillions. Like the nematode, they can’t be seen without a scope. As the numbers peak in two or three weeks, maybe sooner depending on how large the dung beetle population is, the cow pie has been reduced to the shape of a tired paper plate. The ants move in now for a final cleanup.

The process we’ve been talking about could take a couple of days or it could take a couple of weeks. I’ve known ranchers who had dung beetle populations that buried a ton per acre per day. If your dung piles go away your biology is performing as it should. If the only biology that you can see are flies, then you have problems. If you’ve named your cow pies that have been in your pasture for years, you are probably worming with chemical de-wormers and using a bunch of other sprays that kill the creatures that build better soils, better cows and healthy children. If there’s some product you are putting on your property or giving to your animals that you wouldn’t eat yourself then you probably shouldn’t be using it.

Mark U. Sturges lives, writes and farms on the southern Oregon coast. He is known for creating some of the best eco-system compost, which he ships all over the United States, used as the main inoculant in Compost Tea. He is currently developing the rare color of Leghorn Chicken called Duckwing. He is the author of The Return of the Fertilizer King.