In what has lately been a very hard winter here in Ohio, we got a break in temperatures these last few days, and I made a trip to Holmes County to see what the Amish people there were doing with the respite. In typical fashion, they were out using the day to good purpose, mucking out the stalls and loading up manure spreaders. Almost everywhere we turned, we saw teams hitched to red spreaders, walking slowly over the fields, pitching manure left, right and aft, preparing the soil for spring planting, or working over a field planted earlier with winter wheat. At one farm, the lad had used a front loader to stack manure outside the barn, and he had a pile of aromatic fertilizer that was easily eight feet high and thirty yards long, all of it destined for the fields across the way. I got this picture of him bringing his team back for another load, and I thought how remarkable it was that he’d do little else that day. Move a pile of manure as big as an eighteen wheeler? There’s only one way to do that – one trip at a time.
