I can't take it anymore. We're doing this. This is a placeholder tweet because I am about to share images of cow shit in various stages ranging from fresh to fully composted. Hopefully this tweet will allow the thread to collapse and minimize the pics on your timeline.
We are doing this here on my timeline because I cannot handle the way people are talking about the useless fucking manure stunt at the White House - as if the stuff that's getting dumped isn't cow shit or as if my actual job is the worst thing on the planet.
Since yes! A huge amount of my job is manure management! Keeping it out of water sources, helping it turn into good soil, etc etc. I have handled the shit of multiple species in all stages of its lifecycle from steaming fresh to dirt.
This is fresh cow manure. It is as fresh as you're going to get without sticking your hand up a cow's ass.
This cow shit has been on the ground for maybe 12-24 hours and is starting to dry out. Also this pasture is overgrazed, but I digress. At this stage and the one above, it is a biohazard.
It is teeming with fecal bacteria as well as rumen bacteria and yeasts. Some of them have the potential to become beneficial soil organisms. Some are pathogenic. Runoff from manure into irrigation canals is what causes the periodic recalls of lettuce from Arizona.
Depending on the health of the cow that shat it out, it may also carry parasite eggs, larvae, or segments.

It is, as I said, a biohazard. It needs to be managed.
One way farmers manage manure is by putting it in very large piles like these, along with the waste hay and bedding from the cows. These are fucking enormous hot compost piles is what they are.
You leave the manure there to rot down for up to a year depending on conditions. The piles get hot enough to kill off pathogens. Also importantly, the nitrogen content of the manure is reduced.
If you put fresh cow manure directly on your garden in large quantities, you will give your plants one fuck of a nitrogen burn thingy and kill them. This is bad. Composting the manure mellows it so that it won't hurt your plants.
At the end of the process, what you have is dirt. It no longer reeks of shit (unless it's incompletely composted in which case put it back and wait longer). It no longer looks like shit. It's very rich black dirt high in organic matter.
The pathogens have been killed off by the hot compost process and it is no longer a biohazard. While you don't want to dump a handful of dirt in your glass of water, doing so is unlikely to give you quite as nasty an illness or parasite as a handful of manure.
But fundamentally it is still cow shit, merely well-aged, safer to handle cow shit than the stuff that came out of a cow's ass hours before.
Do allow me to note however that I'd rather handle cow shit fresh enough to still be moist, because then I don't have to wear a dust mask to keep from inhaling it.
And even fresh cow shit is mostly a huge risk in quantity. I wear leather gloves to shovel it when I need to move it, and then I wash up afterward, and it's fine.
Moving well composted cow shit doesn't even register on my list of "bad parts of my job" quite frankly. It's *dirt*. Shoveling fresh shit makes the top 10 because of flies but is nowhere near eg having to assist a cow giving birth when I only had wrist length gloves.
What they're doing is spraying a thin layer of liquified manure on the fields for fertilizer. *Generally* not that big a deal as it soaks in rather than running off into the water supply. https://twitter.com/Green_Mt_Girl/status/1385776533147508742?s=19
Obviously you do not want to get sprayed by the manure spreader and also it's not great if done right before a big rain storm. But then synthetic fertilizer run off contributes to dead spots in lakes and bays so swings and roundabouts.
What you don't want is concentrated amounts of manure making its way into the water supply without the benefit of filtration. The ground itself does a nifty job of filtration which is why you have septic systems and wells in the same area without eg cholera outbreaks.
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