The Day of the Brown Bovine Excrement Sawdust Tornado

I work at S & H Farm Supply in Rogersville, Missouri, a fairly large New Holland dealership that handles a wide range of equipment for cattle producers.  When the Missouri Cattlemen’s Convention came to Springfield we decided to have a booth. Our store, and our home store in Lockwood, shared the responsibility for having people there to man the booth.  On the last day of the show, which was at the University Plaza Convention Center, one of the livestock exhibitors was complaining to one of our sales guys from Lockwood that it was going to take them forever to clean up their booth.  They were required to have about a 14” base of sawdust put down for their cattle to be on, and it had to be out the day after the show, because another convention was coming in immediately afterward.  The only way they had to clean up was shovels and wheelbarrows.  Kenny, our Lockwood salesman, wanting to be a good neighbor (and later sell them something) told them that we’d clean it up since we had a New Holland skid loader in our booth on display.  Everyone went home with a warm fuzzy feeling.

I like Kenny Bergmann.  He’s one of the best salesmen I’ve ever met, a guy with a charisma that makes you want to buy from him.  Sometimes he’ll commit to things that get him in trouble, but his coworkers like him so much we tend to bail him out.  I get a call on the way to work…”This is Kenny…would you mind to help the cattle exhibitors at the convention clean up their sawdust?  There are about four scoops that need to be put in a dumpster that’s about 20 yards away.”  That didn’t sound like too big a deal, so I agreed.  After I hung up with Kenny I started thinking… we had no one available to do the task on that day.  Our truck driver had taken a couple of days off, our Lockwood store was hauling all the equipment back to our store, and the shop guys were buried with work, seems like one or two of them were off.  In trying to think of someone to delegate the chore to, I finally decided I’d do it.  It was an unseasonably warm day in December, windy, but mild, and it would get me out of looking at a computer screen for a couple of hours and I enjoy running skid loaders for brief periods of time.  And I could see all of the cattlemen cheering loudly when I finished the job and probably making me an honorary member of the Missouri Cattlemen’s Association.  Ten minutes of work for hero status in the MCA seemed like a good trade.  For a period I was actually glad that Kenny had volunteered me for the job.

Until I arrived at the University Plaza.  There had probably been 40-50 head of cattle there, each in a separate pen, 10’ by 10’ with 14” of sawdust underneath.  THERE WAS A MOUNTAIN OF SAWDUST TO MOVE.  The cattlemen had all gone home.  They’d handed Kenny their problem and left, he’d handed it to me.  My first thought was it was going to take a lot longer than expected.  Then I went to the dumpster.  It was out a narrow dock and a stairway handrail prevented getting a skid loader anywhere near it.  The only other alternative was to drive the skid loader out on the pretty University Plaza grass, which looked like a fairway on the best golf course, and totally destroy the turf making a hard right turn there to get to the dumpster.  I’m in a pickle. 

About that time Scott, the truck driver from Lockwood, showed up.  Together we hatch a plan.  We were showing a New Holland T6000 tractor at the show and a Knight mixer wagon.  Knight mixers are these gigantic tubs with an auger in the bottom.  Livestock producers purchase different types of food for their cattle, dump them in a Knight mixer and it combines them all together, so the cattle get their proper nutrition.  Scott and I figure that if we hook the tractor to the Knight mixer and back it up to the loading dock; we can cram all of the sawdust in the Knight hopper, load it on his truck and take it to our store, then shoot it out the discharge chute.  And that’s what we proceed to do.

Twenty nine skid loader buckets of sawdust later, we have the mess removed, Scott loads the tractor and mixer on his semi-truck and we break for lunch, this has taken all morning.  I ran the skid loader and we packed all of the sawdust in the Knight mixer, several times having to take the bucket of the skid loader and compact the load, lifting the front wheels of the skid loader off the ground. It’s still heaped up over the top of the hopper, and I know we’re going to lose a little bit on the twenty mile trip back to Rogersville, but it’s only sawdust (with some cattle excrement mixed in), right?

The story would have ended here except Scott wanted me to follow him, because he wanted me to witness the way his trailer was pulling, he thought he had an axle problem.  So I get in my pickup truck and get behind him.

It was a beautiful sunny day in early December, probably mid to high fifties, but, as most warm days are that time of year it was windy, REAL WINDY!  We didn’t notice it loading out because we were on the north side of University Plaza, but there was a 40-50 mile wind blowing from the south that we hit immediately after clearing the building.  All of a sudden the sawdust was spreading itself in downtown Springfield. 

Going down Trafficway it wasn’t too bad; the buildings were still shielding us from the bulk of the wind.  When we got on Chestnut Expressway the full furry of wind, aerodynamics and sawdust came together.  I was following a gigantic snowing sawdust tornado.

It was so bad on Highway 65 that cars were pulling off the road.  The sawdust was coming off with a fury that looked like a brown white-out snowstorm.  I got back several car lengths to watch the maelstrom and it’s really difficult to describe.  The wind was whipping a sawdust vortex 35 feet in the air and the more the truck gained speed, the faster the sawdust was sucked out.  It was literally dumping a 1/2 inch snowstorm of sawdust on southbound 65.  When we turned and headed east on Highway 60 IT GOT WORSE…in the crosswind, the vortex shot up to fifty feet in the air and the sawdust snowstorm increased…just about until we reached our destination and we were starting to run out of sawdust.  When we got to the store a significant amount of the sawdust was gone, and what was left we spread on the ground to decompose.  Scott had driven his truck down the road, totally oblivious to the havoc he was creating behind and was surprised by how much of his load was gone.

All this to tell you the funniest part of the incident which was on east Chestnut Expressway.  There are railroad tracks you cross there, and just east of them is a McDonalds.  Across from there is the old Burlington Northern Building where O’Reilly and Dairy Farmers of America have corporate offices.  As we were passing through, there was a young man in a business suit, crossing Chestnut Expressway, probably to go to McDonalds for lunch.  He couldn’t have been in a worse position.  Picture a 20-30 year old man enjoying the sunny day and waiting for traffic in the median.  He had his head tilted back, facing the south, beaming with a big smile, enjoying the sun and the beautiful day, not a care in the world, oblivious to the swirling brown hurricane coming his way.  To make matters worse, just before Scott got to him, he hit the railroad tracks, and the bump lifted the load up, increasing the sawdust being fed into the vortex.  I had to look away as we passed him because I knew what was going to happen.  We dumped a MASSIVE amount of sawdust right on top of him and he never saw it coming.  It fell in a blowing swirling motion, filling every available body orifice, coating his scalp, and likely lodging in his clothing (to his underwear) as well. I looked in the rear view mirror and he was doubled over in the median feverously tying to brush it out and off, hacking and snorting…he never knew what, or who, hit him.  I’m hoping there was no permanent damage to his eyes and that his mouth was closed.  Even though I felt real sorry for him, it was an “America’s Funniest Videos” million dollar winner if I’d had a way of taping it.  And another normal day in the whacky world of the farm equipment business.

Me, 4-H, and Bovine

I was deep in the 4-H Club as a kid.  It was a group of people who had determined there were enough things that started with an “H” that you could pledge yourself to, so an organization was formed.  We’d have a meeting that would get called to order.  Then we’d pledge.  We’d “pledge our head to clearer thinking, our heart to greater loyalty, our hands to larger service and our health to better living, for our club, our community, our country and our world”.  Then there were numerous boring reports, mostly by adults, and then we’d close with the pledge of allegiance.  Then you got to drink kool-aid and eat cookies and hang out with your friends.  It was kinda like going to one of those time-share presentations, you had to sit through the spiel to get to the pay-off.  We’d meet either at the First State Bank of Marionville or the Community Building in the winter, and down at the park in the summer.  The park had a contaminated creek you could wade in and the last thing I remember was a sand pile and the littlest Hopkins girl grabbed a handful of sand and threw it in my eyes and made me cry.  Kids were laughing that I was crying, but have you ever had a handful of sand in your eye?  I’d cry today and stand solid behind my right to cry at that point in my life.

To be in 4-H you had to have a “project” which meant the boys had to screw around with some type of livestock and the girls cooked.  Understand, what was going on in the sixties in the big cities hadn’t filtered its way down to Marionville yet.  My project was Jennifer, an Angus heifer.  Dad was, from birth, a cattleman.  He and his dad made their living “cattle trading”.  That means you travel around the country trying to buy cattle for less than they’re worth from people that aren’t that smart, then put them together with other cattle that resemble them, then truck them to a big stockyards somewhere and sell them for fantastic profit.  Back then all it required was a one-ton truck with stock racks, a credit line at a bank, and a gob of time. 

Dad and granddad bought our little farm in 1937 as a place to keep the cattle until they could be assembled for sale.  The place had been an orchard and there were still ten acres of untended apple trees that they had planned to bulldoze.  Dad decided to see if he could raise apples and that was the beginning of the end of his cattle trading days.  He had found his passion.  He raised the best apples and made the best cider and did it as long as almost anyone, starting with his first “real” crop in 1940 and ending with his death in 2007.  He was REAL good at that.  At raising livestock, I guess he could have been good at that if that had been his goal.

Anyway, we always had cattle around growing up and dad loved to go to the barn and “piddle” around with them for hours.  Actually I think he was killing time so mom could get supper ready without his assistance.  Later in life I learned that some of the stuff we had going on wasn’t normal for a top cattle herd.  Normal beef cattle aren’t blue, normal Angus cattle don’t have horns, normal cattle herds aren’t bred for their kicking ability and so on.  I suspect dad kept the cows he had because he didn’t have much money in them, they were castoffs from mainstream herds.  If they raised a healthy calf every year it was money in the bank for very little investment. 

We had a roan cow, which was some kind of milking Shorthorn/Jersey cross and was colored about like an Appaloosa horse.  She was bred to an Angus bull and produced an all-red heifer that we kept for a cow.  Later she was bred to an Angus bull and her offspring was BLUE and we kept her for a cow.  I’ve never seen another one like her and I remember when we sold her the eruption of laughter in the sale ring at the stockyards must have been embarrassing for her and really hurt her feelings just before she became hamburger.  I would normally have been sad about this, but I really thought she would kill one of us before we got rid of her.  I saw what she did to a snake one day, and thought about what would happen if she’d turn on one of us, all that hybrid vigor gave her a massive attitude.  The other cows all bowed to her dominance.

Our horned Angus had a story.  Angus cattle don’t normally have horns, through selective breeding over the millennia, that trait has been bred out of them.  But, if you accidentally get lazy on bull replacement, and you have an Angus whose dad is his brother, guess what?  Horns!  I wish I had a picture of this animal whose face resembled most pictures of satan!  This was another animal that brought frivolous hilarity to the stockyards buyers and didn’t sell very well.

I’m not sure where the kicking thing came from.  Most of the cattle in dad’s herd could nail you if you got anywhere near their hind quarters.  And I don’t mean a little tag; they’d kick the living CRAP out of you.  To this day, I never walk close to the back end of any farm animal.  Why dad’s herd was so bad at that I don’t know, except, maybe everyone who had kicking animals got rid of them and he bought them cheap.  They kicked and all the generations after them kicked.

SO, my memories of cattle raising were inbred, crazy, punting cattle that all tended to birth at the kickoff of the Super Bowl in sub zero weather in a blowing snowstorm with chill indexes we haven’t seen since the sixties.  Dad liked to give me the job of getting the afterbirth out of the stall.

All this to say that when we picked my 4-H project, we selected one of only two purebred Angus heifers in our herd, Jennifer.  I broke her to lead over a five month period of being kicked, drug, stepped on and “snotted” on (if you’ve been around cattle you know what I mean), and we went to two livestock shows.  At Mt. Vernon I believe we rode with neighbor Kenneth Gillig, whose son was my best friend.  He was nice enough to take my animal and his also.  At Monett, dad took me.  He had a part-time job at the Marionville Post Office (in case the apples froze out in any given year we’d have income), so we got up real early and drove to Monett and he dropped me off and went back to work.  He came to pick me up after he got off at 5.  Trouble is, the show ended at 3:30.  All the parents gathered up their gear, loaded up their livestock and went home, leaving a ten-year-old boy alone with a 1000 pound animal.  By the time dad got there I was pretty sure I had been orphaned and was making plans to find a cardboard box to live in.  He was REALLY embarrassed and felt bad to his death about that day.  As to how we did showing cattle...well, someone has to be last.

Most farm kids that get city jobs eventually miss the fun of screwing with cattle and when they retire, go out and purchase ten head and they’re off and running.  Working in the farm equipment business at S & H we sell them a lot of equipment and they tell me joyful stories about their experiences and I’m real happy for them.  The good news about all of my experiences is that when I’m done working I won’t be screwing with bovine, I’ve paid my dues and have no desire to go back.  While everyone else says “farm livin’ is the life for me” I’ll be on the lake.  You can laugh at me when I’m trying to eat the boat hull when times get hard.