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.