Hauling Trash

(post by Jason) Now there’s a sexy job description and blog post title ! Nevertheless, that’s exactly what I spent much of the middle of the day doing. The folks at the county dump think I’m somewhat eccentric because I often haul trash in our stock trailer. I take it this is noteworthy in our area but the truth is plastic won’t blow out of an enclosed trailer.

As a farm management task trash, or more accurately trash, scrap and recyclables, consumes a lot more of my time than anyone would believe. The monthly rounds of Smartpak boxes and supplement packaging alone is enough to bury us, much less all the empty bags of feed and other things. Add in scrap wood, broken parts from equipment, etc. and we could easily become a junkyard as some farms do. If you don’t take the time to haul it off every couple of weeks believe me when I say it will literally bury you. If you live in an urban area you can see for yourself. The next time you drive out into the country anywhere in Canada or the US pay attention and I promise you won’t have to look far to find farms where they never, ever haul anything off. I find that a little strange because some of the scrap (especially scrap steel and scrap paper) is actually worth quite a bit of money.

More often, trash, scrap and recyclables get hidden in a far off, inaccessible corner of a farm. It’s surprising how often I’ve found myself in the middle of what looks like a mixture of scrapyard and municipal dump in out of view places on farms that otherwise are very well kept. One point of disclosure here is that *every* farm including our own has one or more piles of scrap wood and steel. These really aren’t junk piles, or if they are let’s at least call them useful junk piles. I just spent some time searching through one of my own piles to find some 10 foot lengths of weathered 2×8 boards and I found exactly what I needed.

Since we choose neither to hide our junk nor be buried by it we have no choice but to haul it all off. If you begin to let it accumulate, even a little bit, I swear it multiplies itself by factors of ten in the night. When my truck isn’t at the farm in the middle of the day and you wonder what I could possibly be up to the chances are pretty high that you’ll find me at or near either the dump or the scrapyard.

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Africa