The smell of manure hits you right away when walking into the Canadian Western Agribition.
But the sheer volume that is cleaned out every day might surprise you.
“There’s probably six hours a night dedicated to manure cleanup,” said operations manager Ken Fuchs.
For seven straight days, crews clean up manure for about 2,500 animals. Most of that waste is outside of the tieouts. The barns also house bins labelled for “Manure Only.”
“At night, I have three guys on skid steers just cleaning up, piling it up at the doorways,” Fuchs said. “Then two guys on forklifts getting the bins out.”
Fuchs says the bins usually fill two trucks. The tieouts add another 10 to 20 truckloads to that total.
“We push all the manure out every aisle,” said Chance Stein, who works on the grounds crew. “All the exhibitors will shovel all the manure out of their beds and some extra straw. We just push it to the end in a big pile, then the trucks come at night and take it away.”
According to the crew, the hardest part is convincing people not to dump garbage in the manure bins.
“We have to keep the garbage out of it, because all of this manure is used for recycling,” Fuchs explained.
It takes about a week to clean out the barns once Agribition wraps up. It will then take another two to three weeks to move the manure to a farmer, who will turn it into fertilizer.
“By the time we end up moving all the dirt and manure and biowaste out of here, it’s well into six figures,” Agribition CEO Chris Lane said.
