Doing the manure math at the Pa. Farm Show

A certain scent hangs in the air of the Pennsylvania Farm Show each winter.

Yes, the baked potatoes smell great, the roasted almonds too. But with 6,000 animals — large and small — on display there, there’s a whole lot of manure. It adds up, by the ton, and doesn’t just go out with the garbage.

“There’s two loaders operating all week to move the manure to haulers, and it goes off to become mushroom substrate in Chester County or to become field dressing, fertilizer, that gets spread across farms,” said Shannon Powers, of the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. “The pile gets very, very large.”

On Monday, Powers estimated the pile’s height at close to 10 feet, most of it consisting of a manure/straw combo. With no birds on display, on account of avian flu, the weight of manure could be down this year. There’s no official stats but about two dozen truckloads leave during the entirety of the week-long event.

“The volume of manure when the dairy cattle are here is. . . a lot,” Powers, who wears ankle high boots each year, said.

“All of my shoes are farm show shoes,” she clarified.

An assortment of tools — wheelbarrows, shovels, and brushes — help turn all this manure into a small mountain. When the animals are “shown” for competition, someone walks behind the immaculately groomed black angus with a bucket and what looks like a squeegee.

“Yes, that’s basically a poop bucket,” Powers said.

Nothing can ruin a coiffed cow like a bowel movement, and they can allegedly poop up to 100 pounds per day.

A sign at the mushroom booth said “animal waste” is part of what feeds the nearly $3 billion mushroom industry in the state, but Jeff Seyler, an employee of Giorgio Mushrooms in Berks County, said it wasn’t quite accurate.

“Yes, there’s some animal waste mixed in with the straw, but I wouldn’t want people to think we’re just spreading manure over the mushrooms,” he said. “We’re mostly looking for used bedding, used straw.”

At the farm show, there’s plenty of that too.