THE MANURE CRISIS

            One of racing’s biggest problems, and one that the public is essentially unaware of, is how we get rid of our manure.

            By my own estimation, the average horse eating 10 to 12 pounds of feed a day probably returns about eight pounds of that in the form of manure.  That works out to one and a half tons of the stuff a year per horse.  And while the everyday fan doesn’t consider this problem that we have to face, even they would have to agree that, multiplied by a few hundred thousand horses of all breeds, that adds up to an awful lot of manure.

            Until a few years ago it wasn’t so much of a problem.  The mushroom growers were fighting each other to haul the stuff away from the tracks, and paying for the privilege.  It was a unique fertilizer for their product, which starts out as a spore.  Droppings mixed with straw trigger a chemical reaction that generates heat, which is good for the little mushroom spores.

            So the horsemen were happy, because someone was willing to remove the manure, and the tracks were happy because they didn’t have to worry about the stuff piling up on the backside, which in turn kept the local health inspector happy.

            But then the mushroom business started to take a downturn, principally from foreign imports, particularly the Far East, which reduced the demand for domestic mushrooms.  Certainly no self-respecting yuppie would bother with locally grown mushrooms treated with horse leavings when they could impress their friends by serving Siamese spores.

 And, of course, even the mushroom growers were concerned about quality.  Some years back a man in Connecticut wanted to know if it was legal to send manure through the mail.  He wanted to get some samples of Kentucky manure to test against what he apparently assumed to be more inferior horses in his area. 

No one knows if he ever decided whether you can determine better quality horses from the manure (could this be another breeding tool?), but one mushroom grower did note that you get better quality from better tracks because they use more straw, whereas cheaper tracks use cheaper shavings and wood chips, thus less straw.

“We can only use straw in our composts,” he observed, “and our contracts specify that we will accept only straw muck.”

Plus the domestic producers, faced with rapidly rising transportation costs, were considering other possibilities, such as synthetic composts made at or near their farms.  They learned it was becoming increasingly cheaper to buy bales of straw, add some water and poultry manure along with cottonseed oil to create a workable alternative.

            It became a double-edged sword, because with increases in year-round racing, manure production was increasing, while demand was falling.  A dramatization of the dilemma is best highlighted by the situation in California a few years ago.  In 1980 the HBPA was exploring ways to obtain the straw and manure rights from the racing associations, on the theory that since the horsemen pay for the input, they should realize something from the output, possibly in the form of purse increases.

            The associations, who were getting the manure money, didn’t think too much of that idea at the time, but a year later were trying to get the horsemen to pay for manure removal in the suddenly altered market.  The horsemen held out on that idea, even threatening a boycott, so now the associations are in the position of payer instead of payee.

            A lot of it now gets hauled to dumps, and you can’t even burn the stuff because the air quality control people are sensitive to a lot of businesses these days, so you imagine their reaction if they caught a track trying to burn several hundred tons of muck.  And, of course, there is the question of how long there will be viable dumping sites.

            As you fill nearby sites you face increasing transportation costs to haul it further away.

I suppose California has a possible alternative, they could always build a hundred mile pipeline and pump the stuff off to the Mojave Desert, though some environmental group would probably claim it was disturbing the natural habitat of gila monsters and sidewinder rattlesnakes. 

So you can see it’s an increasing problem that will probably gain more public notice, no doubt unfavorable, as we seek new places to dump hundreds of thousands of tons of manure every year.

Since we already have more than our share of image problems, it is in our best interest to start considering new methods of disposal before the manure hits the fan.

Some research has been done on the possibility of turning manure into energy.  In simple terms, this is a procedure in which the manure and straw are sent to a specially built processing plant where they are digested by bacteria over a period of up to ten days.  The result is the production of methane gas, which can be used as an efficient substitute for natural gas or to generate electricity.

While the technology exists, the problem is not only the cost to build a plant of this nature, but even more importantly how to assure a year-round supply.  Without constant input of the raw material, costs outstrip any possible gains.

So, again, transportation costs alone negate such a project unless it could be built next to a large track with a full stable 365 days a year.  And even that would only solve a regional problem, not the big picture.

Still, a recent issue of Sports Illustrated may offer at least the beginning of a viable solution when it noted that a gentleman in Maryland named Mike Klingaman, a former sports writer who now writes a weekly gardening column for The Baltimore Evening Sun, was admittedly a bit fussy about which horses his new found fertilizer came from, since each of four tomato plants were marked as being nurtured by a particular Preakness horse.

He has Snow Chief, Ferdinand, Broad Brush and Groovy thus far, and will rate them on a number of factors (production, size, taste, etc.) when the plants mature.  And while he admits that a plant fertilized by Dexter (“just an old horse around here”) seems to be doing better than his Preakness crop, the results of his experiment might create a new market for us in the form of tomato growers.

If Mr. Klingman can prove the superiority of horse manure as a fertilizer, a whole new world opens up to tracks and farms trying to figure out what to do with it.

Transportation costs are all but eliminated since tomatoes may be the biggest backyard crop in the country.  People even grow them in patio pots.  So the user is all around us rather than confined to some large mushroom farms.

We could set up a marketing network that would provide all our tracks with 50 pound bags to put the stuff in under a variety of labels.  John Henry would probably be a good seller, but there are dozens of names the public would identify with as they shopped for the favorite brand in fertilizer stores.

You understand, of course, we don’t have to worry about the manure actually coming from the particular horse named on the bag.  I mean, would you know the difference as you were putting Secretariat on your tomato plants?

Tracks could even establish their own retail outlets on the premises, or as part of the existing gift shop, and advertise it in the programs.  Then we cash in on all those backyard growers wandering around the track while wondering if their tomato plants need something better.  As in, “Ma, I think I’ll try a bag of that there Snow Chief this week.”

Plus, it could even be played up as a promotion, which tracks love, by putting a pound of manure in a cellophane bag as a giveaway and putting the name of that track’s most popular horse on it.

While not as volume oriented, it wouldn’t appeal only to the tomato growers.  People collect strange things, so you could even do this weekly with different horse names and encourage racing fans to collect the entire set.  Not too different from collecting baseball trading cards when you think about it (“I’ll give you four pounds of Precisionist for a pound of Seattle Slew.”)

So the solution to the problem may be staring us in the face.  All it takes is brilliant promotion and clever marketing on our part.

Well, that’s another problem, but it still sounds like a good idea.