Clean Up On Main Street, USA

This weekend nearly every city—town—village—parish—hamlet—in America will stage an Independence Day parade. Bands marching, fireworks booming, politicians smirking, local celebs and beauty queens waving, towns people imbibing and of course, horses a-horsing. You cannot have a parade without horses, it’s in the Constitution.

Which of course means Main Street, USA will inevitably be in need of a clean up. One Oregon town isn’t wasting any time “picking up” after its horses. The Oregonian has the story:

The Hillsboro FFA chapter has walked behind horses to pick up the manure in the parade since before Kent Estes, now 45, was a student member in high school.

This Independence Day, Ag-West Supply is loaning FFA Kawasaki Mules, which will carry FFA’s six 70-quart muck buckets for members to shovel manure into, Estes said. At the end of each year’s parade, the buckets usually end up about a quarter full, carrying a total of 120 pounds of manure, he estimated. They usually dump it on a friend’s horse farm to use as fertilizer.

If little Hillsboro, Oregon is producing 120lbs. of horse manure each 4th of July parade, one can only imagine what, say, NYC’s equine output weighs.

Hillsboro’s method promotes sustainable farming—as only Oregon can—by redistributing the manure as fertilizer, which sure beats arming some poor city employee with a shovel and wheelbarrow earning time-and-a-half and shipping it off to the landfill. And come on, no marching band deserves to have to deal with this…

And no human anywhere deserves this…

Dress for success. (newenglandphotos.blogspot.com)

While the commitment to keeping things classy is respectable, this might be a little much. A tuxedo and white gloves on the hot asphalt in the middle of summer? Maaaannn…

Some municipalities take care of the problem before it hits the fan, so to speak. Horse diapers, or manure bags, are indeed a thing that actually exist. Think of a lawn mower that collects grass clippings, only this is fully digested grass clippings. That’s gotta be a little humiliating though, right?