The bunker silo

This is the new frontier. You are looking at the site of the former bunker silo. At one time it was around 50 feet of silage covered in plastic, held down by tires and retained by walls on two sides. When the cows left and the goats came the bunker silo moonlit as a dump. Now the goats have gone and we have arrived, abhorring dumps and loving clean pastures. We hired people to excavate the foundations of the houses we are building and were amazed to watch the ease with which their machines moved massive amounts of dirt, so we asked them to bulldoze the bunker silo for us. What they unearthed is not pretty.

I may have mentioned the prevalence of bones and trash among the few deposits of gold we found here - aged goat manure teeming with scraps of metal, plastic bags and bailing twine, bones of all kinds and even needles and animal medications. Well, here we discovered the mother lode of contaminants. The old scraps of plastic were dwarfed by large torn tarps and giant balls of twine. I found glass bottles of insulin along side 1/2 gallon containers of ice cream, broken glass and worn out tires. There were large pieces of twisted metal as though someone blew up a car. The most distressing and ungodly finds were the piles of packaged meat. They had been rotting anaerobically for who knows how long. Some of them were torn open revealing swaths of grey and sulphur colored ooze amidst the bones. It smelled as you would expect it to. The irony was that their safe handling instruction labels were still quite legible.

That is one of the packages of meat on the left, above the triangular rock.

This tarp exhibits the lethargy and pathos that only some rubbish can. It feels good to make progress here. We are finding what was lost, namely beautiful and rich soils under years of neglect and disinterest. One day, we might even turn our cows out onto it, feeling confident they won't ingest something that could prove fatal. For now, we'll keep our gloves on and keep at it.

-Alanna