What's black and White and Dead all over?

Back in the early 90's I got into business with a woman in Springfield. It was this same business and business partner who would eventually lead to my incarceration, but that’s not what this story is about.

The business I got involved in started out as a recycling company. We had a material recovery facility in Springfield Mo. It was a fairly large post consumer recycling operation. We handled all of the waste haulers recycling in that area. At one point we ran two shifts and employed about 45 people, ironically most of whom were on a work program from a state prison in Fordland Mo.

I started out as combination general Manager and one man sales force. We would later become partners , but I started out as an employee. Newspaper was the highest volume recyclable at the time, we had mountains of the shit. The problem with newsprint was that it didn’t bring in much money if we just sold it to the mills, so we found an alternative market, Farmers. Dairy farmers to be exact. We got grants and DNR money for special machinery that chopped and baled the paper like bales of straw. Dairy farmers used the chopped newspaper for bedding in place of more expensive alternatives, but they didn’t buy enough, we needed a new market. We were selling a lot but we still had tons of paper coming in with no place to send it all.

I know this is a long story, hang in there.

Besides dairy cattle the next largest farming market in southern Missouri is poultry, chickens and turkeys. We chose to go after the turkeys. Anyone who has ever tried to sell something to a farmer, especially something they have neither heard of or asked for, will tell you that they are not an easy sell. So we do our research, find a major turkey operation, and I give them my spiel.

Now the last thing a farmer wants is to waste a lot of his time listening to some city boy give a sales pitch. But if you mention the word free they will listen. I tell the guy we will put newspaper bedding in one of his grow out houses for free, and if he likes the results and the birds do good in it, we can do his other houses for half of what he pays for his current bedding. I show him university studies, I give him stats and figures. The birds will get bigger because they wont eat the paper like they will wood shavings, its easier on their legs, etc. and so forth. All true in theory too.

He agrees, we bring a truck on the appointed day and blow the bedding into the grow house floor, much the same as insulation for a house is done. Then we press the bedding down with a roller. Its ready. They put 15,000 birds in one house almost the length of a football field. They bring the young turkeys in a truck from the brood house. Back the truck up and release about a thousand young turkeys at a time into the grow house.

This would be a good time to point out that over the years I have tried my hand at selling everything from pre arranged funerals to livestock bedding. To be good in sales it is imperative that you convince the potential buyer that you are an expert in whatever it is you are trying to unload. When I get going I can talk more shit than a Philadelphia lawyer, even if I don’t know dick about what I’m selling, I can make it sound like I do. That’s what a salesman does, so that’s what I did.

Turkeys are stupid fucking animals. Adolescent turkeys are down right retarded. When those first thousand turkeys hit that newspaper floor, they freaked. I never stopped to think that we shouldn’t put the stuff in as thick as we did in a dairy barn. What the fuck do I know about turkeys, cows or any other farm animal? The farmer was so busy gloating over getting something free that he neglected to tell me that turkeys will burrow under shit when they get spooked. I suppose you could argue that I was the one acting like an authority on turkey bedding, even though I wasn’t. And I suppose that’s true, which is why I blame myself.

The turkeys burrowed into the newspaper in a state of panic. Then the farmer panicked because the bedding was about a foot thick. The birds were maybe 6 or 8 inches high. Before the farmer and his guys could dig them out, about 500 or so smothered. He was really pissed. No sale.

True story.

**Bush had nothing to do with any of this, I just thought the picture was funny.**