Every day at the Upper Campus barn, equestrian students load manure into wheelbarrows and dump it in an ever-growing pile, a massive mound that can reach the size of a hulking SUV.
Some look at the pile and see waste, a nuisance that needs to get loaded up and taken away. But when Lower Campus Arts Coordinator Ryan Lang looks at it, he sees an invaluable resource – and an extra paycheck.
Several times a month, Mr. Lang arrives on campus with his big, green dump truck in tow. He loads it with manure, and hauls the trailer, weighing 10,000 pounds when it’s full, to local Ojai-area farmers for use in fertilizing their fields and orchards.
The truck groans and jerks along the road to these local farms, where growers incorporate the manure to aerate the soil and infuse it with much-needed nutrients.
“Too many things humans consider waste – there’s zero waste in nature,” said Mr. Lang, the school’s longtime wood shop teacher. “My daughter goes with me so often that when she sees horse manure she says ‘money!’ ”
Removing manure from the OVS equestrian barns has been a family business since Mr. Lang’s father first started doing it 20 years ago, when he was teaching science at the Lower Campus in the late 70’s through the early 90’s.
His father decided then that it would be better to dispose of the manure himself rather than the school paying for it to go to a landfill. He managed the business for 13 years, and when it grew to surpass the bounds of OVS seven years ago, he began to share the load with his son.
Now Mr. Lang is busier than ever.
When there are 25 horses in the barn at Upper, Mr. Lang removes between four and six loads a month. At the Lower Campus, the maintenance crew loads his green trailer once a week and he hauls it away.
Mr. Lang gets paid by OVS to take away the manure, and the organic farmers pay him a small fee for the delivery. While Mr. Lang definitely profits from the arrangement, OVS and local farmers benefit as well.
Without the services provided by Mr. Lang, the school would have to pay the local trash company to dispose of the manure, which would be drastically more expensive and unnecessarily add to already jam-packed landfills.
To aid the process of turning the dung into dollars, the Lower Campus barn recently switched from wood shavings to rice hulls for its horse bedding. The rice hulls break down quicker, and when collected together with the horse manure add beneficial carbon and aeration to the soil.
“It was Mr. Lang’s idea and we love it,” Equestrian Director Stephanie Gustafson said. “There’s really no waste – it’s all going into organic farming.”
Moreover, Mr. Lang supplies a vital service to area growers, offering an economically reasonable, easy and sustainable way to provide nutrition for their land, a key to making hard clay and gravelly soil more workable.
Upper Ojai grower Zach Griffin, who is a parent of two Lower Campus students, has had Mr. Lang transport manure to his small farm for several months. Mr. Griffin said the utilization of repurposed materials, such as the barns’ horse manure, is one of the many components necessary to ensure sustainable farming.
“I am as grateful for his services as the generator of the material should also be,” Mr. Griffin said. “It closes the loop.”
What started 20 years ago as a way to help OVS solve a mounting problem has become an incomparable community asset – even if it is a little stinky.
“We consider it a resource,” Mr. Lang said, “and do not want to see it go to waste.”