Please forgive my use of a four-letter word. But it is central to my overall point, as I hope you will soon see.

Ranches are shit-management systems. There are other ways to think about a ranch, more refined and polite. But this way of looking at a ranch is useful. A ranch is all about raising animals for food, and animals shit. A proper ranch, unlike the factory farming methods criticized in the new film Eating Animals, handles these goals in a manner that is respectful to the animals in question.

The single biggest problem with having lots of animals in a single location is shit. More animals means more shit.

Properly managed ranches have all kinds of systems in place for managing shit. They design their animal stalls to be easy to shovel. They use wheel-barrows and bobcats and all kinds of reliable solutions to ensure that shit does not pile up in the wrong places. Thus, "Ranch Shit Management" can be a metaphor for the proper workings of any business.

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