by Richard Gleeson
Northern News Services

NNSL (May 01/98) - What's brown and dark brown, not solid and not liquid and sweet and stinky at the same time? Opportunity, that's what.

Nattering nabobs of negativism look at the mass of manure at the former site of Tuaro Dairy and see nothing but, well, a mass of manure.

But with a little imagination, that limited supply of pre-owned cow feed can be churned into bucks, big bucks.

Why a group in Cambridge Bay turned muskox dung into paper and sold it for $2 a sheet last year.

Mr. Entrepreneur of the Year, David Ramsay, suggests sending it back to the source: "We should ship it down to Doug (Lagore, former city administrator) in Salmon Arm."

Poetic justice, yes, but the cash registers aren't ringing quite yet.

Local wit and family man Alex Debogorski said the opportunities are rife, from tourism to aphrodisiacs.

He pointed to an experiment carried out on pigs. Since they only get about 25 per cent of the nutrients from their feed, farmers attempted to, er, feed it to them twice.

"The pigs just turned their noses up at it," said Debogorski. "But then the farmers tried adding a little strawberry flavoring and the pigs just gobbled it up."

Debogorski said that lesson could be applied here. "If we add strawberry flavoring to the manure, maybe we can make it palatable to some southern concern."

The force of marketing is no better illustrated than in packaging.

Hand someone a baggy load of crap and they won't touch it. Stuff the manure into a fancy perfume bottle with a French name on it, say Eau du Plop, and people will line up around the block to buy it.

The man most responsible for disposing of the milk byproduct, city public works director Gary Craig, offered a unique idea that's worked in the South.

"You can make clocks out of it," said Craig. "There was a lady at a farm outside of Calgary that made cow pie clocks that were very popular there for a while."

Debogorski's food idea could be taken one step further -- garlic! After all, garlic makes anything taste good.

How does this sound? Merde l'Orange -- naturally refined grain fibre slowly roasted in a garlic orange sauce, garnished with sun-dried tomatoes and bean sprouts, served on a bed of rice with a light sprinkling of parmesan cheese.

Sounds like 50 bucks a plate.