Champion-caliber animals. First-rate chow.</p><p>You just know the cow patties that plop at the American Royal are some of the best in the country.</p><p>&ldquo;These cattlemen feed their stock the best feed, and what comes out &hellip; &rdquo; veterinarian Bud Hertzog shrugs his shoulders and grins. </p><p>Grade A poop &mdash; loads of it &mdash; every day during the Royal&rsquo;s Livestock Show, which will end today.</p><p>Where does it all go? </p><p>We&rsquo;ll get to that. But first, the back story.</p><p>&ldquo;During the American Royal we&rsquo;ll have 1,400 head of cattle,&rdquo; Hertzog says. Add 350 hogs, more than 1,000 sheep and goats, &ldquo;and that&rsquo;s not even counting all the bedding that&rsquo;s in the stalls.&rdquo;</p><p>John Rickart, 68, knows all about the bedding. He&rsquo;s the man sitting at the table near the pallets of pine shavings and feed. </p><p>&ldquo;We sell about 20,000 bags of shavings (about 10 cubic feet per bag) and about 1,000 hay bales. We also sell about 12 tons of feed, mostly to the horse folks. The cattle breeders bring their own &mdash; a special mixture, you know.&rdquo;</p><p>From the stalls, the mix of manure, straw and bedding goes into the gray trash bins in the middle of the livestock barn. All day long, livestock owners muck their stalls and haul the stuff by pitchfork, shovel or bucket to the bins.</p><p>Celise Lawson of Agenda, Kan., is in charge of the output of one very big, black Maine-Anjou bull.</p><p>&ldquo;We clean it up right away,&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;But I love being in the middle of the &hellip; poo! There&rsquo;s not a better way to raise kids than with cattle.&rdquo;</p><p>Her family&rsquo;s 80-head herd makes a lot of manure. Come spring, the gardeners begin calling, asking if they can have a bucketful. She gives it to them free, with one catch: &ldquo;They bring the bucket; we provide the pitchfork and they do the scooping.&rdquo;</p><p>But not here. </p><p>At the Royal, cowpokes are on their own cleaning up after their animals. More than one pair of slick cowboy boots steps in the stuff. A good many mosey over to Franky&rsquo;s Boot Shine at the entrance to the livestock barn.</p><p>&ldquo;We like being in the middle of the poo, too,&rdquo; laughs Cheyenna Clouse, 15, of Leavenworth.</p><p>Her granddaddy shined boots here for 65 years. Her mother, Dana, has shined shoes for 19. </p><p>Cheyenna, wearing lavender and brown cowboy boots, has shined boots since she was 5. Alligators are her favorite kind to clean because &ldquo;they&rsquo;re so cool to shine.&rdquo;</p><p>She&rsquo;s an expert in the ways of dried dung: Horse droppings are pretty tame, she says. &ldquo;Hog poo is the worst.&rdquo; </p><p>&ldquo;I have to dig hard to get it off with my knife,&rdquo; she says.</p><p>She and her mom often work from 7 a.m. until 10 p.m. The booth seems most popular during the Hunter/Jumper Shows, they said. </p><p>But during the hog show, their arms always ache. </p><p>&ldquo;And when I leave here I want nothing to do with bacon,&rdquo; Dana Clouse says.</p><p>With all the shoveling and scraping, sweeping and dumping, the pile of poop grows tall.</p><p>At the end of the day, a tractor-trailer from Missouri Organic arrives to haul all the manure and bedding to a 10-acre compost field on Old Highway 210 in Liberty. It takes about 14 weeks to turn manure into soil. </p><p>American Royal today; your garden next spring. </p><p>Of course, the mulch from Missouri Organic contains more than Royal poop. The manure will be mixed with decomposing supermarket produce, leaves and grass &mdash; anything organic that the company dumps in, says Kevin Anderson, who co-owns the company with his brother and father.