Ill. Festival Features the Cow Chip Throw

Ill. Festival Features the Cow Chip Throw

CHATHAM, Ill. (AP) - Every year, folks gather at the Chatham Jaycees Sweet Corn Festival to enjoy good food, music, arts and crafts, and games for the kids. And toss some cow dung around.

That's right. Come Saturday the skies will be filled with something they're just not usually filled with as the Corn Festival once again hosts the Illinois Championship Cow Chip Throw.

If this sounds like an odd sport, chances are you haven't been paying attention to what's been going on down country roads all over the place. For more than 30 years, for example, the folks in Wisconsin's Sauk County have been holding the Wisconsin State Cow Chip Throw. The winners, of course, are eligible to compete in even older World Cow Chip Throw in Beaver, Okla.

In Chatham, organizers - not to mention the cows - have been busy making sure that competitors have enough, shall we say, equipment on hand.

The cows have been doing their part, of course, with folks like part-time farmer Shane Workman and his buddy Adam Bursott following close behind. When they see a cow patty, also known as a meadow muffin, that a competitor might like, they toss it into a flat wagon. There, the patties bake and bake long enough to turn into chips, the kind that expert cow chip throwers can launch more than 200 feet.

"I think we're all pooped out here," said Bursott, 27, before heading over to another field in the hopes of finding more patties.

Workman, 28, has been at it since he was a boy when he took to the fields with his dad in search of cow patties.

"I can remember I wasn't strong enough to get them hoisted up," he said.

When competitors show up Saturday, all they have to do is plop down five dollars to get two chips. All the money goes a scholarship fund at Glenwood High School called the Mark Workman Service to Humanity Award, named after Shane Workman's father, who died two years ago.

Unlike the Olympic Games, where in throwing events like the discuss and the shot put competitors are only allowed a certain number of turns, the only thing cow chip tossers have to worry about his how deep they're willing to dig into their wallets for something, it's safe to say, they wouldn't buy at any other time.

"If they have a pocket full of money, we let them throw poop," said John Moore, a Chatham Jaycee. "They can throw to their heart's content."