Lavender trembled in the pen she’d lived in for the last few days, ever since she’d been unceremoniously thrown into a box and brought here. She’d been told this was her last chance, that nobody else would ever want her. Horrible as her life at her old home had been, she’d seen the withered, starving fluffies wandering the streets outside before, and she knew there was no way she would be able to survive alone. She needed a home!
She felt a contraction, and the dread reached its peak, before it was forgotten as she forgot everything but the task at hand. One, two, three, four, five, and finally the sixth and last babbeh. Gasping, she turned, and her heart sank.
Of the foals, only one wasn’t some murky brown or green. Only one of her babbehs was pretty. It wasn’t unexpected, but it was still crushing. She was just a worthless shit factory, and when her knew owner found out, she’d be abandoned to starve in the cold. No, worse than that; the old fluffy mill had made sure to show what happened to shit factories. Broken legs, gouged-out eyes, flayed skin, then thrown out the third-story window.
This had been her last chance. She tried to cry quietly, mourning the foals she’d only barely met. Poopy babbehs were pulped and fed back to their mummahs. It wasn’t fair! It wasn’t the babbehs’ fault! Why couldn’t it just be Lavender who died? Now her babbehs would die, never knowing a mother’s love, and she would follow soon after.
But…she’d been left completely alone these past few days, only seeing her new owner when he refilled her feeder. Maybe there would be time to at least lets her babbehs have a short while of happiness before they died. It was more than they could have hoped for at the old mill.
Two days past, Lavender lavishing her babbehs with love and giving them all the milkies they could drink. That was another thing that was better about this new home, for the little time she would be here. More space, and the food was much more plentiful and appetizing. True, it was a little monotonous, being mostly corn or other grains, but at least she didn’t have to close her eyes so she could force herself to eat. The babbehs seemed to appreciate the milkies more than her previous litters had, too.
Of course, as with all good things, this time came to an end, and one day her new owner came into the room with her pen. She’d carefully hidden the five poopy babbehs behind her, in the hopes of softening the blow when the pretty babbeh was spotted first. Maybe that would earn them a faster death. Probably not, though.
“Alright,” her new owner said, voice neutral. A neutral voice was good, at least it wasn’t open disdain. “Quarantine over, time to go.”
Lavender burst into tears. “Wabendew am sowwy! Nu wan hab poopy babbehs! Nu mean tu be shit factowy! Pwease nu huwt babbehs! Onwy gib Wabendew fowebah-sweepies!”
Her new owner cocked his head to the side a bit for a second, then sighed. “I’m not going to hurt you. You’re all going to the main pens. Don’t cause problems, or you’ll regret it. Don’t pick fights. Eat what you’re given. Don’t make a mess. Got it?”
Lavender’s heart soared. She wasn’t going to be killed! Her babbehs would live! Then she shuddered as she realized this was probably a trick. He probably just wanted her to have hope so it would hurt even more when he made her watch him pulp her babbehs. “Wabendew am sowwy fow be shit factowy!” she repeated.
He picked her up, making her babbehs cheep as they felt her leaving them, and carried her to a window. Below was a huge tank of some kind, with tubes and a thick brownish slurry. She began to flail frantically. He was going to drown her in poopies!
“See that?”
“Pwease nu huwt! Nu wan die!”
“Look, I frankly don’t care what color your foals are. It really doesn’t affect my business model at all. All I care about is that you behave and do what you’re told. Understood?”
She nodded, hoping he wasn’t lying to her. It made no sense, though. Nobody wanted ugly poopy babbehs, and nobody wanted a useless shit factory mare, either. Unless, of course…
“Nu wan be miwkbag!” she sobbed, finally realizing what her new purpose would be. “Nu wan babbehs tu be wittewpaws!”
“Fertilizer,” he sighed. “All I need you to do is eat and shit where you’re told. Beyond that, what you do doesn’t matter. I don’t care what color you are or what color your foals are. You all shit the same.”
Why would he want poopies? She’d been told many, many times that even the no-taste-pretty nummies at the old mill cost much, much more than her or her poopy babbehs were worth. It didn’t make any sense! Nummies were expensive, and poopies were cheap! You could get poopies anywhere!
He noticed her confusion. “Fluffies aren’t considered livestock, but they also aren’t considered wildlife,” he said, clearing nothing up in her mind. “So if we give you food, we aren’t baiting wildlife and we aren’t using it as livestock feed. Legally, we’re destroying it. Farmers get paid to destroy excess crops. They give them to me for free. You lot make it into fertilizer. I sell it back to the farmers cheap. Everyone wins.”
“Wut?”
He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Fine. Let me put it this way. I’m your new daddeh.”
Aww, Lavender! I’m so glad she’s gotten another chance. Love the play on Shit Factory.
Get extra feeds, poop for new feeds everybody wins, nice 
Everybody except taxpayers whose money gets spent to destroy perfectly good food and people without food security who could have used the food, but hey, at least it artificially inflates the value of food products to prop up an unsustainable farming sector that the government totally doesn’t just want to feed money as a roundabout way of embezzling it via lobbying.
Added they eat actually fresh corn and wheat and its poop can be more better fertilizer than those industrial made kibble.
-laughs nervously in Not American-
I’ll put it this way. Only factory farms produce this much surplus. if they were allowed to sell below a certain price per bushel, It would literally shut all small scale farms out of the market.
Foreign billionaires would buy up generational land from bankrupt farmers and bulldoze it to make overpriced mcmansions since they think plywood condos are a real estate investment.
AG subsidies protect small businesses and double to guarantee there is a surplus so that in the event of a national or international crisis like war/famine they can redirect the excess crops as aid.
Its the same thing with things like aerospace subsidies. The only reason the US was able to airlift 124k people from Afghanistan was because every airline owes the US government for the R&D in all their planes.
Not all subsidies are embezzling and kickbacks.
Also, 15/10, traumatized mare was prepared to die. Everything turned out better than expected.
The problem isn’t so much the subsidizing as the destruction of food resources that, let’s face it, are desperately needed given the number of people with food insecurity. It seems strange to pay for food to be destroyed, then sink an absurd amount of money into welfare to try to fix the problem of food insecurity you’re actively contributing to by culling the food supply to below demand.
Agriculture in the US is beyond fucked but I promise you it’s more complicated than that. The time money and manpower needed to distribute those surpluses is often downright impossible to get
I adore this story. Clever inversion of tropes, thoughtful use of the community canon and a neat twist on industrial uses of fluffies. Superb work.
I never understood why so many Fluffy operations insist on sticking to a singular type, when there’s several types of product output that are considered viable in a lot of the stories I’ve read.
The three following types of product could easily be output simultaneously from the same operation:
BREEDING: one of the most common outputs from Fluffy operations is the attempted creation of foals of desirable colors, with successful or at least acceptable attempts either being sold to pet shops/directly to individuals or put back into the breeding pool of the operation to increase the potential for desirable traits and wastefully killing off undesirable and surplus product where a more well-rounded operation could just shunt living product from here to a different portion of the operation where their physical colors don’t matter such as…
MANURE: as displayed above. Run in tandem with a landscaping/lawn mowing business to easily dispose of yard waste like grass trimmings.
FLUFF: the harvesting of a Fluffies excess Fluff like how shepherds harvest wool from sheep, and for similar purposes where applicable as most head canons I’ve encountered agree that clean Fluff is hypoallergenic and features other variable positive features such as being one of the best stuffing materials per compressed cubic inch making it great for cushions and pillows.
And that’s not even going into operations that output product following training of said product.