“Here at Fwuffy Fawms Cweamawy…” The man looked disgusted, as if his tongue were coated in slime. “Do I really have to pronounce it like that? Isn’t it a creamery?”
“Cut!” yelled someone from behind the cameras. “As written, Mike. Come on.”
Mike Rowe sighed and took another look at the script. How had he sunk so low as to be hosting “Fluffy Ponies at Work?” It didn’t matter that Fluff TV was paying him an obscene amount of money, there was no disguising the shame of having to speak to these vermin as if they were actually contributing to society. Half the time they were doing meaningless jobs better suited to human hands, and the other half were blithely sowing the seeds of their own destruction. One place he’d visited had the fluffies working the farm as if they we day laborers, only for the farmer to cull the herd at the end of the season to sell their meat and fur. The clever bit was that he had fluffies oppressing fluffies, meaning all he had to do was issue orders to the smarty and the fluffy terrorized the herd for him. He composed himself and nodded to the director.
“Here at Fwuffy Fawms Cweamawy,” he continued, “they’re making ice cream, butter, and cheese from fluffy milk. That’s right. Milk. From fluffy ponies.” He walks over to a lady wearing a flannel shirt and dirty jeans. Behind her was a field full of fluffy ponies grazing and babbling happily. “I’m here with Mary Engles, owner and operator of Fwuffy Fawms Cweamawy. Mary, are you aware of how stupid this sounds?”
“We’re all aware how stupid it sounds, Mike”” said Mary. She was a serious looking lady, despite the flannel shirt and jeans. Her red hair tinged grey at the edges, accenting the thin lines forming at the edge of her eyes. Stress had given her those lines and she was proud of them. “A creamery is different from a legal stand point and we really don’t want the dairy industry up in our business, so it’s ‘Cweamawy.’ It makes the fluffies happy and happy fluffies give better miwk.”
“I’m sorry, did you say miwk?” asked Mike.
“Miwk is legally different than milk,” said Mary. “Due to dairy industry lobbying, milk is only from natural placental mammals, meaning that almond, soy, and oat milk aren’t legally milk. And if you were to somehow get milk from an opossum or a platapus, that wouldn’t count as milk either.”
“Fascinating,” Mike lied. “So, tell me Mary. What’s the point in all this? You do know that cows are a thing, right? Goats, llamas, sheep, even pigs have milk.”
“Pig’s milk is gross,” said Mary. “Have you ever had fluffy pony milk?”
“I can say that I have not.”
“Well let’s take you into the barn and show you how we do things here.”
The camera followed the two into a massive metal building, easily the size of a football field. A center aisle covered in pea gravel ran the length of the building, forking off into straight rows, split every ten yards to form an elongated checkerboard of floor level troughs. At the far end, a massive hopper sat waiting in the rafters, supported by a system of I-beams in the ceiling. Below it was a series of tubes, positioned at the head of each of the troughs. Mike looked around for a moment at the empty building, then to the elaborate setup.
“Well this looks like a feed lot,” said Mike. “But I don’t see any fluffy ponies here feeding.”
“They’re all out in the field at the moment,” said Mary. “We quickly learned that If the fluffies were here when the automatic feeder came through, they wouldn’t move their out of the way from the troughs and, well, headless fluffies can’t give miwk. They’re just not smart enough to keep out of the way, which we learned on the first day.”
“Gruesome, I imagine?” asked Mike.
“Fluffies die all the time,” said Mary. “Worse than sheep, but running a fluffy guillotine just dosn’t sound business sense to save a few minutes of herding them into the building. So they get fed three times a day, which gives the waste troughs time to process the leftovers.”
“And what do you do with all that poo?” asked Mike.
“It all gets recycled,” said Mary, pointing to the large cast iron pipes leading out of the building. “An auger feeds it into the outdoor tanks, where it gets fermented, reduced, and then spread back onto the hay fields. The methane is harvested to supplement the solar and wind. We’re not quite self-sustaining yet, but it’s close.”
“Interesting,” Mike lied again.
They walked out of the barn, past what looked like theft control dividers and small pens without troughs. They stepped into the adjoining field where hundreds of fluffy ponies the size of a small corgis munched happily on the grass. “I’ve seen setups like this elsewhere, though the setting was far more, shall we say, industrial?” The look of distaste on Mary’s face said all that needed to be said about her opinion on such things.
“Sure, we could plug their asses, cut off their legs, and rack them up like a server farm, but why would you really do that to something that has a voice? Has feelings? Something that has a name?” She picked up a fluffy with no effort and held it up to Mike.
“Uppies!” giggled the pink fluffiy said. “Hewwo mistah! Nu fwiend? Pway wif Bessie?”
Mike Rowe looked at the fluffy for a moment. Those large eyes, smiling face, and vibrant pink fur were kind of adorable if you’ve never seen one before, but he’d seen them in every state from chirping newborn to decaying half alive medical experiment. They weren’t cute to him anymore, despite Hasbio’s attempts to make them the most adorable and desirable pet/bio toy on the planet. A white label with a series of letters and numbers stuck out her ear like a price tag. Fitting, given the commodity these things were. It was then that his eyes fell on the extra pair of teats just above the two that fluffies normally had.
“I notice this fluffy’s got, uh…” he searched for the word for a moment, “something a bit extra?” Mary smiled and flipped the fluffy onto her back, cradling it in her arms for a moment. She tickled the fluffies chest which elicited more giggles and coos.
“All our miwk fluffies here are what we like to call four baggers,” said Mary. “It’s a rare genetic variant which we were able to consistently breed for once we found the right studs.” She turned the fluffy upright again, and looked at her rear. “Bessie here looks like she’s ready for another litter, so let’s take her to see her ‘special friend.’”
“Yay!” Bessie clapped her leathery hooves together. “Spechaw fwiend time! Bessie wuv spechaw fwiend! Gon haf spechaw huggies, and bebehs, and skettis and…”
The fluffy continued to babble underneath Mary’s arm as they walked to another metal outbuilding labeled with an outrageously macho picture of a fluffy pony and the words “Stud Shack” over the door.
“So do you name all your fluffies?” asked Mike as they entered the building.
“All our mares have typical cow names,” said Mary. “Bessie, Clarabelle, Daisy, Masie, and Buttercup. They’ve all got numbers too, but they can’t read so they don’t use them. Four baggers have smaller litters, so there’s rarely more than five foals at a time. It mostly means that if you yell all five names, all the fluffies come running.”
“And the males?” Mary shrugged.
“We’ve got a whole process for foals,” said Mary. “But first, let’s get Bessie here some more babies. Might as well get the rest of today’s mare too while we’re at it.”
She walked up to a computer and punched a few keys. Running her finger along the screen, she tapped a few more times and loaded up a long list of numbers. She looked up at the clock, then back tod to Bessie. Bessie hummed happily to herself, a simple tune sounding something like “haf bebehs, wuv bebehs, gun be mummah again.” Mary set Bessie down in a small enclosure and headed back out the door.
“So you saw those inventory control barriers at the door to the feeding barn, right?” asked Mary as they made their way back to the feed lot.
“I was going to ask about those,” Mike admitted. “You have a problem with your fluffies shoplifting?”
“Oh they’ll steal anything their can get their hooves on,” said Mary, “but that’s not why we have them. You ready to wrangle fluffies?”
“Can’t wait,” Mike lied again. At least it wasn’t going to be the backbreaking work he’d done before on his other shows. “So what do we do?”
“Fluffies are going to come walking through these doors,” said Mary. She pointed to the inventory control barriers. “When one that’s ready to breed comes through, the light will go off and the barrier will drop. Most of the time, they’ll just walk through the one-way door into the pen, but if they don’t, you grab them, put them in the pen, and reset the barrier. You ready?”
The large door rolled open as an electronic dinner bell sounded into the fields beyond. Mike looked up to see a wave of multicolored fluff descending on them with cries of “nummies!” It was time to wrangle some fluffies.