The average city-slicking Houstonian is about as far removed from rural life as Garth Brooks is—at least allegedly—from having friends in high places. We’re a cosmopolitan bunch, and our cowboy boots are far more likely to be worn down from dancing all night at a local club than from mucking out a barn.

That all changes once a year, however, when the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo rolls around, and our collective cosmopolitanism slips harder than the San Andreas. Donning cowboy boots, hats, and silver belt buckles, we go all-in for three weeks of carnival food, big-name concerts, and mutton bustin’.

During our temporary frenzy, it’s easy to forget that the Houston Rodeo is the largest livestock show in the world, and competitors come in from all over the country every year to show off farm animals so perfectly chiseled you’d think Michelangelo had a hand in their husbandry. And with all this livestock descending onto NRG Stadium, we couldn’t help but wonder … where does all the poop go?

Every year, 25,000 animals move through the rodeo’s grounds. While some of them make their way into the birthing center, petting zoo, or are used for pony rides, the vast majority end up either being ridden for rodeo competitions or shown in livestock shows. This includes about 11,000 horses, 8,000 heads of cattle, 3,000 hogs, 3,000 sheep and goats, and 2,000 turkeys, llamas, and alpacas. There’s an unfortunate underside to all this urban animal husbandry. Like all the humans romping around the rodeo with bellies stuffed full of fried carnival food, these animals also need to take care of business. When they do, workers at the rodeo are on hand to make sure it’s cleaned up as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Bobby Richardson, the rodeo’s director of buildings and grounds, says a lot of preparation goes into getting the rodeo grounds ready to host all the animals—and their subsequent waste material. “We start setting stuff up as early as possible because we just don’t have a ton of time,” he says. The most important part of that prep work involves making sure there is enough bedding for all the animals, as it’s primarily on this bedding that the animals will be relieving themselves.

The rodeo uses two main types of bedding. Horses and cattle get treated to sawdust made from Texas pine sourced every year from CLW, a lumber processing and millwork company in Cleveland, Texas. The rodeo needs a lot of it. Richardson says they usually need somewhere around 110 semitruck loads just to get everything set up for opening day. By the end of the rodeo, they will have gone through another 65 to 70 loads. It’s sometimes a challenge acquiring all the dust that they need.

“There’s years that they struggle getting us the amount that we use because they may hit a rainy spell and people can’t get into the woods to cut trees, so the wood mills shut down,” Richardson says. Because there’s a chance the rodeo’s supply might be interrupted in this way, Richardson says they start hauling it into town in December. By the time the rodeo kicks off, they always have a stockpile of it already on the property.

While the type of bedding and how it is deployed might not seem that important to outsiders, Richardson says it’s essential to get everything right. The stalls for the horses and cattle require bedding that is about four to five inches thick. Since the floors beneath are made of polished concrete, having the right type and thickness prevents injuries.

“You want bedding underneath their feet for grip. If they hit cement, there’s an opportunity for them to slide, and that’s how you get hurt animals,” Richardson says. “You want the bedding thick enough so that as animals are getting up, they’re not pushing their hooves through it.”

For the lambs, goats, and pigs, which are kept in six-by-six stalls—or what Richardson refers to as “sixes”—a flake shaving crafted from Canadian softwood is used. This bedding is delivered in compressed bags, and one bag is usually enough to fill a single stall. “Those fluff up pretty big,” Richardson says. “They’ll get eight inches in a stall pretty easily.” The bags are delivered to the rodeo in pallets, and most years they need a little over 10 semitruck loads of them.

Once all the bedding is in, it’s extremely important to keep all of it clean. Rodeo exhibitors are responsible for shoveling their animals’ manure themselves, and hoppers at the end of every aisle of stalls are used to collect all of it. Throughout the day, facility workers go around and empty them out.

When a breed of animal moves out, rodeo employees go in and strip each of the stalls down to the cement before putting in new bedding for the next breed of animal coming in. It’s extremely important that this is done for the stalls containing the lambs, goats, and pigs because it helps avoid cross contamination. Richardson says pigs, lambs, and goats are all on different types of feeds, and those feeds often contain supplements. Supplements a goat might be able to take can’t be taken by a pig or a lamb. If any feed is left over in a stall and eaten by the wrong breed of animal, it could have consequences for the competition.

“You don’t ever want an animal to get disqualified because something was left in the bedding or because there was animal manure left in there that an animal ate and it got into their system and caused them to fail a test,” Richardson says.

While that’s not an issue with the horses and cattle, their stalls are still cleaned out regularly. The most important thing, Richardson says, is to dig in to make sure all the waste and wet spots from urine are removed. “If you don’t get all the urine out from the cattle, eventually the barn will start smelling like ammonia real bad,” he says.

Since animals cycle in and out of the rodeo so quickly, cleaning and refreshing all of the stalls requires a lot of manpower—a time-consuming process that must be done perfectly, even in the shortest of time crunches. For conversions on the sixes, the rodeo’s team usually starts cleaning at seven or eight in the evening. They have to be totally done with everything by the early hours of the following morning, which is when the next set of animals usually comes in.

“You’re mucking 1,200 to 1,500 stalls. You’ve got to get it all cleaned out because at three in the morning they’re ready to start moving animals back in. It’s pretty labor intensive,” Richardson says.

For the sixes, workers start by going in with big scoop shovels and transferring all the sodden bedding into the five-foot-wide aisleways between stalls. Then, the waste is loaded up onto one- to two-yard roll-around carts Richardson refers to as “gondolas”—much smellier than the ones you’ll find in the canals of Venice, but much less beer-sticky than the ones in Las Vegas. The gondolas are then pushed to the back dock and their contents are dumped onto the ground. After that, front-end loaders come in and pick up the waste and load it into massive open-top dumpsters that are then hauled away by heavy trucks.

Although much of this waste eventually makes its way to landfills, some is usually turned into compost by Living Earth, a Houston-based sustainable compost, soil, and mulch company. Living Earth, however, can only take bedding that is uncontaminated. Some years, including last year, the company isn’t able to collect any of the waste.

“In the environment we’re in, sometimes you end up getting a bunch of feed bags in it or aluminum cans,” Richardson says. “If there’s a bunch of that in it, then they won’t take it because they can’t. It messes up their product.”

Whether most of the waste ends up slowly decomposing in a local landfill or providing nutrients for pots of petunias, it’s important to appreciate all the manpower that makes either journey possible. Although much of the work done by Richardson and his team is hidden from the average rodeo-goer, it’s some of the most essential work done throughout the course of the annual event. And if there wasn’t a strategic plan in place for its management, one honed through decades of experience, things could end up getting out of hand (and very, very smelly) pretty quickly. Richardson is quick to point out that it’s behind-the-scenes work like this that really keeps the rodeo going—from the cleanup crews to logistic teams and site management.

“Everything up front looks good and ready, but behind the scenes is where it all happens,” he says.