Carrie grew up in Holyoke, Colorado.

This is a town on the eastern plains of Colorado, almost as far as you can go in Colorado before being in Nebraska.

Cows, horses, other livestock, farming, and getting together with your neighbors on the weekends, are common occurrences.

It’s an All-American kind of place…

It’s a small town, where everyone knows everyone.

And I’ve learned a lot going to Holyoke over the last 11 years. 

I didn’t grow up in the city exactly, and my dad grew up around cows and horses (my grandpa was a horse show judge for a good portion of his life), so cows aren’t foreign to me.

But today I experienced something new about cows and humans.

Carrie and I were driving back from visiting Holyoke (we visited Holyoke for Easter).

In the car, Carrie found a ticket to the city fair from 2011.

The ticket highlighted bull riding, horse events, and “cow patty bingo”.

In my naivety about how these things work, I asked her if this is like traditional bingo, except that they give you little placemarkers that look like cow patties.

(For the uninitiated, a cow patty is cow poop. I thought maybe they would give you little cow patty shaped plastic placemarkers to cover up your Bingo card when they call out the numbers.)

Carrie says, “No, they probably put a few cows in a pen where there are numbers on the ground, and wherever the cow patty drops is the number that gets played. You get Bingo if the Cow Patty drops on your square.”

Getting the picture?

The numbers that get called in cow patty bingo are the numbers where the cow poops.

Usually cow patty bingo is played for a fundraiser purpose.

These videos are not from Holyoke, but they do give you a good visual in case you want a further understanding of how cow patty bingo works.

And now you know, just as I do (now), what cow patty bingo is.