For instance, he will politely correct the characterizing of manure as waste. Proper use of manure, the substance if not the noun, is what brings us to him this week. Trib writers J.B. Smith and Richard Smith, have been spending a lot of time on manure lately, enough to drive the average person to the funny farm. And Mukhtar knows it. The Pakistani native came to the United States in the early 1980s to earn a doctorate at Iowa State University.
Manure is a renewable resource long exploited but barely scraped, potential-wise.
Its role in making grass greener has been appreciated ever since there were hooves. From prehistory it has been used for fuel. That's called biomass energy in green sectors. But mankind's manure applications remain primitive at best. And so Mukhtar has a mission to, you might say, bring excrement into the 21st century.