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I'd be willing to bet he's looking for a way to make a really hot compost (raw manure and brown matter, about 1:1) to use as a base for an organic hot frame, or to kill weed seeds in whatever brown he's using. It is the compost of my childhood, that stuff, and I miss having a big barn midden at the end of winter: take the new stuff off the top, put it in a manure spreader and fertilize the corn patch, the composted but still hot stuff gets hand-spread and rototilled into the whole vegetable garden, and the brown gold at the bottom is made into manure tea and lined along the rows as they get planted.
You can actually use sheep, goat, and rabbit uncomposted; they're all pretty low in Nitrogen, but I'd worry about pathogens. I had a friend who was into biointensive gardening who had a greenhouse with rabbit cages inside over barrels with carp from which she irrigated her winter vegetables... it worked OK until the whole thing went down in a windstorm; I think most of those great ideas need sturdier construction than they're prone to get.
It is the compost of his childhood as well. He wants to hand-spread and rototill the manure into his vegetable garden for the winter. No tidy bags from Lowe's for him. No sir!
My mother doesn't think it's such a good idea which only makes him want to get some "fresh" all the more. Their exchanges could be the fodder for a sitcom! Hilarious to listen to them. Mom so serious, Dad so funny.
I only hope that when I'm in my 80s I'll have such energy - for my garden and my relationships!
Yeah, no: raw manure this late in the year isn't likely to do anything good; it's easily leached into the ground/surface water, and tends to produce really weedy conditions. Stack it with the garden waste, yes; rototill it in and you risk messing with the soil texture (especially since there's no guarantee we'll have sufficient dry weather for rototilling not to collapse the soil structure completely).
(Sorry: I got a hoe for my second birthday, what can I say?)
