Can you bed with sawdust instead of straw? Even using old straw with no shine, I don’t find it very absorbent. New, shiny straw is useless, not absorbent at all. A horse who is messy, plus goes a lot, has a wet stall all the time!
For our broodmare before and after foaling, we used the pellets under the straw. I picked up dirty straw, moved clean straw to one side and took out the wet sawdust of pee hydrated pellets. I did not wet the pellets with any water, she peed plenty, which went right thru the straw to be soaked up by pellets. Added new, dry pellets, more straw for depth if needed to keep her and foal off the floor.
Once the foal’s navel dried and fell off, we went back to our wood fiber bedding for the mare and foal. It soaks up wetness well, no problems keeping the stall dry. Mare was very neat, pooped and peed in back third of stall, baby had dry places to lay. They were only inside at night, pastured all day.
If you have only straw for bedding, I have found chopping or shredding it will turn straw into excellent bedding equal to the best sawdust. I did my cutting the straw using my leaf shredder which is an Even-Flo. Kind of like a weed eater with a cone top to direct leaves thru the string cutters. It did a really nice job cutting straw into small pieces an inch or two long. I have horse friends who used a chopper, blew the chopped straw up into the loft, used it for horse bedding. They had equipment already from their dairy operation. They loved it for bedding.
The downside is making time to shred the straw, having tubs to collect shredded stuff into for use in the future. Shredder is noisy, throws dust, so you should be wearing ear and eye protection. Probably need a handkerchief or dust mask over your nose, to not breathe in dust created. Amazing how much dirt is in a bale of straw! Plan on a shower after shredding, you look like a coal miner! Ha ha But I am cheap, was unwilling to just spread nice, unused straw on the field to get rid of it. There must be a use for it! Shredder came to mind so we gave it a try.
The more cut ends there are on the straw lengths, the better they seem to absorb moisture. The shiny or hard cover of straw stem does not absorb much, just the cut ends or splits in lengths seem to take in liquids. My leaf shredder also reduces volume with the shredding, so a whole bale shredded MAY fill a muck tub, but is probably less volume than that. I needed 2-3 bales of shredded straw, to adequately bed a stall 10ft x 5ft, for a 300 pound calf. Couple inches deep, very dense, soft to lay on. Cleaning was a snap, even cow pies liquid was absorbed right there, no runoff! Just a fork under the pie, got the whole mess in one scoop! Usually not even wet to the bottom of his bedding. Same with pee, just fork out a tiny wet clump and done. Add some more shredded straw, done. Easiest stall cleaning in the barn! A shovel full or two of the shredded stuff to refill what I removed so he was good again.
We had these straw bales left over from a broodmare, had not used all of them, so we used them for the calf. The shredder idea was an experiment, to see if shredded straw would work better for his bedding. We were really happy with how well shredded straw worked for his wet pies, lots of pee, ease of stall cleaning him daily. I was just unwilling to put in the time to shred the straw regularly after we used up what was on hand. He got swapped to wood fiber bedding like the horses when straw ran out.
In daily life, we use wood fiber bedding to keep the horses dry, be VERY absorbent, easy to clean their stalls.
Straw was used because it was a farm by-product from growing grain, didn’t cost to get it, back in older times. Guess that makes it a “traditional” horse bedding, though not the best bedding choice.
Deep litter bedding, not cleaning out dirty bedding until spring, just covering daily with new straw, is a work/time saver in daily farm life. But unless you have stalling accessible to machinery, cleaning it out can hurt you. Talking a foot or more of depth of wet, dense, poop and pee, in one solid, packed mat. Even a small amount weighs a ton on your arms! Trying to get into the mat with a steel-tine fork is hard work. Everything is woven, pressed tight together from hours of animal tromping on it. Plastic fork is not up to the job. Farmers just open both ends of the barn, drive thru with a scoop or blade to move the bedding out, load it into a spreader. Lots of machine power for the weight of packed bedding. Done in short order! I consider the deep litter to be a hotbed of germs, infection bugs waiting to find a cut. Have not used it since Grampa had me shoveling stalls clean as a kid. He lost baby animals to sickness after they got bedded in that mess.
