As a boarder, I’d say just raise the price X amount across the board. You don’t have to tell the boarders that it’s because of increased bedding use. You’re already 23% lower in the price than the nearest barns and to be honest, I bet your boarders would not complain about a 10% increase this month and then another 10% increase in 6 months (with notice) to bring you closer to the market value. You need to factor in the cost of wages, wear and tear on your facility and the time you spend on this, even if it’s not a full wage for you.
At the place I currently board, the boarding price used to be $150/head which included as much hay/cubes as they needed. Included in that price, the BO would also swap blankets, administer medications & supplements and bring horses into a private pen to eat if they were getting bullied. They would feed 3 times a day and if your horse needed an extra feeding, it was included at no extra cost.
When hay prices increased, so did board. In August 2015, it went up $25 per horse and no one complained. When hay prices didn’t decrease, it went up another $25 per horse in January. Again, not a single person complained because the care our horses got was second to none. For a lot of people, the care their horses get is more important than a marginal increase in fees. Granted, a lot of people might have something to say about a $150 sudden increase, but if you give them time and notice, many people aren’t going to raise a huge fuss over a gradual, planned increase because, in the long run, it’s only going to make their experience at the barn better.
As for cleaning stalls, I used to work at a 50-horse Standardbred racing operation. We would clean stalls at 7am every day, skip Sundays and strip on Monday. On normal stall cleaning days, average horses would get a half load of fresh shavings. We would pick the existing shavings, turn them over to fluff them up and move them to the center of the stall. Then, we would bank the new stuff up along the walls. At any given time, each horse had between 4-6 inches of shavings in each stall, over dirt floors and stall mats. On Saturday, we would not put in new shavings. Monday, the stalls were stripped down to the floor, sprinkled with lime while the horses were turned out/worked and swept clean after they were dry. Two loads of fresh shavings were added to each stall. We spot picked after lunch and just before we left for the evening. On our morning mucks, we’d generally take as little shavings as we could - we had a great system of scooping only the manure (I used to fling forkfuls of shavings against the stall wall and let gravity do the work - the shavings would flutter down and the manure balls would stay on top so I could quickly pick them. Urine spots would be dug down and turned over so the dry shavings would stay behind and only the wet shavings would stay in my fork. On average, each stall would take less than a quarter of a wheelbarrow of dirty shavings. Of course, we had the messy horses too, but there were only a few in the entire barn. We even had a few who would only make a mess in the furthest corner of their stall. We’d go in, scoop that area and be done the entire stall in under 5 minutes, which included turning all the shavings, fluffing them and banking them up.
