Boarding Barn - dry paddocks no picking all winter....

[RoughOut]

Perhaps manure is being left on the ground for traction?

I am also in New England and we had the January thaw, followed by rain, followed by freezing temps, now we will probably thaw again. I ended up with standing water and ice in my sacrifice pasture. My horse and a few cows were out and the manure that built up allowed them to still be able to walk.

also on days where it is warm enough for manure to be thawed the ground is too soft to drive the tractor on without trearing up the field or walkways. Double edged sword.

that’s why I’m waiting until spring to scrape, drag, and pick my pasture

[MCF1991]

This kind of bothers me as well. My horse has a private field and the poop just sits during the winter. There is no way I would ask the BO to go out to the field and clean it. I am a former professional groom so I know the amount of work it takes to care for a farm. I usually go out and do it on the weekend when it is nicer weather. I also pick his stall whenever I am there. I was always taught to never put a horse back in a dirty stall. I have a touch of OCD and I enjoy doing things like picking up poo so it’s not a big deal to me. I don’t think you should make a big fuss, but instead clean up your horses area yourself if you have the urge and extra time.

[StormyDay]

@firsthorse

Now I know three months worth a poo is normal and horses standing in slushy shit is what people are ok with I will try not to get so obsessed with it!

I don’t think that’s normal. That is a recipe for skin infections and thrush. How deep is it? An inch or two might be acceptable, but if you can’t walk in there without feeling like your boot is getting sucked off that is not ok.
With most sacrifice paddocks you either pick it twice a week or so, or you wait until the poop starts to build up and go in there with a tractor and scrape it away, put down some gravel and start over.

[skyy]

Profit being already low and no wanting to loose profit to hire more help.

Profit? In a boarding barn? ROTFLMAO

[OneTwoMany]

We have a small boutique barn. Each horse has an individual stand-alone sacrifice paddock with crushed gravel footing which makes for a relatively flat, mud free environment. Even with daily picking, cleaning the paddocks easily takes 5-10 minutes per day per horse; longer in the winter. Fully loading the cost of one staff member (hourly wage, insurance, taxes, etc.) adds approximately $1.75 per paddock per horse per day. Multiply that over a month and it is well over $50 per horse per month and can run closer to $100 in the winter. You can see how this can add up quickly. If you want manure-free paddocks in the winter, there are barns that run that way, but you’ll need to open up your wallet.

[Abbie.S]

This thread reminds me of discussions regarding retail jobs - the “everyone needs to be required to work in a retail job for at least a year” sort of thing.

Except this is “everyone who owns a horse needs to work as a stable hand for a year”. Then you might have a slightly better perspective regarding how much labor is involved in the daily keeping of even one horse and how much money it costs to do so. Then we wouldn’t be having discussions like this.

Nobody likes to see horses standing around in manure, OP, but the reality is that A) cold weather is a PITA to keep horses in, B) the staffing needed to regularly pick paddocks in winter for any cold climate would be astronomical, and C) your horse isn’t going to die from not having their paddocks picked every day. I keep my two mini donkeys at home and I clean the paddock as often as I can…but in the dead of winter I can’t keep up with Mother Nature, so there’s always a weekend come spring where we spend an afternoon out there raking everything up. The boys haven’t croaked yet

If this is the only infraction you can bring against your boarding barn and you’re only paying $475 a month? Count yourself lucky.

[Jealoushe]

@firsthorse

I do pick my horses stall run out area when I am there. NOTE: this is not the outside dry paddocks I am referring to.

You said this then later said you can’t pick poo because of your shoulder? So which is it?

[trubandloki]

@Jealoushe

You said this then later said you can’t pick poo because of your shoulder? So which is it?

I do not know about the OP’s shoulder issues but I know I have an annoying shoulder that daily cleaning of three stalls is very doable, fighting with the wet yuck in the paddocks causes me all kinds of issues (thankfully Mr. Trub helps me in the spring).
My back and shoulder are part of the reason I clean 2x per day. Lower amount of work more times is more doable.

Again, no idea if this applies to the OP, but just an example of stall picking being OK and heavy wet stuff not OK.

[ladyj79]

Washington, Maryland, Virginia, Florida, Texas, Holland, Belgium we didn’t pick paddocks. I did pick run outs where we had them. Except when Washington mud made that really not workable for long stretches. I was at a Virginia barn where they scraped their dry lots once a year or so.

I think this is pretty normal.

I think if you’re unhappy with the care your horse is receiving at the present facility it’s just time to go, rather than expecting them to alter their operation to suit you.

[Princess_Sparkles]

Winter/spring at a horse farm with a multitude of horses (more than 3 or 4) is gross looking. It’s unfortunate but that is the way it is. I’m in Southern Ontario and we have lovely deep freezes of -30 C followed by random days of 8C with pouring rain. It’s muddy, there is poop everywhere, and melting slush.

I hate it but it is a reality. I have 23 horses and we keep them in smaller paddocks closer to the barn in the winter so we have running water and hydro for the trough heaters. The pastures are rested until spring. The paddocks are still too big to pick with forks/shovels and wheelbarrows, and there is just no rational way to do it with the constant freeze/thaw/snow/rain delight that is a southern Ontario winter. The horses that come in have clean dry stalls every day. The horses that live out we make sure have clean places to stand (ie the paddocks are big enough and horses are spread out enough that it isn’t wall to wall poop). We rotate where we place the round bales and our soil is very sandy, which is good for drainage so our paddocks don’t get anywhere near as nasty as some other places I have seen (where horses are literally up to their knees in mud).

Late spring when things dry up we can take the tractor in to harrow, scrape and remove all the poop/old hay etc. We take the four wheeler and a dump wagon and do old hay/poop in the smaller paddocks with just one or two horses. Summer we weed, mow and drag these paddocks as most aren’t used until the next winter.

We charge $475 a month for indoor board and $350 for outdoor. The horses have free choice hay and heated water all winter. My business partner and I run the barn and have full time jobs as well. I don’t know any barn where I live, even the super $$ ones, that clean paddocks in the winter. You would either break all your tools trying, or end up removing a fair bit of your paddock base if you tried to use a tractor (you’d get a bunch of ice, snow, mud/dirt if you tried to scoop). Unless someone stands outside all day with a pitchfork and whisks each poop away as it’s made, that is the reality of a horse farm in the winter.

You’d better believe sometimes I’ll throw hay over frozen poop. I won’t throw hay into fresh poop/puddles/mud, but if that poop is frozen it’s basically the same as the ground that they are going to eat off of anyway.

[Jealoushe]

@trubandloki

I do not know about the OP’s shoulder issues but I know I have an annoying shoulder that daily cleaning of three stalls is very doable, fighting with the wet yuck in the paddocks causes me all kinds of issues (thankfully Mr. Trub helps me in the spring).
My back and shoulder are part of the reason I clean 2x per day. Lower amount of work more times is more doable.

Again, no idea if this applies to the OP, but just an example of stall picking being OK and heavy wet stuff not OK.

For sure but she said stall run in?

[candyappy]

@firsthorse

Now I know three months worth a poo is normal and horses standing in slushy shit is what people are ok with I will try not to get so obsessed with it!

I wouldn’t want my horses standing in and eating on that either. When in MN I used a sledge hammer to remove manure from the barn every single day. My horses were not confined to stalls and their dry lot was 2 acres so I never had to clean outside unless it was around where I fed hay. They seemed to like " indoor plumbing".

Here I wait until the freezing has stopped and in a day or 2 I can get at the poop. Again I don’t confine my horses to their small dry lot during the coldest winter months . We drag our pasture in March , so I let them stay out at will when the grass is dormant as it makes the work load easier.

I see no reason for them not using the bucket or blade on the tractor to occasionally remove manure from paddocks? It can’t be good for them to navigate through tons of un-even frozen manure piles.

JMO

[Kyrabee]

Yes…winter sucks. I board at a self care facility. My horse has a 90 x 60 drylot paddock. In the winter it easily can go from a 10 minute job (in Late spring, summer and most of fall) to up to 30 minutes in winter. 1 horse in 1 small pen. I hurt my back in October. I still can’t do much. My friend and I were able to hire a teenager to do them every other day. If she couldn’t do it, she would be standing in poop. Not anywhere close to my ideal but winter is just bad and with my infirmities, it is what it is. The one saving grace is that my horse has a pad of mats where she eats so she isn’t standing ankle deep in yuck. Mind you, that doesn’t mean no poop. When it is really mucky, she just poops on her mats:grief:.

When my horse was younger, she as in a pasture at the same barn. I tried to keep up with the poop just in the hay area. Only 3 horses in this pasture, I couldn’t keep up. This barn does not offer that service so it is what it is. She survived and when she was a little older I moved her into the current paddock. Then I only have to worry about 1 horse and her poop.

Not to minimize your concern, but this particular job in winter isn’t very labor intensive. Labor = $$$. As much as it should be clean, for a lot of barns, it just isn’t going to happen.

Good luck.

Susan

[Simkie]

Boarding is a series of compromises. Generally, the more you pay, the less you can expect to compromise. Your board rate sounds like a pipe dream to me, but board where I live generally seems to be four figures.

You’ve prioritized grass turnout for your horse, it sounds like. That’s an excellent thing to prioritize. Other good things to prioritize might be safe fencing, good hay, enough hay, and the facilities you need. But “the list” is going to be different for each person (and maybe for each HORSE, too.) But NO ONE is going to run their barn exactly the way YOU would like. So you look at the poop in the turnout and you shrug and you think of the beautiful lush green fields in the summer. Or YOU go get the manure fork and pick it up. Or you move–and recognize that picking up the manure in winter in the turnouts is now one of your top priorities…but you might be giving up something else if you decide that. Maybe you don’t get the lush field, or the top quality hay or the nice stall or whatever.

It is HARD to deal with manure in turnout in winter. Hard hard hard. It freezes. When it melts, it’s HEAVY. It’s a nightmare to try to drag a cart through the mud to get the manure, and then drag the heavy cart back through the mud to dump it. If you’re tossing hay on the ground, you get a mat of hay and manure and that’s also awful to try to rake up and remove.

You’re going to have to decide just how important this is to you and either a) pick it up yourself or b) move c) live with it. It sounds like the barn has made it quite clear that this is just how it goes. They do not offer the service of picking up the manure in the paddock over the winter.

[OneTwoMany]

@Simkie

Boarding is a series of compromises. Generally, the more you pay, the less you can expect to compromise. Your board rate sounds like a pipe dream to me, but board where I live generally seems to be four figures.

You’ve prioritized grass turnout for your horse, it sounds like. That’s an excellent thing to prioritize. Other good things to prioritize might be safe fencing, good hay, enough hay, and the facilities you need. But “the list” is going to be different for each person (and maybe for each HORSE, too.) But NO ONE is going to run their barn exactly the way YOU would like. So you look at the poop in the turnout and you shrug and you think of the beautiful lush green fields in the summer. Or YOU go get the manure fork and pick it up. Or you move–and recognize that picking up the manure in winter in the turnouts is now one of your top priorities…but you might be giving up something else if you decide that. Maybe you don’t get the lush field, or the top quality hay or the nice stall or whatever.

It is HARD to deal with manure in turnout in winter. Hard hard hard. It freezes. When it melts, it’s HEAVY. It’s a nightmare to try to drag a cart through the mud to get the manure, and then drag the heavy cart back through the mud to dump it. If you’re tossing hay on the ground, you get a mat of hay and manure and that’s also awful to try to rake up and remove.

You’re going to have to decide just how important this is to you and either a) pick it up yourself or b) move c) live with it. It sounds like the barn has made it quite clear that this is just how it goes. They do not offer the service of picking up the manure in the paddock over the winter.

Well said.

[firsthorse]

@Pennywell Bay

For a field as big as the one you showed in the link- I admittedly do not pick up every poop and I don’t do it in the winter. My sacrifice field is pretty big. I do drag it in the summer, fall.

If it were a true run off the stall, I’d be much much more picky and expect that the cleaning would be stipulated in the contact.

Off topic… New COTH t-shirt “Winter is Tough” (or Winter Sucks )

OH the field is not that big it’s like that cut up into long sections about 30 x 80

[firsthorse]

@Jealoushe

You said this then later said you can’t pick poo because of your shoulder? So which is it?

I pick his STALL area which has a small run off of it. I pick the run part, the indoor part of the stall they do a descent job though shaving are most times very low. I do not plan to pick the long outside run sacrifice paddocks that has a build up of three months worth of poop in it from multiple horses.

[firsthorse]

Overall it’s interesting replies, totally different than I expected. I thought it was more an oddity to let the outside sacrifice paddocks never be picked over months. For poo to literally be everywhere and no way to walk around with out stepping in it. OK got it. It’s normal. Pay more and get the areas picked by the multiple staff… I actually did check out some more high end places but they did not have good pasture turn out. I am ok paying more but it’s not available where I live. Also just because they cost a lot more some of them still only had one person doing all the work. Paying more doesn’t always equate to better cleaning either!

I think the hay is good they have their own hay fields. Water always low and I am always topping them up not just for my horses but for others in the summer. Inside the stalls water is ok.

[firsthorse]

@Simkie

Boarding is a series of compromises. Generally, the more you pay, the less you can expect to compromise. Your board rate sounds like a pipe dream to me, but board where I live generally seems to be four figures.

You’ve prioritized grass turnout for your horse, it sounds like. That’s an excellent thing to prioritize. Other good things to prioritize might be safe fencing, good hay, enough hay, and the facilities you need. But “the list” is going to be different for each person (and maybe for each HORSE, too.) But NO ONE is going to run their barn exactly the way YOU would like. So you look at the poop in the turnout and you shrug and you think of the beautiful lush green fields in the summer. Or YOU go get the manure fork and pick it up. Or you move–and recognize that picking up the manure in winter in the turnouts is now one of your top priorities…but you might be giving up something else if you decide that. Maybe you don’t get the lush field, or the top quality hay or the nice stall or whatever.

It is HARD to deal with manure in turnout in winter. Hard hard hard. It freezes. When it melts, it’s HEAVY. It’s a nightmare to try to drag a cart through the mud to get the manure, and then drag the heavy cart back through the mud to dump it. If you’re tossing hay on the ground, you get a mat of hay and manure and that’s also awful to try to rake up and remove.

You’re going to have to decide just how important this is to you and either a) pick it up yourself or b) move c) live with it. It sounds like the barn has made it quite clear that this is just how it goes. They do not offer the service of picking up the manure in the paddock over the winter.

thanks for taking the time to write your thoughts. I will keep it all in mind.

[firsthorse]

@candyappy

I wouldn’t want my horses standing in and eating on that either. When in MN I used a sledge hammer to remove manure from the barn every single day. My horses were not confined to stalls and their dry lot was 2 acres so I never had to clean outside unless it was around where I fed hay. They seemed to like " indoor plumbing".

Here I wait until the freezing has stopped and in a day or 2 I can get at the poop. Again I don’t confine my horses to their small dry lot during the coldest winter months . We drag our pasture in March , so I let them stay out at will when the grass is dormant as it makes the work load easier.

I see no reason for them not using the bucket or blade on the tractor to occasionally remove manure from paddocks? It can’t be good for them to navigate through tons of un-even frozen manure piles.

JMO

YES this is actually something I have been worried about. When it freezes it is HARD uneven and really difficult for the horses to walk on! I was thinking the same why can’t the barn owner who has the tractor go in there and push it along on the ground to pick it up? I am no driving tractor expert though! so not sure if it would work as the ground to be soft enough to go in with a blade might also be left with deep tire lines from the tractor? but if he can start at the end and go backward? I can’t imagine how that discussion would go!