cleaning a dirt sheep pen without erosion?

[HorsesinHaiti]

The dry lot corral behind my house now holds a pony and 3 sheep. We find we can clean up hay stems, straw, and pony poop while leaving the dirt behind without a problem. However, we can’t find a rake small enough to catch the sheep ‘raisins’ so they are building up. It is the dry season now, no rain at all, but I don’t want manure soup when the rain comes. We can always just scrape and shovel both raisins and loose dirt, but that is going to cause too much erosion in this pen, and it would be hard to haul in truckloads of replacement dirt.

Short of having to run all the scrapings through a wire sieve, does anyone have a better way of clearing sheep poop off of bare dirt while leaving the dirt?

[Simkie]

There’s a review here that says this fork works for sheep.

Or something like the shifting scoop here?

Barring something like that, could you find some sort of screening that’s the right size to pick up the raisins and line a regular manure fork?

Or you could use a leaf rake to collect all the poops in one place, let them compost, and add some or all of the finished compost back into the pen…

[Chall]

You said it, take your pitchfork, cover with scrap metal chain link fencing or similar “sieve”, cross cross layers till you get a fine enough sieve. Use as you would normally. Be creative, you could use orange snow fencing wrapped a few times, or you could use simple fabric.

[kookicat]

If everything is dry, a stiff sweeping brush should work well. I use one to clean up after my rabbits.

[tallyho392]

yup…good stiff push broom, used either pushing or pulling mode will wirk fine…just sweep inot big snow shovel…did that with my goats for many yrs…a leaf vacuum works too

[HorsesinHaiti]

Thanks, push brooms and wire grid/coarse mosquito netting are both available locally. I’ll try those.

[Polydor]

We use these here in Oz for mucking stables out. You get nice toned arms with all the shaking you do!

http://www.horseland.com.au/roma-scooper-dooper-scooper-short.html

P.

[katerycyk]

[QUOTE=Polydor;6109271]
We use these here in Oz for mucking stables out. You get nice toned arms with all the shaking you do!

http://www.horseland.com.au/roma-scooper-dooper-scooper-short.html

P.[/QUOTE]

Really nice design… Thanks for sharing…