Recently we have been going through barn help because of length of time it is taking them to clean stalls. We pay per stall so the longer it takes them the less they get paid and quit. We have 15 horses. The job includes feeding (most only get hay), watering, turning out (turnout lots are less than 150’ away from stalls), cleaning stalls ( the all have a solid grid type of flooring), bringing back in and sweeping aisle and picking the indoor arena. I have yet to hire anyone that can get this done in under 6 hours. They job is priced to pay decent at 5 hours. Is this unrealistic? I expect stalls to be fairly clean but some poop is ok as long as the wet spot is gone and each stall is bedded 6-7 inches deep and the horses are in their stalls the rest of the day.
Horses are in for 18-19 hours? Can you do it all in 5 hours?
I consider myself “adequate” at cleaning stalls and it would easily take me 6 hours to do all that.
Even if it’s 15 mins a stall (I take about 8-10 mins for maybe 4" of pelleted bedding, mostly tidy horses out for 12 hours and runs), that’s nearly four hours, not counting any time to get the wheelbarrow out to the pile. When I had box stalls, it was a LOT longer, because I had grinders. Bringing horses in and out…if you can do pairs, that’s still 15 trips. Feeding? Is it prepped and just tossing hay, or do they have to load up the cart and then feed?
If you can’t find anyone to do it in less than 6 hours, it seems like 6 hours is the amount of time it takes?
Do you just pay by the stall or do you pay for all the extra stuff, too, like turning out and bringing in and feeding and water and picking the indoor and sweeping? That’s a lot more than “just” stalls. Maybe you can find someone to clean stalls and someone else for the rest of it?
Well… do the job yourself for a week and empirically find you just how long it takes to do it.
A boss should always have done the job she’ll supervise, and also always be willing to do that job as it’s designed and equipped.
The rest of the day is spent riding since we are a training barn. Several times a week I will turn out on pasture given time and weather. I can do it in that time, sometimes less and have had previous employees do it in 5. The feed is all prepared. Just throwing them hay. The horses can be run in to lots in groups of 2s and 4s. Only a few are individual turnout. I’ve tried to build into the price per stall the time it takes to turn out/bring in, feed, water and clean the stall (est. 30 mins). Sweeping and picking the indoor also pays the same rate as cleaning a stall.
If you are paying per stall, it doesn’t matter how long it takes them. Thats the beauty of piece work.
If you are wanting them to do stalls, sweeping, feed, turn out etc you are going to have to pay accordingly.
Time wise for me (not knowing your set up at all and based on my farm):
feeding: less than 25 mins
Turn out: less than 30mins
stalls: 2.5 hours - we bed ours a bit less but tend to budget 5 stalls an hour including re-bedding)
The rest shouldn’t take long. So ya do able I would have thought.
P.
You are either paying piecework or paying hourly. Pick one, or set the rates more realistically…
If you set the time rate when the barn was populated with reasonably well-mannered and clean horses and you now have a majority of young stock, stall pigs, and pirates who saturate and rototill the stalls, fling their grain, rip out their feeders, poop in their buckets, soak and bury their hay, walk like jerks on a line and don’t want to come in at the end of turnout, your time table will suffer. Additionally, if you set the rate with a barn full of smaller horses, and now train larger breeds, that affects your rate. Additionally, most BO/BM’s I know will put in a steady rate when timing out a job, but tend to subconsciously push the pace a bit when they do it, then set that as the day to day benchmark, regardless of changing variables. Check to make sure this wasn’t you.
Since this is a training barn, your horses and their habits will be constantly changing. Adjust for reality. I have never heard of turnout and retrieval being built into the stall cleaning rate. I didn’t see anything about paddock cleaning. I assume that is in with the arena cleaning rate where it belongs and not built into the stall rate? Ditto for cleaning and watering the troughs in the paddocks. That doesn’t belong in the stall rate either. Stalls are stalls, and you can reasonably add in the aisles with that. Feeding, hay, turnout, paddock maintenance, etc, that all needs to be regrouped more realistically or your average employee who has no vested interest in the barn beyond collecting a paycheck for a dead end job will have no motivation for taking care of your stuff and will become discouraged, frustrated, and leave. You’ve got too much placed in the wrong category here, and quite possibly wrongly timed to meet the realities of you current needs.
Also, look at what you’re hiring. Fit adult equestrians? Fit day laborers? Unfit locals in need of money? Teenagers? Do they have a vested interest in your barn? If they don’t, don’t expect the same level of commitment from them. It won’t be there.
[QUOTE=lopinl8;8775300]
I’ve tried to build into the price per stall the time it takes to turn out/bring in, feed, water and clean the stall (est. 30 mins). [/QUOTE]
If you estimate 30 min per stall then it should take 7.5 hours to do 15 stalls, so figure a little less time for tasks you can combine (taking out more than one horse at once) I don’t think 6 hours would be unreasonable?
I’ve done an 18 stall barn which can be done in 3 hours if you hustle, but those horses are usually only inside long enough to eat or if they have a lesson coming up soon so stalls aren’t bad. When there’s bad weather and they’ve been in overnight, it often jumps to taking twice as long. And yours it sounds like are in even more than that. And that’s using a dump bed Gator for stalls… if I only had wheelbarrows it would take an eternity.
The economy has been picking back up for quite some time now. The fact that you’ve losing workers has already told you something. If they are leaving because of money, then you need to increase what you pay. If they are leaving for money and something else, then you need to figure out what that something is.
I only recently (within the past six months) began doing stalls again after 20+ years of not. I moved my retired horse to a small barn with 5 stalls and twice now I’ve filled in for the owner when she went on vacation. Each time I was spending between 10-15 minutes per stall, and was budgeting about 2 hours for morning feed and cleaning, and every few days I’d spend more than that because of watering or cleaning out water buckets or whatever. So if you’ve got 15 horses, then 2 hours x 3 is 6 hours. At least that’s what I’d do, and I KNOW I was not as meticulous a stall picker as the owner is. She might do it faster and better because she’s been at it longer, but that was a pace I could keep up with.
[QUOTE=lopinl8;8775268]
Recently we have been going through barn help because of length of time it is taking them to clean stalls. We pay per stall so the longer it takes them the less they get paid and quit. We have 15 horses. The job includes feeding (most only get hay), watering, turning out (turnout lots are less than 150’ away from stalls), cleaning stalls ( the all have a solid grid type of flooring), bringing back in and sweeping aisle and picking the indoor arena. I have yet to hire anyone that can get this done in under 6 hours. They job is priced to pay decent at 5 hours. Is this unrealistic? I expect stalls to be fairly clean but some poop is ok as long as the wet spot is gone and each stall is bedded 6-7 inches deep and the horses are in their stalls the rest of the day.[/QUOTE]
I couldn’t do it in 5 hours for stalls bedded 6-7 inches deep. What you describe sounds to me like a full day of work. 5 hours would be 20 minutes per horse, and I would guess turn in/out at 5 minutes per horse, maybe 2 minutes for hay, not sure about how much time is required to get the wheelbarrow dumped and back, or where shavings are stored, and when you say “water” does that mean dumping and refilling buckets? How much work is involved in picking the indoor arena? (and maybe each rider could just clean up after her own horse to eliminate that job entirely?)
If anyone is getting it done in 6 hours I would say they are moving pretty quickly.
I figure one staff member for every nine horses to do all you ask in 4 hours. Six hours sounds about right. And we pick out at 9 pm, so stalls are not horrific in am.
I’ve cleaned my own stalls for ages and have helped out free at barns, but never timed myself. Horses on average manure every two hours. So that’s a lot of manure for the number of horses that OP has.
I can clean faster in the winter than in the steamy summer months.
6-7 inches of bedding is quite a bit of work to dig thru. I think your time line is not reasonable for the average worker so in the end they are being underpaid and that is why they are leaving.
Add the fact that you are, in theory, hiring someone who is part time but are wanting a commitment from them. There are not too many people who want to work part time in the middle of the day for not much money, with no room for advancement.
Is it worth it for them to give up the chance for a full days work to drive to your house, work very hard for six hours and get paid for five hours worth or work?
Instead of thinking of five hours being plenty of time, do you think 20 minutes per horse is enough time to do all that you list?
whoa. 6-8 inches of bedding? 15 stalls? in for half or more of the day? duties including turnout, hay, and water? and you want it done in six hours?
no wonder you can’t keep a worker.
ex-BM speaking here – as someone who is incredibly expedient at stall picking – you have a very unrealistic precedent set. my advice to you would be to set aside 2-3 days and do all of the work yourself. time yourself from start to finish and then average those times. the result would be a rough average of how long it would take your worker; but keep in mind no barn ever has the same routine every day - there are days workers need to get a horse for a client, or days a horse wont finish grain, or days that a worker needs to hold a horse for a farrier, etc – you really should not expect the amount of work that you have be done within 6 hours. it’s very unrealistic and unfair to your worker.
my personal opinion: if you want the best care, the brightest workers, a happy barn and a willing employee that will not burn out – employ 1 worker for every six to seven horses.
[QUOTE=beowulf;8775464]
whoa. 6-8 inches of bedding? 15 stalls? in for half or more of the day? duties including turnout, hay, and water? and you want it done in six hours?
no wonder you can’t keep a worker.
ex-BM speaking here – as someone who is incredibly expedient at stall picking – you have a very unrealistic precedent set. my advice to you would be to set aside 2-3 days and do all of the work yourself. time yourself from start to finish and then average those times. the result would be a rough average of how long it would take your worker; but keep in mind no barn ever has the same routine every day - there are days workers need to get a horse for a client, or days a horse wont finish grain, or days that a worker needs to hold a horse for a farrier, etc – you really should not expect the amount of work that you have be done within 6 hours. it’s very unrealistic and unfair to your worker.
my personal opinion: if you want the best care, the brightest workers, a happy barn and a willing employee that will not burn out – employ 1 worker for every six to seven horses.[/QUOTE]
Yup, it is so dependent on your setup, you really need to do it yourself for a bit and average the time spent to get a fair estimate.
Maybe another question might be, what is the rate that you consider reasonable? If I needed to be able to really rely on hired help, I might find it reasonable to pay more than what is reasonable. My thought process would be that I needed someone who reliably showed up and who would stick with the job if only because it paid better than anything else they could get.
JMO, but if the horses are stalled for that much of the day, their stalls are going to take alot longer to clean, plus you are possibly burning through bedding. Can you leave the horses out longer and use up less bedding, and therefore make the stall cleaning job faster? Maybe the indoor could be picked out by the rider of the horse that pooped, after the rider dismounts.
Reasonable around here is $10/hr. If I had to do everything listed and made $50/day doing it, especially if it actually took me 6+ hours, I wouldn’t stick around either.
Cleaning stalls properly and fast - IMO - is an art. And you first have to learn where each horse likes to poop and pee + learn the tricks of the trade in order to save clean bedding. Those new to stall cleaning will have a learning curve.
I’m a pro at it, and it takes me 20 minutes to properly clean and bed a (dirty) stall, dump/clean/refill water buckets and dump manure. Multiply that by fifteen horses and it would take me 3 hours of non stop work.
Add another 5 minutes per horse to turn out and bring in: x 15 horses = 75 min. Add 15 min. to sweep aisle and dump debris = 90 minutes. So now work time is 4.5 hours. Add a half hour lunch break and total is 5 hours. Add another half hour to pick indoor and hay horses.
I could do easily do this in 6 hours. And so could well trained barn help. But being that this job is almost a full day of work, I would want to be paid by the day, not by the stall. I don’t get the ‘by the stall’ part of your payment plan. ???
And I personally would pay someone at least 400 bucks a week (five days) to do this job and I would let them take 7 hours to do it. Good barn help is hard to find and even harder to keep. And at this pay rate a person would make an annual salary of 20K. That’s not much in the grand scheme of things. But it’s about average for farm work.
The unfortunate part of farm work (one employee) is that it does take a chunk of time out of someone’s day - which makes it very hard for them to have a second job. Best to hire two workers as others have said.
Wow you wont’ allow an extra hour or two or pay it. That speaks for itself. Workers are not machines asking them to race around for low money with hard ardous work , good luck keeping anyone decent. I don’t know why boarders want to stay in a place with revolving stable hands and harried workers, they notice after a while. a Groom rushing will cut corners and handle horses more roughly.
To a committed worker, as if you were the owner of the farm, it would take 5 hours , but the average worker for this type of wage is just going to do things with that type of mid set, they will go slow at their own pace. You need someone who is committed to wanting to learn and become more with the farm ( and as mentioned above is already past that learning curve of cleaning stalls), but that is hard to find and is not your average hired hand.
Forgot to add - when I calculate how long it should take to do a job, I do it myself and add 25% more time.
