What helps me:
A frame covered with chicken wire (tip: wire must be tight) Pick piles and wet spots, pushing obviously clean bedding to one area. Lean frame against wall, and toss questionable bedding onto frame. For the most part, shavings fall through, debris rolls into pile at base of frame. Not perfect, but very helpful.
Sort of similar to what @paintedpony does but without the frame…
If you haven’t yet - stall mats make a big difference. They’re a pain to install correctly and can be expensive, but they make cleaning a stall easier. My aisle is also wide enough to pull the quad with manure spreader, right up to the stall. I also try and do quick picks before it has a chance to get ground in and spread around - I keep a bucket with a fork right right in my aisle. Personally, I’m not a fan of pelleted bedding, I just use fine pine sawdust - not flakes. I also tend to keep a pile of clean bedding in the back corner of the stall that I can pull down as needed - I usually only add more sawdust maybe once a week?
When I did my own stall with a pig of a horse I would do the following:
This worked really well for this horse and I could clean his stall in no more than 15 min on a bad day. If I stripped I would add both pellets and fine saw dust. If it was summer I would lightly wet the pellets before addition but in the winter I would leave them unaltered. If the stall was damp from pee or nature having the dry pellets would help dry out his stall.
This is actually really clever. I might have to make one.
The OP says they have mats already.
To the OP, it takes me 20-30 minutes also… I bed quite deep, and I am loath to toss good bedding for efficiency so it just take me that long to get it clean without wasting bedding… It annoys me that I am that slow but if I speed up I find I toss way more good bedding…
OP - I have 3 horses in stalls - now on day turnout, so in around 12 hours. I have one very tidy and two messy horses. lots of good advice already given. The messy ones do take a lot more time, but since I’ve started using less bedding (pelleted), it is faster. I bring the muck bucket into the middle of the stall to cut down on walking to the bucket. When I do need more bedding, I put about half of it in one corner, banked up against the wall. I pull only enough out of the corner to replace what I take out. Also, we use Nibblenets so there isn’t any hay on the ground to deal with.
I made the chicken wire thing, didn’t like it. I tried finer shavings so they would fall through easier, they were dusty. I found I had to keep adjusting the angle and move stuff around alot. I didn’t think it save a bit of time. My stalls are 10 by 12 so not a lot of extra room to work around it. It cost me @$50 in materials.
I have a question for all the pellet users.
On the bag it says to lightly dampen the pellets so they expand and fluff. When I horse sit and the owners use pellets that what I do. But it sounds like people are just dumping pellets in the stalls and letting urine expand and fluff them. The places I help out waste pellets by scooping out dirty and wet pellets and then dumping new pellets in the pee spots. I rake old pellets/shavings into the pee spots since I know they’ll be wet the next day and put the clean stuff out in the rest of the stall.
Also, regardless of the bedding, I try to shake out clean shavings before I dump the poop in my wheelbarrow. Takes a little more time but save time in having to haul in additional shavings, saves money on buying shavings and makes my composting more efficient because it’s mostly poop with only peed on shavings. Am I just too OCD?
When temps are near or below freezing I don’t wet pellets at all.
In a day or two, horses’ weight has them pulverized.
Okay, to be honest, if it is 50F or less, I do not wet pellets.
When it’s warm out I sit a bag of pellets upright in a stall, slit open the top & dump in a 2gal bucket of water.
Then pick the stall & when done, slit the bag open & spread the mostly-expanded pellets.
Being strategic with where I placed food has helped greatly. I basically bed down the back of the stall heavily, and place all hay bags/food in areas where butt is facing the same corner. I only have one corner to pick pretty much, has saved so much time.
It depends so much on the climate, weather, barn setup, and the horse’s activity and length of time in the stall. My horses are not stalled for any length of time but use their stalls as run-ins (they have dutch doors and aisle doors.) So in good weather, the bedding can be very dry and would never work without being expanded and fluffed up. In times when we have heavy rains, though - horses are in more, they are wet, the air is wet, etc…dumping dry pellets can help even things out.
The vast majority of the time I have to wet them. Even in winter.
My stalls are bare stall mats with no bedding. At the end of the mats is a 3 ft dirt section. Depending on the horse, most of the manure and pee ends up in the dirt section. To clean, i scoop the manure and sweep the stall with a broom, if necessary. Every once in a while, the back of the stalls need more sand added. I like to hang”‹”‹ the horses hay outside the stall that way the hay waste mostly ends up in the aisle and not in the stall, to reduce dust.
But my horses aren’t stalled that much. Maybe during the summer they are in from 9am to 5 pm. They don’t sleep in the stalls. They don’t roll in there either because of the mats.
To clean wet spots on bare mats, i place some corn cob, let it absorb, and scoop it out. But usually that is not necessary.
Probably wouldn’t work if you stall all the time. My horses mostly use the stalls as a run in, to deposit manure - but that is easier to clean then the paddock is. The paddock gets rained on, the barn stays dry.
I wold agree that it depends some on climate. I’m in a cold area. If it’s too cold to whip out a hose and spray pellets down after they’ve been spread, I’ll slit the top and fill the bag 1/4-1/2 way with water. Granted you have to move kind of fast because all the hard little pellets punch tiny holes in the bag so the bag will start leaking and make a puddle (or soak you if you’re carrying it). Then I split the bag open and spread.
I too scrape older bedding in to pee spots, unless there’s a huge puddle that I need to get soaked up; then sometimes I’ll pour dry pellets in the puddle. The most efficient way of pulling up wet spots that I’ve found, with any bedding besides straw, is a wide mouth aluminum shovel. Scrape away the dry bedding, and then it just takes a shovel load or two to get all the wet stuff; rather than drive yourself nuts trying to get it all up with a fork. Sweep up small wet bits if you’re super OCD. If the pellet bedding is getting a little light but not enough to justify wetting down a whole bag, I’ll just scatter a partial bag of dry pellets and stir amongst what is already there. They will puff and expand eventually.
I want to say thank you to everyone who posted on this thread, I have shaved at least 5 minutes off my stall cleaning! (Just 2 stalls)
Good grief, 20 minutes per stall? How deep is your bedding? I can clean 14 stalls in an hour l, so that’s roughly 4 to 5 min per stall. I have shavings over rubber mats and my shavings are about 3" deep.
As a life-long barn slave, I can say one thing: doing it more often, makes you faster. :yes:
One tends to lose their touch and efficiency if they are not practicing it daily.
20m would not sound horribly long to me if the horse was milling his hay and shavings together, a really messy horse, or the bedding was very deep.
When I was a barn grunt I used to be able to muck out & prep a 25 horse stall barn before 10 AM (~2hrs). When I became a BM, I was doing less stalls as the staff would do them, and in turn my stall picking skills got a bit rusty, but on average I was spending about ~7 minutes per stall.
All of this being well, well in the past for me, I was thinking about this topic this morning, while I was mucking my horse’s stall - currently on stall rest for a really nasty blown abscess… took me about ~15 minutes, and I had to laugh to myself because my younger self would have been quite judgmental about that… but then again, I can’t remember the last time I had a stall to truly muck (all of mine live outside 24/7) … four years ago maybe?
Couple of things that significantly decrease stall picking time:
The most major thing I’ve found helps reducing the pigsty-mess in the morning, is picking out those few piles of manure or pee after you dump PM grain the day before. Most horses will pass manure/urinate either after being grained, or once you bring them to their stall. Picking out that handful makes a significant difference in clean time the next morning. I’ve tested it myself as I used to not believe it. It takes all of 10m but makes a huge difference especially if you have more than ten stalls to do.
My method was be as follows:
Now, I worked in a few BNT barns and I can tell you there were one or two BNTs where they expected you to spend 20m per stall. I might even be ousting one of them in this thread, as he expected his WS to do all of the above, then make the shavings that were spread out in stall perfectly level to the point of being anal retentive. You would have to pull the shavings from the wall and then spend about two minutes perfectly leveling the middle while beveling the edges… Oh and, if he saw even a wisp of hay in a freshly-made stall he used to make you sit down in it and then redo it! My first day there was rough! :lol:
Sometimes it is not about efficiency, it is about presentation - but I think in most boarding barns it is a balancing act of efficiency without cutting any corners. I never found that my workers that took less than 5 minutes per stall were actually banking completely. They usually picked out obvious spots, picked out obvious pee, swept, and left it at that… but as a traditionalist, I do think banking is imperative for an immaculate stall.
I don’t add water to my pellets and I remove urine. Urine isn’t fluffing the pellets. The weight of the horses crush them, and ambient moisture–both humidity and whatever the horses walk into the stalls–provides more than enough. IME, wetting the bedding first = more dust and less use from it.
If you have questions about how your employers want their stalls done, you’d need to ask them. Lots of roads to Rome on this one.
And yeah, unless labor costs far outstrip the cost of bedding, people are removing as much bedding from manure as possible.
By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. You may also receive promotional emails from The Chronicle of the Horse. You can opt out at any time.
For Customers
Company
Terms of Use
