My horses have only been home since November, I currently am down to 2, but will only ever have 3 max. Live in VT on about 7-8 acres of pasture. Horses live out 24/7, I pick pastures and compost manure and hay. I plan on dropping seed and spreading composted manure over the top in the fall for the portions of the paddocks that have taken a beating. BF is looking into a used New Holland 213 spreader, I am interested in the Newer spreader. Anyone have experience spreading composted manure in either spreader? Does anyone use composted manure to help fertilize their paddocks - am I on the right track or potentially wasting my time?
I think a lot of people do and that’s what I want to do with mine. I have a compost pile, but no manure spreader. I was thinking I would put it in the back of my Kawasaki mule and just push some out. Hope this works. Am following for ideas also.
@Dressage59 - I was thinking of doing the same thing if I don’t get a manure spreader this year…spreading the compost by hand as best I could, then taking a chain drag over it to help spread it out more. Would take a lot of work, but I think do-able.
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I’m only on 5ac total - probably 3+ for the barn, arena & pastures.
I have had 2 horses on the pastures 24/7 for the last 12yrs, currently have 3: TWH, Hackney Pony & mini.
I can’t justify the cost of even a Newer Spreader & “mulch” my fields by mowing over the roughs.
Last year a neighbor bushhogged them for me in the Fall & grass came in nicely afterwards.
Noone would ever call my pastures “lush”, but they provide enough forage for hay consumption to go waaaaaaaaay down when there’s grass.
I have compost piles too & use a dumpcart & riding mower to spread the stuff on my veggie garden.
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We “mow” our poo in the pasture. It spreads it around well, and then the rain washes it into the ground. It has worked great for us so far. We’ve been on our 5 acre property for a year now.
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@Lolliver The previous owner told us that’s what he did. I tried it and it just takes off the top of the pile and heaven forbid if I run over a pile with the tires (it’s there until I get a pitchfork)! Thanks to everyone here, we ended up with a drag. For those areas I can reach with a drag or piles that have been smashed in the ground, I go around in the mule with a pitchfork. I’m so much happier with the drag.
@Dressage59 - do you use a drag with tines sticking down to drag the manure/compost? I’d be worried about destroying the grass in the paddock with a drag harrow - have you had any issues with the drag damaging the grass/topsoil?
I have a chain drag (drag with teeth down and some weight on top) and the grass bounces right back after a bit. I think I’m going to start dragging the pasture this weekend. Haven’t done it this year, but they have eaten it down enough I can get to the poo.
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@Savannah_KP This is still new to me. Ours came from Northern Tool and is called a harrow rake. One way is to lay it flat like a chain link fence (this definitely needs a weight to get the job done). You can also turn it over and it has tines with rubber tips. As I mow my pens at 5", this side definitely helps to spread the droppings. Due to the rubber tips, no grass is torn up, either above or below ground. I love it.
We compost manure and have used a spreader to put it on the pasture as well as other grass areas of our property. Not the spreaders OP mentioned, but a Mill Creek ground driven one that is small enough to pull with our heavy duty lawn mower (fill it with the tractor bucket). It works great to spread the stuff in a nice layer of well distributed pieces. The hardest part for us is timing it right, as so much of the year here is too wet to be driving around out in the pastures.
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It’s worth checking with your local Conservation District about rental options. Ours has a program where you can rent a 3.5 yard ground driven one for a week for $70. They deliver and pick up.
We get it every other year and spread the pile (1 horse and 1 mini mule) on our pasture.
Before they had it, we used to use my husbands flat bed utility trailer. He would pull it slowly with the truck and I (and whoever else I could recruit) would pitch and push it off. Didn’t spread it as evenly but worked just fine. Though I always needed a day or two to recover after. 
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Before we had a spreader, I would drive around with the FEL full and let it dribble along.
It worked well, rarely dropped clumps, most just fines.
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We bought a Newer Spreader over a year ago. Three horses, and I spread the manure over about 10 acres of pasture. Usually the 3 acres that isn’t fenced it, but occasionally over the fenced in pasture the horses are on. We’ve not had any problems with the spreader, I love it and wish I’d gotten it sooner.
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I muck directly into my Newer and then spread directly into my pasture when it’s full. If you add fertilizer after each stall it will not harm your fields. That way, you are only “handling” the manure twice - once to muck, once to spread. Otherwide you muck, dump on the manure pile, turn the pile (how many times???) then load the spreader then spread. I also add a scoop of pelleted lime after each stall, and I never have to lime my fields. Read this:
https://ohioline.osu.edu/factsheet/AGF-212
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Thanks everyone!
Honestly, I compost and it is a lot of work, even with aerated composting (I wrote a few blog posts about that–you can see the latest one here if you’re interested: https://thesmallhorsefarm.blogspot.c…t-for-you.html). I can’t imagine picking the manure from 7-8 acres, composting it, then putting it back where I found it!
I only compost stall waste, and I harrow the pastures to break up manure. With a small, closed herd of known deworming history, I am okay with harrowing. I do it when I rotate the horses off a paddock and it is about to get a few weeks of rest. As long as you don’t harrow when the ground is very wet, you will not hurt the grass appreciably. I drag with the tines up. I think this is the harrow I have: https://www.tractorsupply.com/tsc/product/concord-6-ft-drag-harrow?cm_vc=-10005.
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This is what we do as well. Works well for us.
That’s why I switched to direct spreading. I am so up to my eyeballs in grass it’s not funny. I’m heading out of town for the weekend and I seriously considered skipping the trip to stay home and mow. Read the link in my post 14.
Just a slightly cheaper idea: can you nose around a little and find a larger hobby farmer? Or even someone who wants topsoil/dirt?
You can drive up and down my neck of the woods and see maybe five signs looking for topsoil or fill dirt. Dirt is expensive, most would be happy to take your stuff to fill gulleys and holes.
I got super lucky and have a good friend who I met on FB whose wife gardens, and they just picked up a contract to supply a local restaurant with lettuce etc. He LOVES to get my manure. They compost it because they have the room. I have a smaller dump trailer that I bought when I was self-care boarding, because my only requirement there was to haul away my own manure. First my hay guy wanted it, but he is a bit harder to get to, and then my friend Nick wanted it, so I started going there and have since learned a LOT about gardening (building my own this fall now!) and beekeeping (yep those too, eventually!) and all things poop/compost. In fact, since I got some compost back from him when I finally did the landscaping around my house this spring, I kept a couple small loads to try my hand at composting here and he messaged me to ask if my horses had stopped pooping :lol: He also took fill dirt from said landscaping to fill in some areas, he didn’t care how crappy/rocky it was.
So now we have a fun little farmer co-op thing going on that revolves around poop: I bring him poop and get some compost, he has brought his mini-ex over to help with digging for the landscaping, we brought him rocks/fill dirt and my Dad traded him some work making raised beds for his help with the mini-ex, and now I’m going to build my own garden with mostly fruit (they do mostly veg) and I get a satellite hive when their bees swarm, I’ll most likely trade out fruit to them, I’ve gotten honey already, and later today I’m going to a different friend’s place to take away her manure pile and bring it to Nick… Not sure on the trade there yet, but I’m sure we will come up with something. Nick has borrowed my dump trailer, we each have clickers/gate codes to each other gates for our farms. It is a great way to reach out and help each other, and I don’t have to pay the $$$ to haul my poop to the dump or buy a spreader to spread. Just my little dump trailer, which I’ll have paid off this year 
FWIW, even tarped I can’t get my stupid compost pile hot enough, so unless I get a bin system some day, I’ll probably leave all the composting to Nick. Stupid poop.
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