Do you dampen any of the bedding? I always dampen bagged bedding, using a sprinkling can holding a couple gallons, before putting horses in the stall. My hose spraying bedding gets it too wet. Pellets get watered to, for faster breakdown into absorbent. Never seem dusty.
We buy a product called wood fibre, from a local service. Looks like good mulch except it is dry and not colored. They leave some dampness in it to reduce dust.
We have mostly tie/standing stalls, only 2 box stalls. The tie stalls are stripped daily, anything wet or dirty is out, floors broomed off. The box stalls tend to be dirty along one wall and wet in the center. That is all forked out down to the bare floor mat, clean bedding along walls is pushed to the center. Box stalls are both matted for easy cleaning, dry floor to lay down on. Extra bedding is added, daily if needed. They are usually bedded 3 to 4 inches deep, in both tie and box stalls. Horses are inside 8 to 12 hours, depending on the season.
No one I ever knew did the deep bedding thing as I grew up. A CLEAN stall was forked out daily, wet removed, with a REASONABLE (3 to 5 inches of sawdust, or a bale of fluffed straw) amount of bedding put on that clean floor. People were farmers, no waste or excess, while keeping horses. Some was a money factor, “waste not, want not” in all parts of life. Clean stalls was good husbandry, prevented hoof problems, enough bedding prevented sores when getting up or down on hard floors. I am sure this thinking came from keeping farm horses whog worked for a living. No luxury horses back then.
This not stripping stalls daily, excessive bedding thinking, came to my attention as I showed more. It is even worse now, watching a horse STEP DOWN thru his stall door to exit at a show! Talking to stable managers, cleaning the show stalls is hard with sawdust over a foot deep and packed hard, after a week of never being cleaned!
I spread our woody bedding on pastures daily. Woody stuff does take longer than straw to breakdown, so you get a much longer benefit from it mulching the plants, protecting soil from erosion and feeding the micro organisms making your soil richer. We only use straw when we plan a foaling, then get the pair back on woody bedding in about 10 days because we think it is better bedding. Straw is really not absorbent, so we put wood pellets under it. But straw doesn’t stick to foal navel, get breathed in as easily to cause pneumonia lIke sawdust can. No compost pile here, it draws flies, takes up room I want for other things. So we put up with straw for a short time. Spreading it, straw does not do much for the land, drying up fast, blowing away in a short time.
Chopped straw is in a catagory by itself, a wonderful product, even dusty! Extremely absorbent, a nice cushion to lay on, easy to clean quickly. But I was chopping our own straw and that is a filthy job, time onsuming, so I went back to buying the wood fibre. Delivered in a dump truck, good for a couple months per 40yd load.
