Don’t kick with your toes. Kick with your heel or better yet kick the pile back and forth with the underside of your boot (this is assuming you are wearing sturdy hiking boots type footwear.)
smallish crowbar…pops the frozen manure pile right up usually. Easy.
In all the barns I have ever gone to in my 16 years of riding (almost all high level sport horse competition barns) I have never once seen someone out there chipping at frozen poo in the paddocks. Everyone always has waited for a thaw before doing any removal. My horses haven’t ever had true thrush or scratches or anything from being in such situations.
[QUOTE=ElisLove;7314494]
In all the barns I have ever gone to in my 16 years of riding (almost all high level sport horse competition barns) I have never once seen someone out there chipping at frozen poo in the paddocks. Everyone always has waited for a thaw before doing any removal. My horses haven’t ever had true thrush or scratches or anything from being in such situations.[/QUOTE]
You’ve then never seen a horse trip/twist a limb when stumbling on giant frozen poop piles, either. Or you yourself have never done such a thing. Because you’d remember if you had because that hurts.
[QUOTE=ElisLove;7314494]
In all the barns I have ever gone to in my 16 years of riding (almost all high level sport horse competition barns) I have never once seen someone out there chipping at frozen poo in the paddocks. Everyone always has waited for a thaw before doing any removal. My horses haven’t ever had true thrush or scratches or anything from being in such situations.[/QUOTE]
Thaw here won’t be until March. That’s a LOT of poop – may as well just bring in a front end loader at that point.
I only pick poops in the upper small paddock area, where their water tub is, because that’s where they hang out on sunny days, and the poop gets to be too much since they hang out there a lot.
So, I pick out what I can twice a day.
Last winter, we had a week of several degrees below 0, like -15 to -30 overnight, and it was so @)#(! cold out, that I said “screw it!” and didn’t bother trying to pick up poop. After that, it was pointless to try because the poops were frozen everywhere, so at that point, I just waited until spring and we used the FEL on the tractor to push the melted poop into one big pile as it melted each day.
In the bigger pasture though…? no way. That just gets dragged in the spring when everything melts and I can get in there with the 4-wheeler and drag.
This thread makes me feel much better - in a misery loves company way.
The other morning I was out in the paddock doing my morning cleaning (I clean them twice a day) and I was able to un-fuse one out of every four piles from the ground.
No amount of prying or kicking was going to get them loose.
[QUOTE=Hinderella;7309796]
I’ve been know to resort to just picking it up with my hands and chucking it in the wheelbarrow. After all, it’s frozen hard and my barn gloves are already trashed, right?[/QUOTE]
That only works if you can get any portion of the pile unstuck from the ground. Sometimes the whole pile is unmovable.
Kicking with your heel can be pretty darn painful too.
