Horse bedding

I own a wood-mizer!! But I still can’t make all my bedding, have to buy some. I mix in chaff from the loft, and from under the manger to extend it.

I haven’t gotten around to it, but I have thought of collecting leaves!!!
Carl

chaff, pine needles…….we have many pines that are near the barn and shed their needles close by, last year i clipped a neighbors field late, then baled it during a dry spell in Nov., we used about a hundred bales for bedding. Not as good as straw or as absorbant as sawdust, but the price was right, composted it with manure and spread it. I ‘ve known dairy farmers to use junk hay but ran it through a shreader.

neal

I was thinking about leaves and mentioned it to my husband, who reported that his family had a horse when he was a kid (this was a pet riding horse) and they filled its pen with leaves, which it ate and got sick. He says “she was never right again.”

Since horses have access to leaves all the time and generally don’t get sick, this makes me think that she had something going on that was making her eat them preferentially – she was hungry or looking for minerals or bored or something.

This is also a 35 year old memory so there probably is more to the story. Has anyone else tried leaves as bedding? I don’t think they would be very absorbent unless they were shredded first.

@Rick Alger 3511 wrote:

Straw is $8.00 a bale at the nearest Agway.

Whereabouts are you at? I’ve got a bunch of straw I’d sell ya’ for $6.00.

Bedding is a real effort for any small time farmer. Since we happen to have a small time circular sawmill still operating in the community we buy a truck load of sawdust at a time and haul it to the farm on our old flat bed dump that also is our log (only) truck. We put some short wooden side boards and wooden tail gate on it and dump it on a place that is accessible, yet the water doesn’t run through it. This sawdust is mostly white pine and some hardwood. The sawdust is also aged somewhat so it is a little bit drier than right off the log. We have to pay about 40.00 per single axle truck load. It is important to remember that sawdust is usually around the same moisture content as living trees which are 3/4 water. So some drying occurs when it is spread thinly (4-6 inches) in the stalls before animals are put on it.

I think the most important point with bedding is to soak up the urine. Since 3/4 of the nitrogen that is in most animals excreta is in the urine if you don’t soak it up you are literally pissing your nitrogen away. Not true with chickens or poultry, for obvious reasons, which is why their manure is so hot or nitrogen rich. After soaking the urine up and then piling the bedding which is mostly manure from cleaning stalls you have a great compost pile that will turn into greater fertilizer. “Turn” is the operative word since some manipulation of the compost will be required to properly digest the material into a stable rich real fertilizer, that has gotten hot enough to kill most seeds, especially weed seeds. We use the front end loader on the old farm tractor to turn the compost at least twice before early spring/late winter spreading.

We also add chaff from the barn loft and occasionally some low quality or dusty hay. We only use the dusty hay as bedding when we tie the horses so they won’t be tempted to eat the dusty hay. This is also only possible because the barn is well ventilated and we set on a ridge that usually has some breeze blowing through the high ceiling box and tie stalls. In the future we plan some small grains that will provide some straw for feeding and bedding. We have decided to do a little more farming as well as our full time restorative forest management services or horse logging.

Some other thoughts about this need when keeping animals include the fact that although we spent years and considerable investment building our barn when we first bought the land 25 plus years ago, we try not to use it any more than necessary. Ironical for a building nicknamed Barnzilla, build it and try not to use it any more than we have to. In other words this big old barn usually is empty of animals as long as the animals can stay outside. The thoughts when building the barn were forage/hay storage first, animal shelter and equipment housing second. We built the barn as a training facility as far as the horses are concerned. This means box stalls to isolate the horses to make them brave about being alone and having our human presence as the only horses they get to relate too as a part of their training to work. It is a must that we do use the barn in order train young or new horses and to collect our fertilizer annually. Since we have to clean the stalls by hand into the tractor bucket or a wheel barrel we don’t just keep horses in the stalls for no reason. If we get behind (from doing other things to make money) we put it directly into the ground driven manure spreader for direct application to the fields.

We don’t have any boarders except mares when they are brought in for breeding, so that is not an issue at this time. If we did take on boarders they would have to pay for the cost of cleaning up after them as well as feeding and watering them.

Another thought about bedding is the idea of using fossil fuel processed woody debris. Our famous Virginia organic farmer Joel Salatin wrote an article for Rural Heritage a while back that suggested chipping trees from old over grown pastures to collect the woody debris for bedding. This set off some alarms in my forester woods loving mind.

First the forest is an ecosystem that regenerates itself in a series of different species occupying the land as it moves toward being a true climax forest again. So just chipping what is there (pioneer species) as if it were just a free source of organic matter is not fully understanding the forested ecosystem. The other point is that the energy required to do this chipping is not free and usually is fossil fuel powered which has it’s own carbon footprint value or devalue. A question would be is this land marginal agricultural land to start with, meaning thin or no topsoil, excessively drained and possibly highly abused in the past? If one was converting it back to a field would all the debris removed, used as bedding and composted then go back on that ground? The point is that marginal agricultural land may be best utilized as forest, since this use requires less energy input and won’t be highly productive farm land even with increased input.

So, sure if chipping is a part of clearing the edges or converting former agricultural land that is fertile and gently slopping enough to be a productive field then the woody debris could add carbon to the topsoil as bedding and compost. But grinding up a young forest that is trying to reestablish itself on marginal soil should be thought about deeply as a matter of the least input for the best result within the understanding of forest ecosystem and overall land health. I know Joel has run hogs in his woods because a neighbor of his that hunts just over the ridge from a piece managed this way has nothing good to say about the condition of the dominant trees left after porcine (hogs) are fenced in the woods. This is not the first time I have seen great farmers have some disregard for the forest. I have done it myself in the past. “The forest will take care of itself better than any farmer can tend a marginal field.”

We have collected sawdust from some local woodworking shops for bedding in the past. The best thing about that material as bedding is that it is dry and highly absorbent, meaning it will soak up more urine. Sometimes folks that have these little woodworking places just dump the shavings or planner dust over a bank somewhere. We have provided large garbage or leaf bags for them and went and picked it up every now and then and put it in the stalls.

Since we do sell lumber to these small woodworking facilities they are glad to give us the planer dust back, especially when we provide strong bags.

There are some reservations about using Black Walnut sawdust, but frankly we have put that in the stalls to with no negative results. I suspect someone will respond with a warning about that, but it amounts to such a small percentage of the overall material in the stall floor that it hasn’t hurt them so far. It is usually mixed with other species of planer shavings.

It would be nice if we all had a balanced perfect farming system that provided all our needs from right off the place. It could be possible, but it is more difficult to have such a wonderful closed self supporting system. We just seek out the materials we need from within our immediate community (ten miles or so) and make do with that. If one could pick up bags of dry leaves collected from urban settings that could add to bedding needs.

I have never heard the red maple is poisonous though I have read from several different sources that walnut saw shavings are toxic as bedding for horses. I have not heard anything about walnut leaves, but I would be very careful with walnut leaves also.

Kent

P.S. I did not see that there were two pages on this topic when I posted my reply so I did not see Jason’s post until after I already posted. I am sure he knows far more than I do.