Have you ever counted how many piles of manure your horse generates? Most horses produce between 8-14 piles a day, give or take. Consider this quantity spread across your pasture over many months and even years. If your horse doesn’t poop in one or two specific areas, then you might find more manure littering your pasture than grass. Removing it can help improve your horse’s well-being. Here’s how to remove manure from horse pastures.
The Benefits of a Clean Pasture
Being selective grazers, horses tend to avoid grazing grass that has been contaminated with manure. This means not only is your pasture dirty, but your horse also has fewer grassy areas to graze.
It might seem like a staggering project to consider removing manure from your fields, but there are definite benefits besides providing more grazing opportunities.
Cleaning manure from pastures accomplishes several important things:
- It reduces internal parasite contamination.
- It eliminates breeding habitats for flies.
- It minimizes adverse effects on water sources from drainage across a manure-ridden pasture.
How to Remove Manure from a Horse Pasture
The old-fashioned style of using a bucket and a rake is quite effective but labor-intensive. It helps to have a small tractor, ATV, or even a golf cart to tow the bucket or a dump cart around while you pick up manure. If you keep up with the task every day, then it doesn’t become too cumbersome. But if several days go by, or if the ground (and manure) freezes and a long time elapses between cleanings, the job can seem overwhelming.
Others have considered this problem and arrived at some solutions. While these methods might involve purchasing new equipment, it could be money well spent to maintain your horse property and maximize your time.
One piece of equipment designed for this task is a pasture vacuum, but these are expensive and slow to use in addition to requiring a wheeled vehicle for towing.
Less expensive equipment choices that bear looking into include:
- The Tow and Collect manure collector. This unit uses a rotation brush mechanism that pushes manure into a hopper with a 165-gallon capacity.
- Super scooper. This unit tows like a sled to sweep up manure as you drive past it. When you spin the unit around and reverse it, the wheels rotate from the hopper to the ground so it tows like a wagon to the manure pile. Simply tip it over, and the unit dumps its load like a wheelbarrow. On level grass, it reportedly achieves 90% pickup of manure; on hills, about 85%. A height adjustment is available to accommodate different ground.
Combatting Parasite Concerns
Cleaning your pastures at least twice a week is one of the most effective ways to reduce the internal parasite burden on your horses. Most internal parasite larvae are introduced to the horse through pasture consumption. Infective larvae migrate to the top of pasture grass stalks, where they are then accessible to a grazing horse.
If you cannot remove manure from horse pastures, and the pasture tends to be quite contaminated with manure, have your veterinarian run fecal egg counts once or twice a year and deworm accordingly, focusing on your highest egg shedders.
Related Reading:
This article originally appeared on Stable Management.
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