Over Run

One thing that separates a small hobby farm from a real farm is equipment. Every day I wish for a Bobcat or an old tractor with a loader. Having two horses presents endless piles of manure, which is pretty manageable during the summer when you can add grass clippings to cook the pile down, however the composting slows down in the winter. It would speed up greatly if I had a machine to turn the pile every week or so, but for now it is turned by me and a pitch fork.

The problem is the manure under the shed gets piled high and I have to start piling it outside, then the pile inside cooks down and then I have to move the outside stuff inside and then it piles up again on the outside. It gets bad unless a lot of it can be totally removed from time to time. I can use a couple yards of it in our garden a couple times a year, but the horses and chickens are producing well over eight times what I can use.

Fortunately I have some neighbors that are really getting into gardening and he has a front loader, so I count on them taking several loads a year to reduce my inventory and keep me from being totally overrun. Today we loaded and hauled out four half/ton trucks and one 3/4 ton. There is now light at the end of the manure tunnel, however we could easily haul off another four loads.