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Saturday, April 20, 2013

Moon Has A New Bed (and It's the Serta Perfect Sleeper for Horses)

When Lorrie and Moon moved to Skoog Farm, they wanted to take care of all hay, grain and bedding.  Fine with me!  Armed with a shredder, she mixed pellets and paper.  It created the deepest, fluffiest stall I have seen.  The only problem....it took a long time to clean it.
 See the strips of shredded newspaper?  Newspaper ink is now soy based so it's not a problem...just don't use the glossy inserts.
 Being a very enterprising person, Lorrie thought about options and decided that a cross-cut shredder would be better.  She started checking them out and told her husband about it.  Last night he came home with many bags of just what she was looking for, and today we started our experiment.
 Moon's stall is just average in size and has rubber mats on the floor.  She added two bags of soaked pellets, half a bag of fine shavings and three big bags of shredded paper.
 We are looking forward to seeing how this works, as we have a good supply of the paper available.
I put one bag in each of my two stalls, which were bedded with pellets and fine shavings.
It will certainly save money in the bedding department and it feels great.

By the way, this morning Lorrie took some of the paper and put it in a cup of water to see how absorbent it was.  As this comes from an office, it's more like computer paper than newspaper and was not quite as absorbent, but it worked.  You don't want to use anything that the water rolls off of.
Cross-cutting newspapers would probably be the best.

Because the pieces are small, it easily slides through the fork and her stall cleaning time should be cut in half (not to mention... the price is right).

Have any of you horse people ever tried this?

4 comments:

Nancy J said...

Looks great to me. Years ago I tried my hand at paper making, and Hugh shredded reams of paper for me in the garden shredder,worked so well.Here banks and businesses are very happy to divest their worthless( to them) paper,nothing that has any personal details on it.I can see how good it is for all the girls,and easy to recycle in the garden later on for mulch. It is a wonder some enterprising person has not done this as a commercial business,maybe Gary will look at it in his spare time!!! Greetings from Jean.

Anonymous said...

Mmmm interesting... I never tried shredded paper, I'd heard too many horror stories about decomposition time.
I had a really cheap (read "free") supplier of mixed shavings and sawdust... not dust free at all, but absorbent and easy to work with. It just cost a few six-packs and a couple of bottles of wine every year :)

Strawberry Lane said...

That looks luxurious. Hope it works perfectly.

Oak Creek Ranch said...

Interesting bedding. I'll be curious to see how it works out.