Redneck Engineering

Necessity is the mother of invention, right?  We have had goats and chickens for several years, now, and there are some things we continue to try to do in order to deal with the goofy little problems we encounter. 

Being that we are a chicken farm larger than most small hobby farms, but much smaller than the big guys, the practices used by others don't always work very well here. And with our lack of much natural browse or forage, and much less rain that most folks would get that would help disperse the goat and chicken poop or help to incorporate it into the soil and earth, we spend a good bit of time dealing with poop. Exciting, right?

While on the one hand, organic compost is great for the garden, too much of a good this is, well, too much. And honestly, there are a few issues in dealing with the same old problem on a different scale or in a different climate. So this is one of the things we are working on...

With chickens, most folks who raise organically also know that chickens will gladly eat ALL of the grasses near their coop, as well as many other plants. To still give our chickens plenty of fresh nutrition, we use sprouts. You have probably seen some of our sprouting experiments on the blog before. We are presently working on a larger scale system, and will share about that when we have more worked out. The really big production places leave the poop and don't worry about such things until the chickens are harvested. But I imagine you have seen many of those photos before. This is DEFINITELY NOT what we consider best practices.

Goats in the desert also means that we have less forage. Ours love the mesquite beans, and we are working on salad bars for the goats and the chickens in the early parts of the coming month, but  with the dirt, and the digging the goaties LOVE to do, we are trying to rake out goat "berries" without removing all of the soil. If you walk through our farm, you will notice many low places, and areas where it seems like you step up when you leave the pen. This is why, and we are trying to prevent and fill in so that we take good care of our land and also don't create place for water to amass in the livestock pens during our rainy season.

There are several neat rakes available for horse folks. The fact that there are so many horse supplies and so much horse research available to the public really deals with where the money in research and development is. Goats are long considered the poor man's animal, which also means less research dollars and fewer available resources, though we goat folks get good at adaptation. Whether we would beg to differ or not, this, combined with the unique climate we live in, gives us an extra challenge. (Goat manure is already ready to use in gardening, so leaving it in a large pasture works great in some areas.)

On and off, we have seen where folks have used these basket type manure forks with hardware cloth to capture the manure but not the dirt, so we wanted to give it a try. When I found one of the forks on sale, I bought it and set it aside for Bailey to experiment with. She used wire and tied some extra hardware cloth fro the pile of chicken supplies to the inside of the "basket" portion of this rake. She was going to trim the mesh down initially, but then tried out using it in the pens first.

It wasn't a perfect solution, to be honest. I found her outside trying to shake the dirt through at one point, which is terrible for her allergies, not to mention some other issues in our area, but she assured me not to worry since the goats were out wandering the rest of our property. I don't know what she thought was protecting her! 

Anyway, the extra hardware cloth turned out to be good. It allows for a little more to be raked into the "basket" so that more of the capacity of the modified rake has access to the surface area of the hardware cloth, allowing a little more dirt to fall through and not head off to the muck bin with the muck. Bailey found that adding more ties as she went helped her reduce the amount of muck between the mesh and the rake tines, but it still happens some. That part frustrated her, though it happens more when you run the rake along the ground toward the pile than when you rake the pile into the rake.  Both versions work, though better at different times.

I still managed to fill up this big green muck wagon four times in the buck pen when cleaning the other night, though there was less dirt overall than there often is when the same pen is cleaned. As a matter of full disclosure, I am not the usual pen cleaner, and I don't think we will ever get all of the poop when cleaning the pens. Those little manure pellets roll away very easily, and so much dirt still finds its way in the rake. But we are glad for the little improvements that help us do better.

I know there are some rakes which are a little deeper, and if I find one, we will likely make a second one for the goats and let Wyatt try this one out for the chickens. This leads me to ask, what have you all tried? If you have ideas or photos, all ideas are welcome and we love that folks share and help each other try things that might work or make life more simple or less wasteful. Hope you all have a wonderful night!