HOW TO CLEAN A HORSE STALL (Step-By-Step)

hey everyone so today i'm going to show you a very essential part of horse ownership which is how to clean a stall so our question for this week is does your horse live out in the field 24 7 or do you keep them in the stable sometimes so any horse i've had i like for them to live out 24 7. i do bring them in if they are injured or maybe the weather is really bad that's how i do it but i'd like to know what you do so let me know in the comments [Music] so before you go to clean out your horse stall there are a few things you're going to need so first and foremost you're going to need something to put the dirty shavings in whether this is a wheelbarrow like i have here or maybe a muck bucket and wheelbarrows make it easy to transport to like the poop pile or the manure pile so i'm gonna be using a wheelbarrow so the next thing you're gonna need is a pitchfork to pick up the poop and the dirty shavings or if you use straw as you're bedding pitchforks make picking up straw really easy the next thing you're going to need is a shovel so as you can see this shovel has seen its fair share of poop piles here i mainly use the shovel here to clean out the spots where the horse has peed and i use it to scrape the bad and the gross shavings away and into the wheelbarrow i'm also going to use a broom here to sweep away from the door of the stall just to get the shavings from going out into the barn aisle i can also sweep away from where my horse eats like where the hay goes and also where they eat their grain and that way if food is on the ground they're not going to inhale and ingest the sawdust so i have my broom so another thing you're going to need to clean a horse stall is bedding for your horse and bedding allows your horse to be more comfortable while they're in the stall so i use shavings like this that come in a bag and that you can just get at a farm store i know a lot of people use straw or there's a bunch of different kind of bedding types there's like pellets that you can put water into and then they grow and absorb like this so it's really just researching the kind of bedding you want to use for your horse so if you have a horse that maybe has a hard time breathing when it comes to dust and being in a stable you want to make sure you find a bedding that suits them and allows them to breathe well so that just comes down to researching what kind of bedding is best for your horse so if you're missing any of the supplies i just went over i'll put some links in the description for you where you can go and buy them online all right so let's go ahead and clean our stall i'm gonna put my wheelbarrow here so all the horses that were in last night are pretty clean as you can see real quick i just want to show you how to recognize some things in your stall so the poop is pretty easy to see and to recognize but with pea spots if you look here the sawdust is a little darker than the normal sawdust so that's a p-spot so we're going to want to make sure we clean that out too because we don't want the horse standing in nasty shavings alright so to get started i'm just going to remove all the poop piles first that just makes it easier in my opinion so one thing i can do is when i pick up my poop here i like to shake my pitchfork and any good shavings will fall out so i can save those good shavings and i know that may sound tedious but shavings can be expensive and so we want to try and save as much of the shavings as we can some horses like to bury their poop and shavings and so some stalls will be much more work while others you know they keep it a little bit more clean so now that we've gotten all the poop out of the stall it's time to handle the p-spots so how you handle the p-spots in the stable is really determined by the type of flooring you have underneath so we have rubber mats underneath these stalls so that means the moisture is really going to be absorbed into those mats so all we really have to do is remove the shavings that were peed on if you have a stall that's maybe built on a dirt floor you may handle that a little differently the ground where the horse peed is going to need to dry out before you can put shavings back on top of it so i'll walk you through what to do with the stable mats and then maybe talk you through what to do if you have a dirt floor so here's my p-spot the first thing i'm going to do is i want to remove all the clean shavings away from the p-spot so i can use my shovel and i'm just going to draw a perimeter kind of around where the horse peed and this is a little bit more difficult of a spot because the horse peed right up near the wall but i'll do my best so i've outlined my p-spot so now all i really have to do is scrape it up like this with my shovel and then throw it in my wheelbarrow so real quick you can see these rubber mats under here so that's the flooring i was talking about so the rubber mats have already absorbed the majority of the p so i just really need to remove the shavings now so there's another p spot over here too the horse buried it a little bit but i need to clean this out as well probably not going to save as many good shavings in this one because it looks like he's kicked it over kind of but we'll get it done [Music] so as you can see it looks like good shavings on top but when i scrape you can see the wet spot underneath so that is really what i'm trying to pick up [Music] so when it comes to the rubber matting floors once i've removed the bad shavings all i really have to do now is just cover those spaces back up and make sure they're covered nicely with the clean shavings if you have a dirt floor what you may want to do is once you take the bad shavings away you may want to just let the ground dry for a minute where the horse peed before you put any new shavings back over it so now what i'm going to do is i'm going to cover my p-spots back up and then i'm going to kind of move my sawdust around i'm looking for smaller pieces of poop that i may have missed earlier so let me go ahead and do that so these horses don't have too many other smaller poop pieces some horses are really messy somehow they turn their poop up and they spread it all over their stall so this step may be more prevalent depending on whose stall you're cleaning out so this is more of a horseback riding humor but looking for poop in a stall is kind of like mining for gold i don't know if you guys have ever seen people mine for gold but you scoop up the sediment and then shake out the sediment and the gold will be left on top so you're still looking for nuggets but just a different kind [Music] all right so we're pretty much done in this stall all we have left to do is to sweep so the first thing i'm going to sweep is the doorway here as you can notice there's a lot of shavings outside of the stall door in the barn aisle which makes the barn owl really messy so i want to make sure i sweep the shavings back so that they don't go in the barn around when the horse walks through so i'll start in here another place i can sweep is under the horse's food bucket the reason i like to do this is if the horse is eating and they drop food out of their mouth on the ground they're more than likely going to go try and pick it up off the ground with their mouth if their shavings there they may ingest or inhale dust or shavings so i just want to sweep it away so that they can easily get the food that they drop without inhaling dust so same goes with the hay area so i personally like to put my horse's hay on the ground and this way it's just a more natural way for them to eat you know with their head down like they're made to be doing but if you put the hay up in a hay net or maybe a hay rack this may not be as important if you plan to put the hay on the ground you can sweep the shavings away from that area as well so you may be wondering how do i tell whether or not a stall needs shavings so this stall here is pretty good on shavings it adds a nice layer of protection and comfort for the horse let me show you what a stall looks like that needs shavings so even though the stall is messy i can already tell it's gonna need shavings so there are a few reasons you use bedding in your stall and once you understand these reasons it's gonna be easier to figure out when you need to put more bedding in the stall so one reason you need bedding in your stall is to absorb pee that your horse leaves so if you don't have a lot of shavings or bedding in your stall that means there may be sitting pee which is kind of nasty so you want to make sure you have enough bedding down so that can absorb any water that's left another reason for putting bedding in your stalls is for comfort for your horse so just remember your horse is standing in here a long time and i know if i'm standing a long time my legs start to hurt especially if i'm standing on hard ground so when you provide that comfort for your horse by giving adequate bedding to them they're able to not only stand comfortably but they can lay down and take a nap if they want to as well so a good way to look at it is if i were to lay down right here would i be able to be comfortable and take a nap the answer right now probably not [Music] so there's not a horse that's going to be going in the stall for a while so i'm just going to put down about half a bag just in case there's an emergency and the horse needs to come in here i'm going to save the rest of this all right now i'm just going to spread the sawdust around evenly across the stall make sure the horse has an even comfort all right so i finished cleaning all the stalls and now i'm going to go dump my wheelbarrow [Music] so this is the point where you're going to want to have some good in muck boots because sometimes the easiest way to turn this wheelbarrow is just to climb up in the poop this is part of horse ownership people so where there's manure there's usually flies so if you want to keep your barn free from bugs and flies and those annoying creatures it's important to keep your maneuver pile away from your barn so we have another video about how to care for a horse which will talk about other things you need to know to properly take care of your animal so i'll put the link in the description and if you enjoyed this video please be sure to like and subscribe to our channel [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Equine Helper

Views: 58,989

Keywords: How to clean a horse stall, How to clean a horse stable, How to muck out a stall, How to muck out a stable

Id: OlNewmAHrbM

Length: 12min 7sec (727 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 02 2020