Not to mention the smell! Covering the soiled hay daily prevents the smell from being offensive over the winter. That makes roughly 200 cubic feet of waste to remove by hand and shovel. Sean worked for 6 hours straight pulling roughly a foot deep of compacted, soiled hay from both doe stalls. We have enjoyed a string of days well above the freezing mark, culminating in temperatures yesterday hitting 42 degrees. It was Sean's brow, but you get the point). While the "Deep Litter" Method of dealing with animal waste works, we pay for it come spring in the form of screaming muscles and the sweat of our brows- (In all honesty, there was no "we".
Another benefit, in all honestly, is NOT having to chip away soiled, frozen waste and then wrestle to remove said waste through mounds of snow, several feet deep in below zero temperatures to add it to the compost pile on a daily or weekly basis. Heat is a good thing in Maine during the bitterly cold winter months, especially this year when we had steady weeks where the temperature failed to break the zero degree mark. The benefits of doing this is that the bottom layers begin to break down into compost over time and that produces heat. Basically, instead of cleaning the stalls each day, (like we do spring, summer, and fall) in the winter, we pile fresh hay bedding on top of the soiled hay bedding, layer upon layer, all. For those of you who don't know what that means, I'll give you a brief explanation. When I read this post from Lil Bit Farm, I had to commiserate.
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