When the goats first came home, I set up a routine of mucking out their living quarters about every 2 weeks, putting down a fresh bed of straw after each cleaning. While they were eating mostly milk, and then transitioned to grazing for most of the day in the field behind the house, that worked well. However, when winter arrived, and their time in the field was limited or nonexistent, and their food was primarily hay, the goats suggested a new strategy, deep litter bedding.
I had read about deep litter in the context of chicken coops. If you are not familiar with the concept, the idea is that instead of removing the soiled bedding, one simply covers it regularly with a new layer of fresh clean bedding. As the bedding on the bottom begins to compost, it generates heat, helping to keep the chickens warm. I have a compost pile, and I compost the chicken bedding I haul out of my coop, so the concept definitely had its appeal. However, it is not ideal for our coop, which has a wood floor. A damp composting layer of straw at the bottom of the deep litter also means a composting/decaying wood floor. So, in the end, I never tried it out for the chickens.
Interestingly, it didn’t occur to me to try it for the goats, even though the floor of their area of the barn is dirt/sand, ideal for a deep litter approach. However, recognizing my lack of insight into the potential benefits for deep litter bedding in their home, my goats decided to implement it all on their own. And it just so happens that goats are naturals at this strategy. First, goats poop small, hard, firm pellets (think Raisinets), which do not contribute much moisture and sift down through the bedding. In addition, with the sand/dirt floor in our goat house, urine can soak down into the ground, so their bedding is never totally soaked. Second, goats waste a lot of hay, making them very good at laying down their own fresh layer of clean bedding, all day long, every day.
After the goats had transitioned to staying mostly inside that first winter, I found a nice clean layer of hay covering the old bedding when I headed out to do my two week cleaning. Seeing no reason to clean out a bed topped with clean hay, I decided to leave it and check again in a week. Week by week the floor covering got progressively deeper as they consistently distributed fresh clean hay on top of the old. I continued to hold off removing it. Finally, it dawned on me that my goats had adopted their own deep bedding practice. Once I understood their goal, I stopped feeling guilty about not cleaning, and enjoyed the break from mucking out the goat house. At first it bothered me a little that hay costs twice as much as straw. My goats have expensive beds! But, since they were going to waste hay anyway, I finally had to admit there wasn’t really a downside of letting them use the wasted hay for deep bedding.
Well, to be totally honest, there is one small downside to the deep bedding approach. It is a lot of work to clean up when it is finally time to move the bedding out of the barn. That first winter, with only two young goats, I was able to leave it in place until spring before tackling the task of hauling 16 heaping wheelbarrows of old bedding out to my compost piles. It was hard, heavy work, and not much fun! Last year, with 4 goats, the bedding “floor” had reached the bottom of the hay feeder by midwinter. Since having soiled, composting bedding in contact with the hay they were eating didn’t seem like such a great idea, I added a midwinter clean out. This year, with 5 goats, I have just completed clean out number 2, and we still have more winter to go. It again involved a couple of hours of heavy lifting, and 17 heaping wheelbarrow added to the hay/straw compost pile. And it still is not much fun. (But at least thinking about having to do it even more often will provide me extra motivation to find good homes for this year’s baby goats, rather than just adding them to the herd.)
Last week my daughter suggested we add a Scottish Highland cow to our menagerie. “Have you seen them?” she asked. “They are SOOOOOO cute and fuzzy! And they are supposed to have really nice personalities!” As it happens, a friend from the Dexter Farmers Market raises Scottish Highland cows, so I have seen pictures. I can’t argue with her about them being awfully cute. Never the less, I told her NO WAY! After all, have you seen cow poop?
