FIX YOUR MUD PROBLEM!
Mud is not good for livestock.
Wet conditions carry disease.
Deep mud can injure animals from pulling muscles to causing infections such as mastitis.
We had a big mud problem at our homestead.
Our barn was located at the bottom of a hill, where all the water on the whole property ran.
Our cows spend the winder in our fenced in paddocks so we can feed and water them.
Unfortunately this means that they are standing in the low spot, causing more mud problems.
We decided this year to fix the mud problem using heavy traffic pads or heavy use area.
The fix to mud is simple.
- Take a roll of geotextile fabric, roll it out.
- Place a layer 6″ of larger gravel. We used 6inch and minus stone.
- On top of the larger gravel place a 3″ layer of 2″ gravel.
- If you have livestock that will be walking on it often you will want to top dress it with sand or small pea gravel so that larger animals don’t bruise their hoofs.
You can get the same effect by dragging the area till it’s rock hard, laying the membrane, and dumping repurposed shingles that were shredded. Cheaper, easier, less chance of injury. The sun will melt them into a solid sheet if not I your area, if not a propane hand torch will
Came here to say that
Much cheaper given today’s costs for gravel. I’ve got a buddy hookup and still paying $450 a load for chirt.
With that, there may still be the problem of drainage, don’t you think.
Nope no problem with Drainage!
Would love to see more
We use stone dust/blue stone (very tiny gravel) that packs tight and hard for our barnyard. As long as you keep manure and hay cleaned off, it lasts for years!
I also recommend french drains in 3/4 minus rock. Depending on the lay of the land, they can be under the drain/gutter line, or at the end of the paddock, if your land slopes.
The part I don’t like about using all rock is unless you are cleaning daily with manure fork, you would keep taking rock. So what are you doing for manure maintenance? Is this in your sacrifice pen?
Yes, manuer matienence is a big issue with these pads, we try to not keep the livestock on them for an extended period of time, rather we keep them in the field as much as possible and when they dirty the pads we do have to maintain them!
Hi! So we just did one with 3/4 inch stone and the. compacted it. But we have sheep, goats, alpacas and pigs. So should we top dress it with sand? I can already see their droppings get stuck in it, I foolishly thought it wasn’t an issue but THEN I saw your video. Very informative. I could compact sand I between it?
Hi Rozlynn, if you can afford sand, YES! It would be much better to clean sand than gravel! You will have to clean the manure regularly, otherwise the drainage will suffer!
Been looking for a solution for sometime , we have sheep and its a swamp in there winter and spring. Where do I get geotextile fabric ?
Thanks a million for this info.
Please contact me as to where I can get the geotextile fabric
Geotextile fabric is at garden centers and big box stores
Have this a lot in Florida however we put large quantities of tree mulch from cleaning pasture which has a pond we dug a French drain co vered whith water or silt cloth then got rubber crumbles from recycled rubber it even in stalls the covered with saw dust
We used shale , it becomes like cement. We can clean with a skid loader.