Make My Horse Life Easier Tip #8

I thought I would do a post on how I use up hay chaff from the loft during the winter rather than letting it accumulate and get moldy.  How often I do this really depends on the hay itself; some hays are more prone to producing chaff when the bales are moved around than others.  In general, I'd say once every six weeks or so I have enough chaff to fill a muck bucket (which, packed, is roughly equivalent to one flake of hay) and make the effort worthwhile.

My barn is a monitor-style, which means it has a two story center section, where the loft is located, and wings on both long sides that contain the stalls.  The sides of the loft are open to the stalls below.  On a barn where the loft floor does not open to the stalls below, this method of mine won't work (although you could open the loft door that goes to the outside and do the hauling up and down portion that way).

First, I rake all the chaff in a pile up in the loft.  I usually do this on a day when I've throw down hay for restocking the feed room.  There is an old metal-tined manure fork (circa 1980s) kept in the loft expressly for this purpose.

Back on the main floor of the barn, I grab a muck bucket (clean, of course), and thread a longe line through both handles, then clip it to itself.

Once that's done, I take the muck bucket (and looped up longe line) to the stall I'm going to put the chaff in, and I toss the longe line up into the loft.

Having done this, I go climb the ladder to the loft, and walk to where the longe line landed.

I use the longe line to haul the muck bucket up to the loft (it's too big to go up the ladder and through the hole in the loft floor where the ladder resides).

Loosening the line by sliding the clip along it, I pull it out of the way so that the opening in the muck bucket is unobstructed.

Then I fill it with hay chaff.  One nicely packed muck bucket of chaff is roughly equivalent to one decent sized flake of hay.  Good to know so you can accordingly reduce what you give that night at feeding time.

I adjust the longe line back over the top of the muck bucket, then using the line, lower in down into the stall below.

Once the muck bucket has reached the stall floor, I climb down the ladder out of the loft, and go dump the bucket in the corner where hay goes at feeding time.

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This system does require a bit of climbing up and down the ladder, depending on how many buckets-worth of chaff is in the loft at the time.  But, I figure it has lots of benefits:

1. Good exercise!
2. Can be done on even a windy day (compared to tossing the chaff out the loft door to the ground below, then raking up and putting in the bucket for carrying to stalls).  Ditto rainy day.  Ditto snowy day.  Ditto day with horrendously muddy ground.
3. The chaff gets fed rather than piled up and allowed to mold for a once a year loft clean out just before putting in the new season's hay harvest.  So, more efficient use of hay/feed.
4. Since there's no mouldering chaff pile, the air quality in the barn is better.