moving poop

J didnt' do all the work over vacation week (I spent most of my time taking care of a 5 year old boy who had his tonsils out, but I did do some work on the farm too).

We were told we had to move the poop pile. It would never be my choice to do so, as it's a hard and not fun job. It's ideal to put the poop in a place where it can decompose and you can use as fertilizer (which is what I thought we were doing but turns out not to be the case). I bribed Emma to help me. Usually farm chores are optional to the kids. If they want to help we definately appreciate it. And the more they do, the more involved in the fun things they will be (like being able to halter and walk the alpaca, participate in shows etc). But since this was such a very unfun job I told Emma I'd pay her to help. She jumped at the opportunity and was a great helper.

Thankfully the poop doesn't smell and was dry so scooping and moving it wasn't as bad as we feared. But still, being covered in poop dirt isn't fun.

Here is the pile of poop:


This is Emma standing at the end of the pile (note all the grass growing out of the older poop):


After some trial and error we found that scooping the poop into buckets and then dumping those into the truck was the best way to move it. We placed it on the truck over a tarp, then when we dropped it off we lifted up the tarp. However, to make sure the tarp wasn't too heavy we could only move a small amount at a time. This picture shows Emma scooping the poop into a bucket:


Here is Emma in the truck at our drop off place:


Here is the spot we put the poop, note the green tarp, that is where we put the hay that wasn't used at the barn. We plan to mulch the poop and hay into a mixture with grass to grow a nice pasture.