Cutting down mucking out time..suggestions!

dominobrown said:
I have had staff take the pee.... 20 mins to turn out a hprse thats stable was less than 100m from field gate... 5 haynets filled in half an hour.
I am not good with having a word... i just said there would be no riding until the yard was done. The one who spent an hour texting etc in the tack room got a shock when their wages reflected this! Never came back.
Firstly... horrible I know... but staff are all too easy to replace (well useless ones area).
If you are the rider I would ride, and expect them to do the yard.
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I have no idea where in the world you are but staff are not so easy to replace. By not discussing shortcomings and problems with your staff you are being a really poor employer. If the staff do not know what is required how can the do it? If they are on their phones in the tack room and you share the boxes between the staff the lazy ones will be show up and you can then take action but to not discuss is not very fair. You can always ban phones on the yard at least until mucking out is finished!
 
sport horse said:
I have no idea where in the world you are but staff are not so easy to replace. By not discussing shortcomings and problems with your staff you are being a really poor employer. If the staff do not know what is required how can the do it? If they are on their phones in the tack room and you share the boxes between the staff the lazy ones will be show up and you can then take action but to not discuss is not very fair. You can always ban phones on the yard at least until mucking out is finished!
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Haha...does it matter "who" I am and where I am to have an opinion?!
I admit... I am not good at 'telling off' staff. I tend to just do the work muself instead and then wonder why I am paying someone?! Its a steep learning curve managing staff, especially teenagers or part time casual staff who dont want the job as a career.
What I was simply saying is that I can sympathise with the OP... I have been there and its not an easy probelm to fix. There have been some great suggestions on this thread too.
I do agree... good staff are Not easy to replace, but lazy ones are. If they are costing more than they are worth then from a business point of view I am not in the position to babysit people.
 
I suppose the other question is what is next - i.e 24 horses do they all get ridden/worked- is there a high workload? I'd say10-15min per stable max, maybe 20 with hay etc jobs done also.
 
You need a holding yard or a loafing area to reduce the strain on the stables with horses grouped. This will save on mucking out and bedding, round bales in holding areas will further save filling nets .... poo can be picked from the holding area .... wood pellets in stables (which can then be used only in bad rain) will compost nicely and if you’re worried about lowering ph which will take years, add some lime a few years down the line. Btw., wood pellets drastically reduce load on muckheap.
 
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Darlabean said:
You need a holding yard or a loafing area to reduce the strain on the stables with horses grouped. This will save on mucking out and bedding, round bales in holding areas will further save filling nets .... poo can be picked from the holding area .... wood pellets in stables (which can then be used only in bad rain) will compost nicely and if you’re worried about lowering ph which will take years, add some lime a few years down the line. Btw., wood pellets drastically reduce load on muckheap.
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That would mean restructuring the whole set up of the yard, it will cost a small fortune to fence and hardcore enough space for 24 horses and would not suit all of them, the owners that are paying for full livery would not expect their horses living in yards so the staff problem would be solved by many of the liveries leaving but that does not help the OP in any way to get her stables mucked out faster.

They are bedded on straw and the OP has her reasons to remain on straw, to speed things up I would give everyone set horses to do, I find it easier when I know the boxes, I would ask them to turn one bank each day so each is done every third day rather than every day, if they do the same boxes they should be able to speed up, I would probably do the nets myself rather than muck out so I could do the odd extra job as and when, simply emptying a wheelbarrow for a groom will help them or bringing fresh bedding round by the bale and splitting it in one box to take to the next boxes can help.
 
Set horses to do. Good clean wheat straw that shakes up easily. Straw barn that is easy to access. Decent large barrows with decent inflated tyres (or the new solid tyres). Horses either out of box or tied up . ( big time waster ) Throw ALL the clean straw up into one or two corners and clear out whats left.Dont try to muck out the same way as shavings . Sweep floor . lay old straw and add new straw. Hay on separate trolley used by everyone mucking out (loose , nets are a faf ,dangerous ,and bad for the horse. Check water . Untie horse. Decent muck heap easy to access . Tip muck and fork up onto heap. Biggest time waster I have seen is trying to muck out straw with the wrong type of fork . A two prong pitchfork is the right tool .Any other fork will slow you down. When you buy a new fork ,you may want to cut a couple of inches off the prongs ,they work better like that. .
It is vital for efficiency that mucking out is a set routine that staff step into and just get carried along . Constant problems break the flow of the routine and add a lot of time . For me, straw is the cheapest best and fastest bedding .
 
Mike007 said:
Set horses to do. Good clean wheat straw that shakes up easily. Straw barn that is easy to access. Decent large barrows with decent inflated tyres (or the new solid tyres). Horses either out of box or tied up . ( big time waster ) Throw ALL the clean straw up into one or two corners and clear out whats left.Dont try to muck out the same way as shavings . Sweep floor . lay old straw and add new straw. Hay on separate trolley used by everyone mucking out (loose , nets are a faf ,dangerous ,and bad for the horse. Check water . Untie horse. Decent muck heap easy to access . Tip muck and fork up onto heap. Biggest time waster I have seen is trying to muck out straw with the wrong type of fork . A two prong pitchfork is the right tool .Any other fork will slow you down. When you buy a new fork ,you may want to cut a couple of inches off the prongs ,they work better like that. .
It is vital for efficiency that mucking out is a set routine that staff step into and just get carried along . Constant problems break the flow of the routine and add a lot of time . For me, straw is the cheapest best and fastest bedding .
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Pretty much with this. Hate nets -take ages to fill and are dangerous. We have big bale hay/straw so put sections of each on a barrow and they get wheeled around as work progresses. As we have big bales we have a tractor so no forking up onto much heap - hey presto a machine does it and it is surprising how many staff want to learn tractor driving!
 
With straw beds, I always find that a good deep and thick straw bed with plenty of straw in it is much quicker and easier to muck out as the wet doesn't all get mixed and stays underneath. You might find that you can get away with just removing the wet on every third or fourth day.

Also, I find that using waterproof nitrile gloves best for quickly removing the droppings from a straw bed into a skip, and this also reduces the straw wastage, and it leaves the bed undisturbed.

We often have time and motion studies implemented at work (non-horsey), and the principles transfer to this question ref mucking out. Essentially if five employees each have to undertake the same tasks A/B/C/D/E, then it may be more time efficient if each of the employees completes the whole of one task each, or it could be a variation on this.

As per other posts above, it's key to get the inputs into the process, ie. hay / straw / water supplies located so that time is not wasted with endless journeys to collect these inputs and outputs (ie. Muck onto the muck heap etc)
 
Big straw beds do take longer to muck out than other types, in my experience. When I was a pro groom I much preferred shavings and found those beds much quicker. The first yard I worked on we had a maximum of 18 in and that would generally take us 1 hr 15 mins between 2, unless we were bedding down. Then it would take more like 1 hr 30. That included haying and sweeping the yard as we went, but not waters as they were all automatic. Horses were all mucked out in boxes as even if being turned out they were kept in until they had been ridden (SJ yard). We had a coffee break once we finished, which was always an incentive to get a move on! We also had huge wheelbarrows that would do 3-4 boxes, so that really cut down on trips to the muck heap (which was a bit of a trek). All beds were shavings.

When I then moved to a different yard, I was astonished at how long it took them to finish the yard. They had, at the time, ten horses and 2-3 members of staff on at a time, and they would still be finishing the yard at 10.30 (starting at 7.45). That drove me absolutely up the wall, but fortunately I had been brought in as manager so was able to change things round. I changed to mucking horses out in stables (they had been putting them on the walker so that the boxes would be empty), started a system of sweeping the yard as we went, and introduced a tea break if we finished early enough. Certain things meant that this yard would always take slightly longer than the first one - we had quite a few horses on straw, we used smaller barrows as our muck heap was up a steep ramp so larger ones weren't feasible, we had a larger yard to sweep, we also had to sweep the muck heap, and the riders would start exercising before we finished mucking out (my old boss was a bit lazy!) so we would have to get horses out/ tack up/ do them off/ turn out while mucking out. But I did manage to get things to the stage where we would have everything finished (including sweeping) by 9.30, despite the number of horses increasing to 13/14.

I think part of it has to come down to mindset. In the first yard the other groom and I would always race, which sped things up, and shortly after I arrived at the second yard they took on another new girl groom and she and I used to do the same. It became a competition to get everything finished as early as we could.

Some practical suggestions that might help are switching to feeding from the ground (haynets take ages), bigger wheelbarrows if yours are small, bringing a load of bedding onto the yard before mucking out, sweeping as you go if you don't already. You could also have one person each day who mucks out two stables only, then takes over responsibility for filling all the water buckets (if yours aren't automatic), scrubbing feed buckets and filling haynets (if you don't want to feed from the ground. I would also decide when you realistically think the yard could be finished by, and tell them that if they manage it, you will all have a 20 min coffee break or something. Or you could set them all a time limit per stable. I genuinely don't understand why they are so slow though. To me, mucking out was the worst part of working with horses, therefore it made sense to do it as quickly as possible so that I could get on with the more fun bits!
 
Size of wheel barrows is my number 1 tip. If you can fit 2 mucks outs into 1 barrow, take less time walking to the heap.
Change hay nets for tubs, each box has 2, so there is always 1 to use. I've done a 48 box yard, with 4 people and this worked. Taps... how close are they to the stables? Fill up a big container, (keep it clean obviously) and use buckets to dunk... while buckets are being dunked, keep the tap on. Invest in a blower, can be fun and easier to use than the mundane task of sweeping up - especially if the yard is large. Blow it into piles, allocate a picker-upper and bobs your uncle.
Have a laugh with your staff. Happy 'on side' staff are not only easier to work with, but get on and do jobs!
 
The thing I've found with straw is that if it is grown on site, it is often cheaper to replace the centre of the bed completely every day than to pay staff to sift dirty from sort-of-clean. So, using a fork, scrape the centre bed away from the banks, plough the whole lot forwards (it can generally all be shifted with one or two sweeps of the fork as clings together), then fork into large wheel barrow, sweep behind if necessary and replace centre bed. Better still, if you have a tractor with a grab bucket, you just push the contents of the stables outside onto the concrete and then one person goes round picking up the piles to deposit straight into trailer.

Other things are doing away with haynets, minimising the time spent walking backwards and forwards accross the yard by moving things closer or having one person doing the fetching carrying with others mucking out, and having an auto fed central water tank on the yard with a clean bucket in it that can be used to ladle water into the stable buckets rather than waiting for them to fill and queuing at the tap.
 
amymay said:
Are the boxes skipped out in the evening?
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see this makes a huge difference all our full liveries were skipped out at 4.30 and it makes a difference as not all ours went out all day everyday, it might be worth staggering your staff so one stays late each evening to skip out and fill nets for the next day.
 
Ok, so muck heap is just round the corner, it's a trailer you wheel up on to. They have large barrows. The straw is in the barn already stacked at the end of the stables. The water buckets are filled by dunking into a self filling trough. They are skipped out at the end of each day.
Horses are turned out before mucking out so not in the way.
Guess I just need to crack the whip! :-)
 
charlie76 said:
Ok, so muck heap is just round the corner, it's a trailer you wheel up on to. They have large barrows. The straw is in the barn already stacked at the end of the stables. The water buckets are filled by dunking into a self filling trough. They are skipped out at the end of each day.
Horses are turned out before mucking out so not in the way.
Guess I just need to crack the whip! :-)
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Having been in this position many times may I suggest that the first time the 'crack the whip' is a discussion. Tell them you think the mucking out is taking too long and it has to speed up. Ask them for suggestions as to how this could happen. Perhaps ban phones till after mucking out? Involve them.
If it does not improve then you can really 'crack the whip'!
Good luck it is so not easy but it is part of being an employer. (I have tried the I get faster and faster hoping they will notice but that does not work. Now I do not muck out at all!)
 
Some horses may be messier than others. My pony is tidy and he tends to poo in one corner and I have only ever seen him wee in the one place which is the middle but some horses are really messy and it will take longer.

Messy horses are going to take longer to tidy up especially if you are trying to be economic with bedding so some staff may be slower depending on how messy the beds they have are. Allocate them an amount of time that is a bit longer than you think they need and then say if they finish early they can have a longer coffee break, if they finish late then they get less break. They have to feel that what you ask them to do is reasonable and within their capability. Like others have mentioned division of labour may work for two reasons, if anyone is slacking then the others will notice, and it might mean that they all get less break so it might motivate them all and two might mean less moving around with a conveyor belt type system so may well be quicker.

As a staff group if they meet their target of getting things done in a set timescale say 9/10 times can you give them some sort of reward? If yard staff are hard to come by being punitive such as threatening them with loosing their job probably won't work as they know they can get another one easily so you may have to work on incentivising them in some way eg longer breaks, lessons if they like riding, or other opportunities/treats depending on what you can offer.

If you don't already do so I would also look at meeting with each staff member individually every few months to see how they are getting on, to let them know what they are doing well and where improvement could be made and also to ask them if they have any suggestions as to how to improve things on the yard to improve their job satisfaction. You may get some surprises someone may say they prefer mucking out to riding or that have some ideas on how to be more efficient. My old boss said to me "good ideas can come from anyone" and I think if you can at least give them the chance to give you feedback as well then it might help.
 
SO1 said:
If you don't already do so I would also look at meeting with each staff member individually every few months to see how they are getting on, to let them know what they are doing well and where improvement could be made and also to ask them if they have any suggestions as to how to improve things on the yard to improve their job satisfaction. You may get some surprises someone may say they prefer mucking out to riding or that have some ideas on how to be more efficient. My old boss said to me "good ideas can come from anyone" and I think if you can at least give them the chance to give you feedback as well then it might help.
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Like any employer / manager should.
 
One of our incentives was food if we finished early we ate toast in the tea room or someone would do a tea hut run for bacon rolls Mmmmmmm, if we ran over time we had to wait until lunchtime to eat and I for one looked forward to a mid morning snack.
 
The stable floor can slow things up quite a bit we have slowly sloping grooved concrete in our stable the wet runs off into saw dust piles. I tried to muck out a stable I rented while away for the weekend it had a rough uneven floor what a job
 
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