Will some of the wet land people share thier experiences on how to deal with barnyard mud? Over all I have dry ground. Seasonally areas get wet and will not dry out. My areas of mud are where the goats step down out of the barn, and near the feeder area. Once the hay mixes with the mud it get squishy and slippery. The more I dig it up the worse it gets. I have place big flat rocks around the feeder so the boys have a dry place to stand and eat. I dumped a bale of cedar shavings which seem to help. Any ideas are welcome. IdahoNancy

Hello Nancy,

Why not paving the entrance to your barn as well?

I work with wooden pallets, layed over the muddy areas as a wooden bridge. Not perfect but all I could manage for the last two years - more excessive work is planned for next year.

And there's a product on the market, called cow carpet. You can use it as a surface cover or - more often - as a layer between original soil and some soil covering like sand. It's a fabric that will allow water to pass through but not the soil to be pressed up/squilching (forgive my clumsy description, I really lack the grammar to properly describe it). But the system originates in the US, I think, so you should find enough information online.

Oh how I hate the mud! I have a large area right now and I to have made a wooden bridge out of pallets. I just nail a square of plywood on top and nailed down a couple of roof shingles so it won't be as slippery. I have also put a couple of the rubber stall mats down around the feeder. You have to clean them off every once in awhile but then I don't have to move the feeder around as the mud builds up.

My new barn (yeah! but not ready yet) has better drainage. I'm going to have large wood chips (not shavings or sawdust but quarter size playground type chips) dumped several inches thick in heavy trafic areas. These tend to last several seasons and need to be replaced depending on area used and amount of goats.

Every blue moon or so we get mud. And when we do the goats and I really hate it. Fortunately it is a rare thing for us. But what works for us, is what other have suggested, and that's pallets. I knock some apart and get the boards from them, then nail them onto some others, to fill in the gaps. Maybe not necessary, but I sure wouldn't want a goat getting his foot caught in a gap between boards and crippling himself. Another thing I have is a wooden cable spool in the goat pen. If there were more mud, or longer lasting mud, I would put a couple more in there. The goats love to jump up on them whether the weather is wet or dry.

My goat barn is built so that the goats don't have to go outside to eat. And I can feed them without going into their pen. So they don't have to stand in the mud to eat, and I don't have to walk in it.

We put down large size gravel in front of the barn and gate. I also made a path up to the house with it. At only $25 a yard around here it was a cheep easy end to the mud pits and it looks nice year around.

The pallet idea works great. I had 5 of them stacked up in the yard from a patio project. It was great to put them to use. The gaps are filled in and plywood over the top. The only problems is the goats have taken up tap dancing. It seems they love the sound of thier own hooves on the board walk. Heck even the berries have a nice ring when they fall.
The dancing Ober boys.

Yeah---the berries---I have to sweep mine off every once in awhile because I think they go on the pallets more than anywhere else.

I know that I am going to have mud problems and threat of hoof rot every spring if I don't do something. In the past I put down a good 6 inches of large gravel in my horse corral and within one season the horses had tromped it down into the muck to the point that you would have had to dig to find any. Then I put down several inches of slag from a local steel plant. No more problems. It has somewhat jagged edges so it won't roll over the other chiunks like the smooth gravel does and it locks in place. Lots of people use this for their long driveways. After a while it packs down like cement but remains porous. I have talked to my neighbor about hauling some in for me for the goat pen. I will water it down plenty to wash in any dust that might come with it. I think that it will also help keep the hooves worn down some. It's pretty cheap but very heavy so will have to use a tractor to spread it.

we have deep mud here and no rocks in sight. Things sink fast. Roadbed fabric or nursery fabric, the heavy type, works great as it creates a barrier between the mud and rock that keep the two layers separate. You can get it at a nursery supply.