A brown van will haul a ton of poop

My ugly brown $450 van brought home another load of manure. This is a load of horse manure, a mix of horse apples and sawdust. I don't have much of an estimate but am pretty sure it is in excess of 3000 lbs of material. For Jeff, we'll just round it off to a ton of poop.



Last year I got a five by ten flatbed trailer from a friend. It has stake rack sides, about 36 inches tall. I can hold about five and a half yards if I can handle the weight. That's a lot of poop to pitch by hand, though. Last fall I built a pair of bins on pallets so I could lift the poop out of the trailer with the forks on my tractor. The bins are about 5 x 5 and four feet high. The bins do make unloading the trailer lot easier. But with bins that large, it's not hard to over load the tractor. It's not so much the actual weight as it is the distance of the center of mass from the front axle. The bins allow the center of mass to be a lot further out, giving it more leverage. So there is still a lot of hand work getting enough compost out of the bins so I can safely move the bins with the tractor. It's still worth using the bins because the tractor allows me to stack the compost much higher than I could reasonably by hand.



It is nice having these big bins for materials that I can handle in or near full bins worth. The debarker chips from the saw mill across the way are a good example. But I am toying with making some smaller pallet bins for denser materials. If I cut the bin depth by a third I could handle them with less hand work. But then I would need a place to keep the bins I am not using. And unloading three bins is significantly more difficult than two because it requires a different approach angle. I am waiting for inspiration to hit me.