# Dry lotting



## Jmh677 (Apr 24, 2014)

Hey there! Our family would eventually love to keep a few goats for homesteading purposes (looking into a mini dairy breed) and had a few questions about dry lotting. What have you all used to remove the grass from your pens? Did you lay some type of "landscaping" (or other type) fabric or base (sand, gravel, concrete) to ease cleaning and muddy messes? Have you found this to be helpful controlling parasites? How often do you clean/remove waste/hay? What method do you use to clean your dry lots? Sorry if my questions seem a little silly (like how do you clean the pens, but I read someone used a leaf blower so maybe there are some other ways out there too)! Thank you in advance for taking time to read and answer my questions!


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## SalteyLove (Jun 18, 2011)

Hi! Welcome to the forum! 

There is a user on here, msscamp I believe, that dry-lots so hopefully she will chime in! I think she is in the mid-west though - so not sure if it is applicable to your area.

You would definitely need to remove the topsoil from the area and backfill with a gravel/sand material. You probably wouldn't need to bother with a Weed Stop fabric after that. But you will need to compact the gravel/sand material (plate compactor, roller, or machine bucket). Depending on your rain situation, you will either want to grade the area to drain well OR include some type of French drain underneath. If you get a material that has some silty/clay content it can create a "seal" and let everything run off - but then you should have some type of grassed swale or something to provide capture & filtration.

We do deep bedding method in our shed in the winter, and then I just use a leaf rake to clean up the lot/sacrifice area weekly.

Best of luck!


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## lottsagoats1 (Apr 12, 2014)

I guess I would be considered a dry lot. I have no land for pasture, so the goats have a small outside pen attached tho the barn thery can go out in at will. They get fed hay and grain and any browse I find on the ground after a storm.

The take care of any grass that was growing, since their hooves and poo kills it. Yes, I get mud....lots of mud in the spring. I clean out the dropped hay form around the feeders. I have wall hay feeders haging on the inside walls and a pallet hay feeder type of bunk on the outside. I mostly fork the hay away to be composted. I like to leave a thin layer on the ground to soak up extra wetness and to keep the goats from walking on mud.

My outside goat area is maybe 35' x 40'. The inside goat is 16' x 10'.


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## TDG-Farms (Jul 12, 2013)

Just dont water it


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## nancy d (Oct 5, 2007)

Oh Dave, tsk tsk tsk. Don't you know if you don't water the pen it wont get bigger?

Any grass that is growing they'll take it down tromp & poop on it.

We dry lot. If you can call it that here in the Pac NW. During the dryer months stuff is raked up.
When wet we use hog fuel.


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## MsScamp (Feb 1, 2010)

No, your questions are not a bit silly. It is always better to ask than to charge ahead full steam only to find it doesn't work and has to be redone. Once the goats eat or tromp out the grass, yes, dry lotting will reduce - and probably eliminate - the parasite issues. Parasites need forage to complete their life cycle. I do not free choice feed hay, so I don't usually have a big problem with it building up - the exception to that is if we are in our rainy cycle and the hay is stemmier than usual. My pens are way to big to even consider cleaning them by hand - the smallest pen is 25' wide by probably 50' long, the biggest pen is probably 70' wide by 50' long, and the rest are somewhere in between. Dad comes in with a front-end loader every fall and cleans them for me. At the same time he takes a bit more out of the center of the pens so rain water/snow melt has somewhere to accumulate and the girls aren't standing in it constantly. We keep the outer portions (where the feeders are), under the sheds, and a path to the waterer built up so they can access water without slogging through water/muck and have dry areas to lounge/lay in. Putting a base of gravel or sand would not be feasible because it would be removed when Dad cleans the pens. There is also the consideration that my place used to be a feed lot and has about 6-8' of cow manure accumulated, so the girls would just tromp sand/gravel into the manure.

ETA: Removing the manure and replacing with clean dirt is simply not feasible because finding that much dirt is impossible, not mention the cost and time that would be required to haul it in.


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