When we had the school and livery in Tucumcari, we would drive a big truck to Amarillo every two weeks to get bagged shavings for the box stalls. We would have the 200 bags loaded onto the truck, then we had to unload and stack them at home. It seemed like a lot of work and money for bedding. The father of a student who would come up from Portales told me all about the massive amounts of peanut hulls that were available free for the taking and that the horse people there used them successfully for bedding. He said that horses did not eat them. It seemed worth a try. So, before we were out of pine shavings (I do think ahead most of the time), Leon, Bill and I took the white truck with the box bed and huge garage type door... plus snow shovels, goggles and bandanas at my friend's suggestion.
In Portales, we found the processing company and backed up to a loading dock area where there were mountains of peanut hulls. We started shovelling them into the truck. We took turns being inside the box to push them to the front... the dust was unfathomable. My thought was that, after all this handling, by the time we put the hulls into the stalls, the dust would be minimal. Besides, I could dampen them down for the horses if need be.
We stopped at a cafe with a truck filled to its limits with the peanut hulls and us looking like we had been mining brown coal. We had white patches where the goggles had been, lips crusted shut with the dust mud of saliva, nostrils caked and clothes that made clouds when we moved. I was beginning to doubt the advantages of this idea... but we ate and felt stronger and drove home to Tucumcari.
The next day we mucked; pushed the saved shavings against the stall walls; filled the stalls with the peanut hulls and pulled the saved shavings over them to make the beds. The wheelbarrowing of hulls from the truck parked just inside the barn aisle raised another massive dust cloud. We sprayed everything lightly with the water hose and filled hay feeders. We brought the horses in from the field. Some just went to their hay. Others pawed the strange, fluffy beds and rolled before eating. A couple of ponies munched some bedding first, then went to their hay.
The next morning I just stood aghast in the aisle when I realized that all the horses had eaten every peanut hull!! I quickly dosed everyone with mineral oil and then fed wet, sloppy bran mashes and that was ALL they got to eat until noon when I fed a small bucket feed. They pooped 4 times as much manure during the night and that morning. We mucked for several hours. The peanut hulls cost us a lot of time and work, they made tons of manure we didn't need, could have coliced all our horses, left them with essentially no bedding in their stalls (we did bed lightly with shavings that night) and left us with a needed trip to Amarillo and the 3 of us with sinus irritation and coughs to deal with. Lesson learned.
