In many cases, the piles are simply too fresh, not of good enough quality, or too small for the landscapers to bother with. In other situations, the locations of the pile has not been properly selected so the resulting soggy product is undesirable. Although horse manure has the potential to be transformed into a good commercial product for landscaping and soil improvement, she must start with quality ingredients and then invest a lot of time and equipment expense into developing them. Horse owners trying to interest landscape suppliers into hauling their manure away should avoid the following most common management errors. The first mistake acreage owners make is choosing the wettest, most poorly drained spot for their manure pile - out back, down in the slough.
Extreme wetness smothers the bacteria necessary for proper composting.
The second error is throwing slabs of old straw and hay and other garbage onto the manure pile. This makes for an uneven mixture and an undesirable material from a landscaper's viewpoint. Horse manure that has been kept dry and is not dominated by bedding is the best. Lanscapers prefer wood shavings and chips over straw as wood products break down well and hold the base to the humus for a longer period of time than straw will. There must be no foreign materials such as sticks, rocks, or twine in the manure pile as they are damaging to the processing equipment and very time consuming to pick out.