Mud, mud and more mud

I've got a real issue with mud. We live in the mid-south (mud-south), and have had my coops and pens for 4 years now. Never have we had such a problem as this year with the snow, ice and rain. I was taking the soiled hay from the coops and putting it in the pens, I thought everything was good until I started raking the hay out of the pens. I must be 6-8 inches thick. It stinks to high heaven too. The more I rake out the more water comes to the surface. I can't even walk out there without holding on to the pen fence. It is on a slight slop so I've been able to channel the water but with eggs hatching any day now, I want to get this dried up.

Is there something I can put down that with help absorb the water and I can leave it there? If I put more clean dry hay it will just sink into the mud when I step on it and continue to create this cesspool.

Try straw or wood shavings instead of hay? Or maybe put down some pea gravel with straw on top of it?

Hay and straw will decompose and will continue the cycle, Gravel will sink.

How about wood pallets to walk on until it dries?

I don't think there's much else you can do but improve the drainage.

Kaessa said:

How about wood pallets to walk on until it dries?

I don't think there's much else you can do but improve the drainage.

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I had a similar problem in my goat pen one year and using pallets worked great -- and you can get them for free! If you look/ask around, you might even be able to find some that have close set top boards, so that they are basically like decks. (I am a pallet fanatic......) If you can't find those, you can stuff the cracks with straw quite easily.

One things to bear in mind is that rats and mice like to live under pallets, so be sure to be prepared for that....

I detest rodents, love snakes but don't want to attract them to the duck area.

It's raining again

We had an awfully muddy winter too, and this past week nothing but rain. I'm hoping for some sun this week to dry things up bc it's awful in my duck run. They love it tho lol

Strange thing I've noticed with my duck-muck is that it seems to "float" ...like if you take a shovel-full of dirt out, the ground underneath the 2-3 inches of muck is fairly dry. And the same ground just outside the pen with no grass on it is also dry. I wonder what it is about all the duck poo that makes it do that? Or maybe the ducks are compacting the ground? Doesn't seem possible as little as they weigh...
I don't know what to mix in the dirt to make it not do this either. Tried sand and it seems to just get buried under muck.

Sometimes when the soil has been compacted and there isn't much by way of organic matter in the soil, it becomes like a solid mass that sheds water. It's fairly common in permanent barnyards where there are no roots in the soil anymore and the topsoil is constantly compacted by foot/hoof traffic. Sand actually makes it worse as it percolates into the soil and makes something akin to cement.
If you want to improve that soil, you can partition parts of it off from the animals and amend it with good compost and then plant some cover crops on it -- like clover, bell or fava bean, etc. -- when that grows you can either chop it into the soil, or let the animals back on it to graze it down and return it to the soil with their manure. The key is rotation so that each patch of soil gets a break from having every scrap of organic matter picked clean off of it and tramped down. If you have to have animals on it all the time, you can also construct wire covered decks that you place over "resting" soil, which allows plants to grow but keeps the animals from picking them right out as they can only access the portions that grow above the wire. If the "decks" are of manageable size, you can move them around as needed.

Here, I have the pen on a 2% slope. I add chopped straw from time to time so we have a nice compost base. At the downhill side I have a shallow hand-dug channel to direct the water to raised garden beds.

The water needs to be moved away from the pen.

Then, you can put down some landscape fabric, and put smooth pea gravel over that (it keeps the mud from pumping up through the gravel), or place 2 inch (more or less) diameter hardwood poles down next to each other and then chopped leaves and a little straw over that. The poles will start to break down and absorb water - if you have some poles that are already on the old side, starting to break down, that would be better.

Stink comes from organic matter (manure, plants - like straw or hay) breaking down without oxygen. Water drives out oxygen. So getting more oxygen into the mix, by using stiff high-carbon material can help. Coir blocks might be an idea - they come dry and compressed, and absorb water. Once wetted up, they have a nice bulk to them.