COOP OPERATIONS: THE GREAT PINE SHAVINGS ECONOMY

As told by the hens of Rainbow Connection Farm

New shavings day is, without exaggeration, one of the best days of our entire month. The second that bag rips open, we are in there. Scratching. Fluffing. Pretending we discovered dirt for the first time. The Farm Moms have learned to just stand back and let us have our moment.

But it turns out our favorite day of the month is also a bigger operation than we ever gave it credit for. So this week, Coop Operations is going where the shavings go — in, through, and eventually out to the garden.

Cooperation Gets the Job Done

Running a farm takes cooperation, and apparently that includes something as simple-looking as bedding. Pine shavings aren't just something soft to stand on. They're doing real work — soaking up mess, keeping smells down, and quietly making their way toward a second career in the garden once we're done with them.

This Week's Farm Job

Pine shavings go down in four places on this farm: our coop, the duck house, the horse stalls, and the pig stall. Same material, four very different jobs, because none of us make a mess the same way.

Here's the math behind it. A standard 8-cubic-foot bag of expanded pine shavings runs about $8 and covers roughly 32 square feet at a 3-inch depth. That sounds like a lot of coverage — until you start adding up how many bags it actually takes to keep four groups of animals comfortable, twice a month, every month.

Right now, the coop gets 2 bags. The duck house gets 2 bags. The pig stall gets up to 6 — pigs make a mess like nobody else on this farm, and it takes real depth to keep up with it. That's 10 bags, roughly $80, every single time it's done — and it gets done twice a month, which comes to around $160 a month just for us three groups.

The horse stalls are a different story. In a perfect world with unlimited budget, Mavis, Sugar, and Harley would each get 5 bags of their own — that's 15 more bags, on top of the 10 already going to the coop, duck house, and pig stall. Twenty-five bags total, roughly $200 per application, which comes out to about $400 a month if it happened every time. We do that when we can. On a good week, when funding allows, the horses get their full 5 bags each. But some weeks funding runs low, and that's when we have to cut back and stretch what we've got.

It adds up to a genuinely surprising amount of shavings moving through this farm every month. And every bit of it eventually leaves — heading to the compost pile, where it dries out and turns into something the garden actually looks forward to.

Weird and Interesting Facts

• Pine shavings aren't just bedding — they're doing active cleanup work, absorbing moisture and mess before it ever becomes a bigger problem.

• The duck house shavings deal with a genuinely unique challenge: ducks make things wet in ways no other animal on this farm quite manages.

• Pig stall shavings work overtime, both soaking up mess and helping keep smell and bugs down in a stall that gets used hard.

• Used shavings don't get thrown away — they go straight to the compost pile, dry out, and become some of the best material the garden gets all year.

• We happen to like shavings for a completely different reason: they're excellent for scratching through. (And no, before you ask — chickens don't have a sense of smell to speak of. We're told that's supposed to be a joke about the pig stall, but honestly, we'll take the win.)

How the Farm Moms Make It Work

Twice a month, every stall and coop on this farm gets stripped down and rebedded — coop, duck house, pig stall, and horse stalls, all on the same rotation. It's not a small job. Ten-plus bags of shavings, moved, spread, and packed down, then the old bedding hauled out to start its slow second life in the compost.

Kelley and Britt treat it the way they treat most recurring farm work — split it, stay ahead of it, and let the smaller jobs get done quickly so there's more time left for the bigger ones. Kelley takes the coop and duck house. Britt takes the stalls — horses and pig — which happen to be the ones that call for the most bags and the most muscle. It's not glamorous work. But it's the kind of unglamorous work that keeps all of us comfortable, dry, and — in our case — extremely entertained on shavings day.