TOFT poo picking machine

TOFT Poo Picking Machine- Only thing missing is the engine. Runs on normal fuel intake with cake and coffee supplement! 

Seriously I always smile when I pass these rigs. We have them placed all over the farm in strategic positions for clearing the hard standings, small home paddocks, isolation paddocks etc. A £40 wheelbarrow and a £7 snow shovel. Yours truly has been known to invest in several snow shovels in July and August when he sees them in the sales at less than £7 outside small DIY outlets and garages. Well, we just can't have enough of those boys floating around to shovel up the Alpaca poo. Simple but, oh,so effective. After almost 20 years of picking alpaca poo we still haven't found anything better than a cheap plastic snow shovel for scooping up the 'beans'.

Of course we do have an old Wessex sweeper/scarifier that works off the PTO on the tractor for cleaning the bigger paddocks. I mean lets get real, there's almost 70 acres of alpacas  at TOFT !

Alpaca poo

Alpaca poo is a wonderment. Alpacas do their poo in select poo piles in the paddocks. They make several of these and always return to the poo piles to defecate. This makes tidying and cleaning the paddocks a dream.
The recommended everyday tool for collecting poo is a simple £7 snow shovel which is light and flexible enough to be able to scoop up the 'alpaca beans' easily.
We collect ours and bag it up for sale to allotmenteers and gardeners. It doesn't need to rot down like horse manure. Alpaca poo can be dug straight into the flower beds. Because of its pelleted nature the poo stays in the garden a longtime and breaks down ever so slowly providing gardeners with an excellent slow release fertiliser.
Here we see a slightly clumpy poo caused by the new grass coming in and a comparison picture of the normal 'alpaca beans' which look a bit like rabbit droppings.
We sell bags of alpaca poo at £3.50 a bag and the profit goes to the Warwickshire air ambulance. If there are any keen allotmenteers out there who want to give it a go please get in touch. It's all in a good cause!