When to Book a Farmyard Clean, and Where the Water Goes

Two questions decide whether a farmyard wash is a good job or a nuisance, and neither of them is about the price.

Question one: which weeks

A farm has a shape to its year and a jet washer belongs in the quiet parts of it.

Late winter into early spring is the best window on most holdings I would work with. The yard is as empty as it gets, the ground work has not started, and a concrete apron cleaned in February goes into the growing season with nothing on it. Organic growth restarts from bare concrete rather than from an established film, which buys most of a year.

After harvest is the second window, and on arable holdings it is often the more practical one. Machinery has come off the fields and wants a clean standing to sit on over winter, and the yard is briefly not the busiest place on the farm.

The weeks to avoid are obvious to you and worth saying anyway: anything around your own peak. On a livestock holding that is turnout and housing. On arable it is drilling and harvest. A yard clean is not urgent, so there is never a good reason to force it into a fortnight when the yard is the centre of everything.

One more timing point that gets missed. Wealden clay holds water, and a yard on clay stays wet long after the wash has finished. Plan for the surface to be out of use for a day in winter rather than an hour.

Question two: where the washings go

This is the one that has legal weight, and it is the reason I ask about drainage before anything else.

Yard washings that carry slurry, manure, silage effluent or feed residue are agricultural waste. They cannot go to a ditch, a watercourse or a soakaway. On most holdings the correct destination is the dirty water system or the slurry store, and the wash gets planned so the fall takes it there.

Where a yard has separated drainage, with a clean area running to a ditch and a dirty area running to store, that separation has to be respected on the day. It is very easy to undo it with a hose and a bit of enthusiasm.

Where a clean area does drain to a watercourse, that area gets washed with water only. No detergent, no hypochlorite, nothing that changes what is leaving the site.

Getting this wrong is a pollution incident with your name on it, not a mess to mop up. It costs nothing to plan and it is the first thing I want to establish on a survey.

What comes up well on farm concrete

Farm concrete is generally old, thick and rough, which means it takes pressure without complaint. The film on it is organic and soft, so it comes off comprehensively and the change across an open apron is dramatic.

Compacted muck in corners and along wall junctions is slow, several times slower per square metre than open standing. Decide at survey whether you want the corners done properly or the open areas covered for the same money.

Rust bleed from gates, barriers and machinery feet does not come out with water.

Flaking lime wash and old paint on block walls will come away in patches under pressure, which can look worse than leaving it alone. Say if you want walls touched at all.

What this is not

It is a wash, not a disinfection. Cleaning a livestock building to a standard that satisfies a disease control requirement is a separate discipline with approved products and record keeping attached, and I do not offer it.

Washing first is what makes any later disinfection work, since disinfectant over organic matter is mostly wasted. But the two are different jobs and it is worth being straight about which one you are buying.

The farm and agricultural page covers what I take on and what I will not touch.