About Manure Forks and Manure Grapples

Cleaning bedding, moving compost, and handling loose fibrous material is work that buckets do badly. A bucket has to be driven into the pile and scoops the floor along with the manure. Tined attachments slide under and through material instead, letting the fines drop and picking up the bulk, which is faster, cleaner on the barn floor, and easier on the machine.

Manure Forks

A manure fork is an open set of tines with no top lid. It is the simplest and lightest option, and it is what you want for scooping and carrying loose bedding, manure, compost, silage, and similar material where nothing needs to be held down. Because there is no hydraulic lid, a fork needs no auxiliary hydraulics at all, which makes it a straightforward fit on almost any loader.

Manure Grapples

A manure grapple adds a hydraulic top lid that closes onto the tines. That clamping action is what lets you hold material that would otherwise slide off: matted bedding pulled up in sheets, wet compost, brush, small bales, and awkward loose loads. It also lets you carry a taller load without spilling it across the yard. The tradeoff is that a grapple weighs more, costs more, and requires auxiliary hydraulics at the loader arms to operate the lid.

Which One You Need

Choosing between them comes down to whether you need to clamp. If your work is scooping and dumping loose material, a fork does it with less weight and no plumbing. If you regularly handle matted pack, wet material, or mixed loads that need holding, the grapple earns the difference.

Sizing for the Barn

Size to the machine and the barn. Width should generally be at least as wide as your tires or tracks, but the more binding constraint in livestock work is usually the building: measure your narrowest doorway, alley, and stall opening, because that dimension caps what you can actually use. Weight matters too, since any attachment hangs at the end of the loader arms and counts against your loader's rated operating capacity along with the load.

Mounting and Construction

Most of these attachments use a universal quick attach mounting plate, the standard interface on skid steers and compact track loaders and available on many compact tractor loaders. Confirm your interface before ordering if your tractor uses a different mount. Tines take the abuse, so look for replaceable tines that bolt on rather than tines welded permanently to the frame. Replaceable tines mean a bent or worn tine is a part swap instead of a repair. Also check tine spacing and how the tine bar ties into the frame. Each listing states width, tine configuration, and mounting details.

Related Categories

For heavier clamping work outside the barn, see our full range of skid steer grapples. Move feed, bedding, and bulk material with skid steer buckets, clear stone from pasture and paddocks with a rock bucket, level arenas and lanes with a soil conditioner or landplane, and keep yards open in winter with our snow pushers, blades and buckets.