How much water hemp hurd bedding holds

Hemp hurd, the woody core left after decortication, is chopped into small chips that work as animal bedding. Each chip is a sponge of hollow plant cells that soaks up liquid and holds it against gravity, so the stall surface stays drier. Measured carefully, hurd holds about two and a half times its weight in water, in the same range as straw and wood shavings rather than far ahead of them.

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Bedding material

Particle size

The hemp lab test used chips ground through an 8 mm screen.

Bale weight

Step through it

Hurd chipsAfter the fiber is stripped off, the woody core is ground into light, absorbent chips. Here they cover a stall floor.
Soaking it upLiquid poured on the bedding wicks into the chips. The more each gram can hold, the smaller the wet spot on the surface.
How it is measuredIn the lab, a weighed sample soaks in water, drains in a filter funnel, and is weighed again. The water left in the sample per gram is its holding capacity.
Compare materialsSwitch to wheat straw. Its published value is a little lower than the hemp test result, but the two numbers come from different methods, so treat the gap as small.
Smaller chipsGrinding finer exposes more surface and usually raises absorbency a little. Here 3 mm chips hold more than coarse 18 mm pieces.

What the measurements say

A 2023 study of ten hemp varieties ground through an 8 mm screen found hurd held on average about 252 percent of its weight in water (2.5 g per g), ranging from about 2.1 to 3.2, with no meaningful difference between varieties. Extension tables list wheat straw at about 2.2 and pine shavings at about 2.0 pounds of water per pound. The same study's literature review cites higher values for straw and shavings in other tests, so the honest conclusion is that hurd is comparable to common bedding, not dramatically better.

Claims that hemp bedding absorbs four or five times its weight appear in marketing, but the controlled test here did not reproduce them. The same study also measured how well hurd captures ammonia, which varied from variety to variety.

Try it: keep the bale at 20 kg and switch between the three materials. The litres per bale shift by only a few, which is the honest size of the difference. Then slide particle size from 20 down to 2 mm and watch the gauge rise.

The model here (simplified)

Water held per bale is bale weight times the holding capacity. The particle size effect is a teaching assumption: about 1.5 percent more capacity per millimeter finer than 8 mm, capped at plus 9 or minus 18 percent. The study's authors note smaller particles usually absorb more because of their larger surface, but they did not test it, and the straw and shavings values were not measured at a set particle size.

Sources

Physical Characterization of Ten Hemp Varieties to Use as Animal Bedding MaterialAnimals (MDPI, open access, peer reviewed)
Horse Stable Manure ManagementPenn State Extension
Horse Manure Management: Bedding Use (FS537)Rutgers NJAES Cooperative Extension

How to cite this model

Avid Solutions International. (2026, November 11). How much water hemp hurd bedding holds [Interactive 3D model]. Avid Field Lab. https://avidsolutionsintl.com/explore/hemp-hurd-bedding-absorbency

Last updated November 11, 2026

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