Horse Housing

[Does’ Leap]

We are planning on building a horse barn for our 4 horses (2 drafts, 1 draft cross, and 1 halflinger) next summer and are in the planning phase. What do folks do for horse housing? Better yet, if you were to do it over, what would you do? We are considering tie stalls, box stalls, and loose housing or a combination of all three. How does a tack room fit in along with harnessing and manure management?

Thanks.

George

[Rivendell Farm]

One of the best setups I’ve seen was built by a Suffolk horse breeder in Canada. The scale was bigger than what you’re talking about, but you might use some of his ideas. He had a row of about 12 tie stalls on one side of the barn. The horses faced mangers for hay and grain feeding. Beyond these was a work aisle for bringing in feed. Behind that was the year’s supply of hay in the center of the barn. I don’t remember where grain was kept, but I assume it was in a secure granary in the barn. Behind the row of stalled horses on the other side of the aisle there was a manure composting area about 4 four feet below floor level and opening to the ground level on the outside for easy manure removal and spreading. The covered manure pit was divided in two halves so composting pigs could work in one while the other was being filled. A diagram would make this much more clear, but the idea is to keep in mind minimizing labor requirements as much as possible. A box stall would be nice in case you have a sick horse or some special situation, but isn’t really necessary. Horses are better off outside whenever possible.
I don’t have a setup anything like the one I just described. I carry manure much too far and feed the hay and grain from the horse side of the feeders, but if I were starting from scratch to build something I would do it different. Bob

[Andy Carson]

Having moved into a place with no horse facilities, I had to build everything this year. I had initially thought I would build a small barn with box stalls, but having used a simple run-in in all year, I decided to keep this system. I built a three sided run-in with a feed manger and room to keep a few bales of hay and rodent proof containers for grain. There is also room for tack storage in this building and a place to tie the horses inside. The bulk of my hay is stored in a separate building, which I like because if the hay ever catches fire, not all is lost. The run-in is open to a small sacrifice area where the horses can trot around a little and crap all they want. They have actually picked out a couple areas in here to deposit manure, which makes it easy to pick up and (predictably) there is no ammonia smell as in barns. One important factor that makes this works for me is that my draft horse (who needs much more food) is very dominant over my riding horse (who is also a very easy keeper). Because of the pecking order and the food requirements of the animals, I can dump the grain in two piles (for example) in the feed manger. The draft will choose the bigger pile every time and the riding horse gets pushed onto the smaller pile. Same with hay. Easy sleezy. Also, because the manure is distrubuted over a relatively large area, there is no need to pick it up every day (or even every week). The horses chose to not soil thier run-in and the need for bedding is extremely minimal. When there is pasture, the horses are turned out at night in one of three small rotated pastures, where they spend about 2 weeks for each pasture. The concept of rotating pastures is extremely nice for many many reasons, and the grass really seems to come back strong when not overgrazed and given a month to recover before being grazed again. Also, because I am always leading the horses to a place they want to go (either to grain in the AM or to pasture in the PM) they are extremely easy to catch. Overall, I really like the system that I have kinda fallen into. I can think of a few downsides though. 1. It is more difficult to control what horses eat than with individual stalls (I rely on my horses to do this for me -this won’t work for everyone) 2. It requires space for sacrifice areas and pastures 3. The horses can get a little buddy sour when together all the time and 4. When picking manure out of the sacrifice area, one much walk around a little from pile to pile (rather than having a big mound of manure right in front of you). At any rate, it’s something to think about for small numbers of horses…

[grey]

Due to our climate and our small amount of horse-appropriate pasture, my horses only spend about half to one-third of their free time on pasture. The remainder of the time is divided pretty evenly between sacrifice paddock and tie stalls.

I don’t have much use for box stalls. If I were breeding anything, I should like a foaling stall and a safe nursery paddock, but I long ago converted my foaling stall to a shop. I like some tie stalls in the barn and a sand-footed paddock with some kind of shelter outside the barn.

The sand-footed paddock is the sacrifice area in the winter when the pastures are too soggy and the grass has gone dormant. I feed in a manger in the shelter, to avoid feeding on the sand. Although sand increases the risk of colic, it is so many orders of magnitude easier to sift manure out of, versus hogsfuel. We don’t freeze up hard here, except maybe for a few days at a stretch, nor do we get anything but a dusting of snow here and there. So manure pickup is a daily thing in the sacrifice area.

When I’m using my horses regularly, they stay in the tie stalls at night… unless they’ve had a really hard day, in which case they get the paddock or the pasture so they don’t get stiff overnight.

If your climate is damp, you’ll want a climate-controlled tack room to keep stuff from molding. My nice stuff and the things I don’t use as often get stored in such a way as not to mold. The daily-use stuff hangs near the tie stalls and does mold a bit, even with daily use. It’s pretty humid here. Oh! Make sure your tack room door is extra-wide to accomodate carrying saddles and harnesses through it without having to turn sideways. Don’t store harnesses too near any stalls – the ammonia is hard on leather and stitching.

I compost my manure, so the covered compost pile structure is away from the barn a bit, so the leachings from the pile doesn’t trickle out onto the driveway. If you’re going to use a spreader, see if you can’t arrange it to house the spreader as close to your stalls as possible, under a shed roof.

[Does’ Leap]

Thanks all for the replies – good food for thought. I will try to post some plans once we have something concrete.

George

[mitchmaine]

hey george, one thing i’d try and avoid in building your barn, is to have the run in under the eaves of the building. snow and rain runoff will turn into the worst mess you ever saw. they can make a mess coming in the gable end too, but nothing like coming in under an overhang. best of luck, mitch

[Charlie B]

One of the best barns i ever saw was a Quarter Horse farm. The trainer had them build his tack room so that a whole wall of the room would spin. They mounted a pipe in the center of the wall and had latches on the ends. When he went into his tack room he would choose his saddles and tack that he was going to use that day and put them on the wall (saddle racks and bridle hooks were on the wall). Then he would unlatch the wall and spin it into the outside alley where he tacked up his horses. The same could be done with harnesses and collars. It was so much easier than dragging tack through a doorway. If you were using the same harnesses and collars everyday it would save you alot of trouble.

[Ed Thayer]

I would echo Mitch’s statement. Our gravel paddock is on the West side of the barn and the horses both have free access to it from doors in the box stalls. It is on the gable end of the barn and thus the roof sheds the water away from from it. However, with doors on the west and always open it allows the wind to whip in and does present it’s own problems. I had no choice but to put my doors there as my barn was allready built.

Ed

[Anonymous]

Here is a couple of photos of the barn on the farm where I worked a couple of summers ago. In the last photo you can see the whole barn, it is the one nearest me in the photo. The barn comprises of a two and a half story hay and straw barn that connects directly to a lean to where you a row of tie stalls, an alley and then three pig pens behind for hogs to turn the horse manure. the pig pens are concrete and can be cleaned out with a bucket loader. There is a feed alley in between the tiestal and the main hay storage barn so you can walk infront of the horses mangers to feed them. Horses are watered when they come in and leave at a water tub with an automatic waterer in the main alley.

-Devin 🙂

[Does’ Leap]

Looks like a great set-up. Thanks for the pics.

George

[Jean]

When I was a kid I worked at West River Stables in Brookline VT. I worked to ride. It was a great barn setup, tie stalls for horses used in the schooling program, box stalls for boarders horses and the 2 morgan stallions. The manure was all shoveled into holes in the floors and stored under the barn in space large enough to get a tractor into for cleaning. The tie stalls were facing the hay room and all had a door that was used for feeding in front of the horses. The main hay storage was upstairs, but was dropped into a smaller hay room on the level of the horses. There was also a large storage for shavings, a truck would drive into the upstairs and dump the shavings into a hole that was accessed on the same level as the horses.

Too bad the property has been empty for years, wonderful old farm house had been an inn for over 50 years. I was born there. Miss that place and now that I have horses of my own I realize how nice the barn was.

[Rivendell Farm]

Devin- Those wouldn’t by any chance be pictures of the Laing’s barn? That’s the barn I attempted to describe back at the beginning of this thread. Bob

[jen judkins]

Hey George. Since you asked….:D

I thought long and hard about my barn layout. It is a simple structure…36 x 36 with 3 12 x 12 stalls that turn out to my upper pasture, a 12 x 36 cement aisle and on the far side a 12 x 12 feed room, tack room and spare stall (I use for rescues, sick horses or extra hay). The barn is on the highest point of my property and boy am I glad I decided on that spot….drainage is key. My stalls open out onto the south side of the barn, not on the gable end. I agree this is not optimal, as previously mentioned, so I built a 12 foot farmers porch, which I love and this cuts down on the muck right outside the barn and allows more protected loafing area for the horses (I sometimes have more horses than stalls).

The stalls are built so the dividers come out easily and the whole area can be opened up like a run in shed. The stalls could easily be subdivided into straight stalls as well.

As an afterthought, I built a manure shed with 3 10 x 10 ‘stalls’. I dump manure and shavings into one stall at a time and stir with the tractor regularly. This is really a great way to speed up the composting process. The floor and back wall are cement, the rest is modular, so the walls can come down or up depending on what I am doing. The pigs spend a month or two in this area in early spring….they stay warm and compost the winters manure for me.

I’ll take a photo tomorrow…should make more sense. Jennifer.

[Does’ Leap]

Thanks for that input. It sounds similar to what we are closing in on, stalls going out to “farmers porch” (I had not heard that term before!). I think I remember you saying you let horses comingle in and out of stalls free will. I am not sure that would work well with us with the 2 mares. I worry the little one would get cornered and pummelled. but I really want to understand your manure shed, since we are trying to incorporate this but can’t quite figure out how it would work most efficiently. Look forward to the pictures!

Kristan

[jen judkins]

Still working on the pictures…sorry, it was a busy day.

In regard to the sharing of space. I have had all sorts of combinations of horses…up to 8, sharing the 3 stalls. Some horses will share space willingly (I have found 3 horses in a 12 x 12 stall) and some will not share an inch (such as my alpha gelding)… but they all sort it out in rather quick order. Which is why I like the porch, as overflow, of sorts…provides shelter without the confines of a stall.

I can see why folk have straight stalls though…easy to put horses where you think they will be safe and easy to manage.

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