Optimising Your Acres: How To Ensure Your Farm Is Equipped For Horses

From stable and land maintenance to transportation, healthcare, food and medicine, the costs of horse ownership can add up quite quickly. But alongside the financial considerations of horse care, many regional homeowners and farmers find that despite the size of their land lots, they still often don’t have ideal conditions or infrastructure for keeping horses comfortable on their properties.

If you’re thinking of keeping horses on your property, it’s essential to first ensure your land provides adequate exercise, comfortable grazing and field conditions, and stable conditions. We’ll be outlining how best you can optimise your land for keeping horses comfortably today, namely by sharing the top investments for horse care as well as design considerations you’ll need to make when organising your property.

Property and equipment considerations

To begin, for farmers and landowners who are expecting to add new infrastructure for horse keeping purposes, it’s imperative to make sure you outline the estimated costs of these new property and equipment investments to ensure that they can be added to your farm insurance cover. This preliminary step can make sure new amenities like stable facilities, grazing paddocks, on-site equestrian training facilities like circuits and obstacle courses, and specialised care equipment and their own storage facilities are all covered by your farm insurance provider if they were to become lost or damaged as a direct result of an insured event.

Equipping yourself with a strong estimate of upfront costs can also help you maintain a strategic approach to buying horses for your farm. If you’re looking to train horses and can expect more costs before you see a return on your investment, maintaining a critical approach to property improvements and equipment purchases alongside insurance considerations can help you stay within budget when expanding your farm to include horses and horse facilities.

Land size and conditions

Being highly energetic animals, horses naturally require a lot of space to meet their basic personal enrichment and welfare requirements. That’s why virtually all equine experts recommend that landowners have at least 1-1.5 acres per every horse on their property, plus one extra acre for good measure.

Alongside considerations for the size of your farm property, farmers are also advised to assess the terrain and ecological conditions of their land to determine whether they’re suitable for keeping horses. For example, keeping horses on wet, muddy, or swampy ground can eventually result in horses developing thrush in their hooves.

You also want to make sure your land possesses a good mix of short and tall grass pastures and other varied terrain, including hilled areas and areas with plenty of tree shade. Ryegrass and phalaris grass are ideal for horse pastures, but excess consumption may result in horses developing laminitis, which is why having adequate space for a dry lot or two on your property is also ideal. That way, horses and ponies can enjoy active hours outside of their stable without being left to graze idly on an excess of non-structural carbohydrates. Dry lots can also be useful for quarantining foals and older horses and ponies alongside supporting the monitoring of laminitis-prone horses.

Stable placement and design

If your land is ideally sized for keeping horses, then the next decision you have to make is where to position your stables. This is arguably the most important decision you’ll make when preparing your farm property for keeping horses, as everything from your construction materials to bay placements and weatherproofing to solar orientation must be considered to ensure your stables are comfortable and durable.

Keeping passive design principles in mind, farmers can construct stable facilities that effectively reflect sunlight and thus don’t absorb solar heat, whilst still providing plenty of wind and rain protection during cooler weather. Ensuring sufficient light and airflow is also key for keeping horses comfortable year-round. Installing industrial fans can also aid in facilitating airflow during summer for larger stables.

Then there’s the placement of the stables themselves. As horses require more maintenance than other livestock, positioning your stables closer to residential buildings is ideal, as you can ensure people are always nearby in the event of an emergency. If you’re planning to get horse supplies delivered, then equipping your stable facilities with large vehicle access points is also going to provide added convenience over the long term. Adding float parking located in proximity to your stables is also ideal and can significantly reduce the hassle of preparing horses for transport.

Seasonal considerations

Whilst we’ve touched on how best to keep your horses comfortable in stables and paddock areas from season to season, there are other seasonal considerations that must be made when preparing your farm property for keeping horses. Arguably the most important factor to consider is frost trends in your area and how these may affect the overall health of your horses and ponies as well as food availability.

Winter frost can cause surfaces across your farm property to become slippery, which runs the risk of injuring horses. Improving surface traction by spreading sand or straw can aid in reducing risks during frost build-up and protecting horses from accruing injuries during colder weather.

But there are just as many dangers for horses living in naturally arid climates as for those living in alpine regions. In arid climates, horses are more at risk of experiencing dehydration or even malnutrition due to food scarcity. For farms in both frost-prone and arid regions, managing food sources for horses should involve ensuring that plenty of hay or straw is available at all times, and that your property may even be equipped for growing your own vegetables and other foods for horses to forage year-round.

Optimising your horse property over the long term

With all these practical considerations made, farmers should be able to effectively ‘optimise their acres’ and maximise their available space for comfortably keeping horses.

For more inspiration on designing your own equine facilities, check out our write-up on the DIY signature property, Elivyn Park. These Perth-based Appaloosa ranch showcases a great design that works for both humans and horses alike (as well as some other furry friends that call the stables home).