Fall / Winter Riding and Program Considerations (Part 3 of 4 - Facilities)

Fall is officially here, and in the Pacific Northwest that means the start of the rainy season (and lots of mud!). While running Little Bird Farm I found several ways to manage both of these elements. I’m hopeful some of them help you (and your students/clients) be best prepared, too. In this 4-part series I’ll be covering clothing, tack, facilities setup, and policies.

Little Bird Farm is entirely outdoors. Needless to say, in Oregon's rainy environment I have become a bit obsessive about mud control with horses at our facilities.

First, I put in an all weather arena. Our farm's base is clay so we scraped and compacted the clay, put down 3 inch rock and compacted it, laid road tarp (I highly recommend road tarp over landscape tarp. It is more durable), put down 3/4 minus rock compacted, then added Equiloft footing on top of that. We have a drainage ditch around the high side for water runoff and the whole arena is canted at a 1.5% grade for good drainage. Even in heavy rains, it drains in about 2 hours and doesn't ever get slick. This means that despite being outside and in one of the wetter climates in the United States, I only have a handful of non-riding days all year.

Next we built out dry paddocks. Each of our horses has a run-in shed with a dry lot (designed the same as above but with river sand instead of Equiloft - I recommend using shale if you can get ahold of it but we couldn’t at the time). Our dry lots open to pasture. This enables me to give the horses a fair amount of space to move even when the weather is bad. During the rainy season I keep them out of the pastures so they don’t end up with clay mud up to their knees/hocks. This practice reduces the risk of scratches, heavy thrush, and abscesses through the rainy season and gives me a chance to ease them onto grass in the spring when the risk of founder/laminitis is high in our region. If we were to design these over again, I would have been more mindful of angles for water drainage. As the sand in here has become compacted (inevitable with horses) we have had spots form that retain water. While I still don't have to worry about mud, the efficacy of my dry lots is not as great as it was when we first put them in. I will likely need to scrape and redo them in the next couple of years. Learn from my mistake and do it right the first time. Oh, and use panels as opposed to setting posts. We put in permanent fencing and it's going to make the process of "fixing" them much more involved than it would have been. I'm not a huge fan of the look of cattle panels - so doing it again I would go with something like Noble panels that are designed to look a bit more permanent, even if they are not.

Finally, we converted the carport off the side of our shop onto crossties and put a door in the side of the shop on that side. In the shop, one corner is a dedicated tack room. This way we can get horses ready in a dry area and put tack away without getting wet hauling it back and forth. The shop is also dry, reducing the risk of tack getting moldy in our wet climate.

The first season I taught at our home facility we didn't have hook ups for electrical / lights on the arena. It was a tough year. I bought solar lights but Oregon is so cloudy and overcast that one wouldn't even make it through a whole lesson by the end of the season. About halfway through the winter I added battery powered lights along the arena fence to get through the season, but during the following summer I sucked it up and had electrical plumbed and proper flood lights installed. It has made a world of difference. I kept the solar and battery powered lights as backup, though, in case we lose power (not uncommon in our more rural area).

Speaking of loss of power, we have two IBC totes full of water and covered to insulate them for just such an occasion. We are on a well, so no power means no well pump and no additional water for the horses. We have since installed a hand pump on a shallow spring-fed well on the property as a backup water source, though this water has to be treated before it can be consumed.

I also keep tennis rackets in my tack room to break holes in water buckets for the horses when they ice over. Did you know if you make a hole big enough for your horse to drink out of, as opposed to breaking the entire top level of ice, it will actually help insulate the water below so that you don’t lose as much each time it freezes over? This knowledge has saved me on numerous occasions when we haven't thawed out quickly enough or returned to power such that I can get more water from our well. I can tote water down from the house (if you live in an area where there is a risk of power loss, you're probably already familiar with filling bathtubs before an outage occurs - better safe than sorry), but it's a real pain to do when there's ice on the ground.

While this probably should have gone under clothing, the final thing that makes winter at our farm a bit more manageable is a pair of Yaktrax. If you haven't seen them before, they're traction cleats that fit over the bottom of your shoes or boots. They allow me to walk virtually like normal down to where our horses are even through the ice. I do recommend getting two pairs, though, as I had one break on me last winter in the middle of a 5 day thaw out.

While mostly rain with a bit of snow and ice is the name of the game here in Oregon in the winter, weather varies greatly across the US and the world. How have you set up your facilities to make them most ideal in your regional climate?

Missed Part 1 of this series, featuring fall and winter clothing suggestions? Check it out here.

How about Part 2, covering tack? Get caught up here.

Hugs and Happy Riding!

Kristin

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