Tips for small-acreage horse farms

Having a horse of your own sure sounds nice. You can take the time to build up your relationship with it, and you can go for a ride whenever you see fit. But, as you’ve probably guessed, horses need space. To keep your horse healthy, you will need to keep it on a farm where they can graze, run and play freely. Therefore, having a large, well-maintained horse property for your horse is ideal. But, as it usually is in life, the ideal is rarely achievable. Instead, you will probably need to look into tips for small-acreage horse farms and how to properly organize one. Well, let’s take a look.

What you need to understand about small-acreage horse farms

Unfortunately, not all small-acreage horse farms are properly organized. Some have too little space for horses to graze and play around in. Meanwhile, others are difficult to clean, which makes them a hotbed for infections. All in all, there are certain aspects that your farm needs to have. And, if you do manage to integrate these aspects properly, your horse will remain happy and healthy.

How to organize a small horse farm

Some of the aspects your farm needs to have are:

• You need to have a decent pasture with few-to-no weeds.
• Every aspect of your farm (horses, water, mud, manure, grass…) needs to function together. Therefore, you need to organize a system where you will be able to easily connect all of these.
• As the owner, you need to have an easy way to clean your farm.
• You need to ensure that there is no mud or manure is piling up, especially during the rainy season.

Luckily, with proper organization and forethought, you can take care of these aspects even with a small farm. But, you must keep them in mind from the moment you start building up your farm. Altering an existing farm is much more difficult than simply setting up a proper one from the get-go.

Setting up a pasture

Having a well-maintained pasture is a must if you want your horses to stay happy and healthy. The first thing you should do is to figure out what type of soil you have to work with. After that, you want to find a resilient type of grass that can fight weed and survive with your horses. Try to study up a bit on how horses affect pastures and what you need to do to maintain them. Your primary goal here is to have a pasture that is luscious and easy to maintain. After that, you can worry about nutrition, since it should be the primary source of it for your horse.

Maintaining hygiene

It is actually quite hard to overstate the importance of maintaining proper hygiene on your farm. If you fail to do so, bacteria and viruses can easily pile up and your horses can easily become sick. So, to keep your animals healthy, you need to keep your farm clean. This means that any mud or soil that gets misplaced needs to be removed ASAP. This, as you will soon learn, is much easier said than done. But, this is precisely why you need to set up a decent system where you can clean your farm with as little hassle as possible. If you don’t know where to store certain cleaning tools, we suggest heading to verifiedmovers.com and learning how to find a decent storage/moving company.

It is vital that you keep both your farm and your horses clean.

Restricting movement

To maintain both your pasture and your farm in general, you will need to be able to restrict movement. This is due to two reasons. First, you need to have access to different areas of your farm without having to worry about your horses interrupting you. This will make cleaning easier and more efficient.

Second, you need to have a paddock. For those of you who don’t know, a paddock is a small outdoor area where your horse will stay segregated from the rest of the pasture. You can think of this area as a “sacrifice area”. To maintain the amount of grazing and prevent your pasture from becoming bare, you need to have an area where you will keep your horse away from it. Ideally, your paddock should be contacted to your stall. That way, your horse will have easy access to it during winter. In addition, you’ll be able to easily bring out your horse to clean the stall. The important thing to note is that your paddock needs to remain dry, even during harsh weather.

Installing fences

If there is one thing all small-acreage horse farms need, it’s decent fences. After all, horses are strong animals that like to explore their boundaries. Therefore, if you do not have a strong fence separating your farm, your horse will ruin it. Keep in mind that they need to be around 4 feet tall to safely contain your horses. Also, you want to have decent-sized gates within your fences. Know that you will probably have to push through tools and farm equipment to clean your farm.

The final tip for maintaining a small horse farm

Whether or not your small horse farm will function is entirely up to you. Know that there are countless ways of setting up small-acreage horse farms and that you need to know a fair bit about horse maintenance to set up a decent one. So, do yourself a favor and do as much research as possible. Talk with more experienced people and try to figure out how to best utilize the land you have. As you learn, you will be able to figure out which improvements to implement, and how to help your animals flourish. With luck, you should be able to set up a small farm that is easy to maintain and perfectly suited for your horses’ temperament.