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Daily stall-cleaning or occasional stripping?

From: Harmony

Dear Jessica, I board four horses at my small farm. We have just four stalls so my own horses (I have four of my own) live outdoors in a pasture with a three-sided shelter. I need to board horses to make money to pay for the new fencing I need to fence one more pasture and replace the old fencing (very saggy 4x4 wire) in my horses' pasture. My place is just four acres and I don't even have an arena, we just ride in the pasture and along the road. My boarders are all nice people who live in town and don't have a lot of time to see their horses. Most of the time they come out on the weekends only. We offer only full board, so I do the feeding and turnout and I clean the stalls. I've been cleaning them every day and then stripping them out and replacing all the bedding every couple of months as needed. Nobody has complained about the stalls. None of these four ladies is the kind of person who has a fit if the shavings aren't perfectly white and fluffy, or if they come out and find a pile of poos in their stall. They are all pretty reasonable about what is "clean". But my husband thinks I am spending too much time cleaning stalls! He wants me to clean them every other day at most. He has pointed out to me that I clean my own horses' shed twice a week only, and says that it might even be more efficient to let the stalls build up for a few weeks, then strip them out and replace all the bedding. I have been cleaning the stalls every day, and some days I'll pick them whenever I go through the barn, just because I like to see stalls be really clean. What do you think about his idea that I could just clean them every other day or even every third day? I am new to this whole boarding experience and I want my boarders to be happy here, but I don't want to be wasting my time if my husband is right about stall cleaning. Please help me figure out what's right. Thanks! Harmony


Hi Harmony! Your stall-cleaning schedule is going to depend on the stalls, the bedding, and the horses in those stalls, but you should count on cleaning stalls once a day - at least. Under some conditions, this will be enough, and your current arrangement (clean stalls daily, strip stalls and replace bedding every couple of months) may be perfect for the horses in your barn. Under different circumstances, or with different horses, you might need to clean stalls twice a day and/or strip the stalls more often.

You'll find more on this subject in the HORSE-SENSE archives, by the way.

How big are your stalls, and how do they drain? If you have bedding over mats over lime over gravel over larger rocks, your stalls probably drain wonderfully. If you have mats over dirt, or just dirt or road-pack for stall flooring, your stalls probably drain less well, and will be much more likely to begin smelling strongly of ammonia if you don't keep them very clean and dry.

Do the stalls have runs attached to them, and do the horses have free access to those runs? This may not change the amount of manure and urine in the stalls, since some horses will walk back into their stalls to use their "toilet corner", but it means that the stalls will be better-ventilated, and it also means that the horses have the option of getting OUT of the stalls and into fresher air.

How absorbent is your stall bedding - and how deeply do you bed your stalls? If you're using a thin layer of bedding over mats, try using more bedding. Even with mats, horses need at least several inches of bedding for comfort and absorbency. If you're using sawdust, consider using shavings instead - they're typically easier to clean. Pelleted wood bedding is another excellent option; in many cases it may be preferable to the locally-available shavings, and its quality is more predictable.

Are the horses in their stalls (or stalls and runs) all day, or are they in only at night, only during the day, or...? The amount of time a horse spends in a stall will certainly affect the amount of stall-cleaning that's required. If horses are turned out most of the day, and come into their stalls only at mealtimes, then go back out into the pasture, you may find that it takes you only a few minutes each day to keep the stalls clean, and it may be three or four months before you need to strip the stalls - or it may be a year or longer.

Letting the manure and urine build up for several weeks, as per your husband's suggestion, is not an acceptable option. In addition to making the horses' lives unpleasant, this practice will also put the horses at risk for thrush and respiratory diseases. You won't enjoy walking through your barn, because it will stink - and the poor horses will have to live in it! It's also not particularly efficient. "Just strip it and put in new bedding" sounds easy, but if the stall is really filthy, the process is not going to be as easy as it sounds. It takes a considerable effort to strip a wet, stinking stall down to the ground, and in fact you will find that the ground itself - the stall base - will become urine-soaked and nasty, and that in order to strip the stall properly, you'll also have to remove some of the base... which means that you'll need to ADD to the base regularly, otherwise your stall floors will get lower and lower. If you use mats, you'll have to remove and replace them each time you do this. If you don't use mats, you will need to add to the base AND tamp it down to create a hard surface. This is a HUGE amount of work, and even though roadpack and a tamper won't cost an arm and a leg, there's no reason you should need them at all if you clean the stalls properly every day.

Some horses are very tidy and assign themselves a "toilet corner" in their stalls. Others will use any and every part of the stall as a toilet, and some horses are always on the move in their stalls, and will quickly mix soiled bedding with clean. This makes stall-cleaning more time-consuming, so if you have horses with these habits, it's a very good idea to remove manure piles and wet spots every time you go through the barn. If those areas don't get stirred into the clean bedding, the entire stall will stay much cleaner for much longer.

I am personally far too lazy to strip stalls and replace stall base material. I use stalls as little as possible, and whenever my own horses are in stalls, I routinely clean them twice a day, and I do some casual picking whenever I happen to be in the barn for any reason. This doesn't take much time, really, and it saves time later by making the stalls much easier to tidy. It also saves on bedding! Keeping the stalls clean and dry will do more - in addition to saving bedding and keeping the air fresher and the barn atmosphere more pleasant, it will also help keep down the numbers of flies. If you use fly predators, as I do, you can easily see that leaving stalls damp and dirty is counterproductive - what's the point of making an extra effort and spending extra money to get rid of flies if you're simultaneously running a very effective fly-breeding operation inside the barn?

Your own horses may need their pasture shelter cleaned out only twice a week, because they aren't spending ALL of their time in the shelter! I would guess that most of the time, they are meandering around your pasture, grazing. But it's important to realize that all of the manure and urine has to go SOMEWHERE, and there should be some cleaning done wherever that somewhere happens to be. If your horses use the shed as their toilet, lucky you - it should be quick and easy to clean a limited space. If they rarely use the shed, then they must be using the pasture... which means that unless your pasture consists of hundreds or thousands of acres, you'll need to go around once or twice a week (at least) and remove the manure from the pasture. If your boarders' horses are turned out for eight hours a day and are in their stalls for sixteen hours, then you'll almost certainly have to do at least twice as much stall-cleaning as turnout-cleaning. If it rains so hard that you have to close the runs and pastures for a week, you'll be spending a lot more time and effort cleaning stalls, run-in sheds, and sacrifice areas. If the weather is perfect and all the horses can go out full-time for a few months, you'll be spending much more time on "pasture poo patrol", but you'll be able to clean the stalls ONCE and then leave them alone until the horses have to come back in.

Your husband may not understand the quantities of manure and urine that horses produce on a daily basis - explain to him that you're dealing with forty or forty-five pounds of manure and several gallons of urine from EACH horse on the property. Stall-cleaning is a necessary investment in horse health and welfare. You may be new to the business of running a boarding barn, but I'll bet that your boarders have kept their horses at quite a few different barns over the years, and could tell you interesting stories about the cleanliness (or lack thereof) of their horses' stalls at different establishments. You say that your place is small, that you don't have an arena of any kind, and that you and your boarders ride along the road or in your pasture. So WHY is it that your boarders keep their horses with you? It's obviously not for the riding facilities, and you don't give lessons, so I'm going to guess that they like the atmosphere of the place. I'm quite sure that a very important part of that atmosphere - both figuratively and literally - is the cleanliness of their horses' stalls.

The "bottom line" here (pun intended) is that asking the question "How often should I clean the horse's stall?" is effectively the same as asking "How often should I change the baby's diaper?"

In both cases, the answer is the same:

"As often as it's needed to keep him dry and comfortable."

Jessica

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