As we're in the middle of the Winter months, the days continue to grow shorter and temperatures continue to drop. As a result, our horses tend to spend more and more time indoors in the barn. While your horse spends more time in his horse stall, we always recommend clients to find ways to increase comfort and decrease boredom. The result will be a happier and healthier horse.
In this article, we would like to share five products that will improve your horse's happiness, comfort, and health through the Winter months. Read on for our recommendations!
StableComfort Horse Stall Mattresses:
Whether you are in the barn or in the arena, we understand the importance of the right footing. The proper footing and flooring can improve leg health, circulation, and eventually impact performance. As the days grow shorter, we recommend our StableComfort Stall Mattresses for your horse's horse stall.
Rubber Pavers:
While we're on the subject of flooring, let's discuss our recommendation for your barn's aisle. During the Winter months, we spend more time indoors with our horses. While we spend time indoors, we often bring in wet feet and inclement weather residue – whether it is snow, salt, water, or dirt. For this reason, we recommend a flooring solution that adds comfort and much needed traction.
Our Rubber Pavers are the perfect flooring product to consider for your aisle. They are ideal for horse barn aisle ways, saddling areas, horse barn corridors, service roads, wash stalls, wash bays, grooming stalls, feed rooms, and breeding sheds.
We offer our rubber pavers in both a 7/8" thickness (for concrete floors) and 1-3/4" thickness (for natural substrates and concrete floors). The increase of thickness provides much needed comfort to tired feet – offering a 50.7% force reduction. This force reduction also translates to durability and resiliency.
They are slip resistant, even when wet, because our rubber pavers provide a superior coefficient of friction in both wet and dry conditions. You can learn more about our rubber pavers in this helpful blog post.
Bedding Blockers:
If you are spending more time in the barn, chances are that a messy interior will drive you crazy. Our Bedding Blockers are a fantastic way to keep your barn nice and tidy. These innovative Blockers are installed in your horse stall door's threshold.
Built from rigid materials, our Bedding Blocker contains shavings and feed inside your horse stall. The Bedding Blocker is the first and only product specifically designed to save you money on horse and large animal bedding costs. This low profile, safe threshold barrier keeps more bedding in your stalls, and mud and debris out.
Here's what one recent client said about their Bedding Blocker: "It is so much ncier not to walk into a shavings filled barn aisle every morning! Even my 27 year old gelding quickly learned he could brush the bristles to enter and exit the stall. This product definitely works!"
Horse Stall Fronts with Mesh & Yokes
Last but not least, let's discuss horse stall fronts. This fourth and final recommendation might not be as intuitive as the above recommendations. However, the right choice in materials and horse stall design will ensure a happier and healthier horse – not just in the Winter months, but year round.
If possible, we always recommend to add clients to add a yoke opening to their Sliding Horse Stalls. This allows your horse the ability to socialize with the rest of the barn – especially important during Winter months. Our Yokes come in multiple designs. They include open designs such as our popular v-shaped yoke, our racetrack yoke (as seen in our Stall Gates), and also a rectangular yoke design. We also offer the ability to make them "hinged" to seamlessly fold down and close as needed.
Below is yet another possibility - Removable Yoke Fill Pieces for yoke openings. This yoke option allows us to prep your yoke with openings to seamlessly fit a Removable Yoke piece into your opening. This is most cost effective than welding a hinged, fold-down yoke. It also provides you with flexibility to close off yokes on stalls as needed.
We also recommend to add mesh or a grilled bottom (1") to your European Horse Stall Fronts or Sliding Horse Stall Fronts. This design choice provides you and your horse with more visibility – both into the stall and out into the aisle. This provides your horse with more visibility – alleviating stress and anxiety during stall rest. Another added benefit? This design also allows for ample ventilation and the ability for heavy gasses (i.e. ammonia) to flow out of the barn. The end result is a healthier and more functional barn.
We hope that this article has helped provide ideas to increase comfort within your barn. Do you have any questions on this post or simply need help with your barn project? You can reach us at sales@americanstalls.com or a call at (855) 957-8255. We look forward to assisting you!
