These Barn Design Tips Can Help Prevent the Spread of Contagious Diseases
Biosecurity plays a key role in keeping your horses safe and healthy. Whether you’re showing, training, or selling horses, proper biosecurity practices can help prevent the spread of contagious diseases, such as Equine Herpes Virus and strangles. It can be challenging to implement biosecurity practices if your barn isn’t set up correctly, which is why it’s essential to design your horse barn for biosecurity when you first build it. As you plan your barn, consider these helpful design tips to prevent the spread of contagious disease.
Create a Quarantine Space
Proper biosecurity begins with the ability to quarantine horses upon their arrival at your facility effectively. That’s difficult to accomplish when you don’t have a proper quarantine space.
If you’ll often be bringing in new horses, then it’s worth building a quarantine barn. This quarantine barn and its paddocks should be downwind and placed away from your other paddocks and barns. By keeping new horses physically separated from your other horses, you’ll be well-prepared to prevent disease spread when you add other biosecurity measures, such as proper handling protocols and the use of foot baths.
Choose Stall Partitions for Full Separation
Diseases like Equine Influenza Virus and strangles can spread through nose-to-nose contact, so design your stalls to prevent such contact between horses that could be ill. Look for solid Stall Partitions that are tall enough to keep horses from touching noses while stalled.
Explore the different types of Stall Partitions and find the best fit for your Horse Stall in this in-depth article.
Consider the type of Horse Stall Doors you choose as well. When quarantining horses, it’s best to keep their heads fully within the stalls, which can also help prevent horses from leaning out of their stalls and touching noses, or from snorting and contaminating barn aisle surfaces. If you’ll only be periodically using the stalls as quarantine stalls, then a stall door with a drop-down yoke gives you the option to choose when you’ll let horses put their heads out into the aisle and when you want to close them in.
Maximize Air Circulation
Maximizing air circulation within your barn can help prevent airborne disease spread, and the ventilation is important for horses who may be recovering from illness. Investing in horse stall windows is an excellent way to maximize air circulation in stalls. At American Stalls, we custom-build our Barn Windows to perfectly fit your existing window openings. The grills are all solid welded and are pre-hung, making for a simple installation. Plus, you can choose from many design options for the exact functionality and style that you want. 
Installing barn fans can also help with air circulation. Select high-quality, large fans explicitly designed for use in barns. Barn environments are harsh on electrical components, since fans are exposed to large amounts of dirt and dust, as well as high humidity. Buying a quality barn fan can help maximize your investment.
Create Wide Barn Aisles
To ensure that you can keep horses separated and prevent contact, build your quarantine barn with an aisle that is at least 12 feet wide, if not wider. Creating more distance between the horses can help prevent disease spread by keeping them from making contact with others as they walk through. 
Find out the ideal aisle width for safety, movement, and long-term barn function in this article: How Wide Should Your Barn Aisle Be?
Choose Stall Materials That Are Easy to Disinfect
When building your horse stalls, use materials that are easy to disinfect. Non-porous materials, like metal and rubber, are easy to thoroughly and repeatedly disinfect.
Avoid using untreated wood in your stalls, which is porous and can harbor moisture. Instead, choose treated wood or waterproof and seal any wood that you’ll use in your stalls, so that you can more easily disinfect them between uses.
Install Flooring With Minimal Seams and Crevices
The seams and crevices in your floors can also trap and harbor moisture, making them more difficult to thoroughly clean and disinfect. Choose flooring materials made of solid, non-porous surfaces, such as rubber.
For example, while Rubber Pavers are beautiful additions to many barn aisles, they’re not ideal for a quarantine barn because of the many seams that are formed by the individual pavers. A product like Interlocking Rubber Mats would be a better choice, as they have minimal seams. 
When it comes to flooring for the horse stalls in your quarantine barn, the StableComfort Horse Stall Mattress is an excellent choice. This stall mat system features a crumb rubber mattress topped by a rubber-coated, waterproof top cover. That one-piece top cover not only makes cleaning stalls easy and fast, but is also easy to disinfect between uses.
From mats to mattresses, find out what stall flooring works best for your horses and barn: Flooring 101 for Horse Stalls.
Create Space Between Paddocks
Plan your paddock layout so that no paddocks share adjoining fence lines. You will need to invest more in fencing materials. Still, if you design your paddocks so that they’re separated by at least four feet of space, you can prevent horses from touching noses over the fences, potentially preventing the spread of disease. 
Invest in high-quality horse fencing, such as HDPE Horse Fencing. This durable fencing is strong and features long-lasting colors, thanks to a UV protection film. Since the fencing is crafted from 100% HDPE, it won’t crack or become brittle in extreme temperatures, helping to keep your horses safely contained and separated to prevent the spread of potential diseases.
Learn more about biosecurity in the barn in this article.
Contact American Stalls for Your Barn Building Needs
As you plan and design your barn for biosecurity, contact American Stalls. We’re happy to work as a team with your architect and builder, so we can custom-build quality horse stalls and barn components that will be the right fit for your project. Contact us today at (855) 957-8255 or email us at sales@americanstalls.com to schedule a sales and design consultation.
