How to Disinfect a Horse Stall?

A clean barn environment is crucial to a horse’s overall health. This is pertinent to the Horse Stalls, feed rooms, tack rooms, wash bay areas, and just about any other area in the barn. Yet, as horse people, we understand that it is challenging to maintain the barn's cleanliness from time to time.

It’s impossible to make barn surfaces 100% sterile (free of all bacteria and viruses), but meticulous disinfection can go a long way toward reducing harmful bacteria and viruses.

Clean and tidy barn for foaling.

To begin, it is important to disinfect a horse’s stall anytime you have an ill horse on your property. This means that you must disinfect the horse stall after the horse recovers and before the stall is used to house another horse.

Here are some helpful tips on how to properly disinfect a horse stall:

Timing the Cleaning & Removing Horses

Choose a cleaning period when you can expect sunny, warm days with a breeze to help ventilate the cleaning. In the meantime, other horses should be removed from the barn and moved to an area away from the contaminated horse stall.

Remove all bedding

Remove all bedding and manure and strip the horse stall bare. Don’t put any contaminated bedding in the manure pile or the spreader, as these piles can be breeding grounds for other bacteria.

Remove removable objects

Remove all removable objects from the stall, such as stall mats, buckets, hay nets, and other equipment. Clean these removal objects with a mixture of hot water and dish detergent – scrubbing the buckets with a stiff-bristled brush. Rinse thoroughly and then scrub the items again with a 10% bleach solution. Allow the buckets to then air-dry without rinsing. We then recommend scrubbing a third time with hot water and dish detergent (and any other disinfects). Rinse thoroughly after this last scrub to remove any detergent or bleach residue. We highly recommend that stall mats be cleaned similarly and hung up somewhere off the barn floor to dry out.

Disinfecting the actual Horse Stall

Clean the horse stall using a similar method as above. Spray the stall with a 10% solution of bleach before applying a disinfectant. This helps remove biofilms that can protect bacteria from disinfectants. Allow the horse stall to dry completely before spraying a disinfectant. We recommend completely washing the stall walls and other solid surfaces with a pressure washer or garden horse, a stiff scrub brush, and dishwashing detergent.

TIP: Pump sprayers from your local hardware stores apply bleach and disinfectants well.

Choosing a Disinfectant

We recommend that you ask your veterinarian for the best disinfectant to use. Phenolic disinfectants are often the best choice, but the exact disinfectant can widely depend on the pathogen you wish to control. After using the disinfectant, please allow the horse stall to fully dry.