Attractive, Quality Fencing Enhances Horse Facility Management

A practical and well-designed horse fence is a terrific benefit for a horse facility. A safe, strong horse fence protects your horses, enhances the management of your facility and gives your perimeter an attractive look. It also reflects well on your facility's management.

Keep Your Animals In And Everything Else Out

Fences help you keep the horses in and trespassers (whether human or animal) out, and they allow you to establish parameters for grazing. In addition, dividing horses by use, value, age and sex is made easier. You may want to use different types of fencing within your facility. Stallions, mares, mares with foals, weanlings and geldings need different fences. What's most important in constructing your enclosures is focusing on quality. Whether casual or fancy, a good fence should be thoughtfully planned and carefully erected. Avoid cheap options like barbed wire, which can injure horses and result in soaring veterinary costs. The best fences are highly visible (so that horses can see them easily) and "give" a little (to alleviate horses' injuries upon contact with a fence).

Multi-Purpose Arenas & Paddocks

Your fields will likely serve many purposes. In addition to exercise corrals or paddocks, your fields' uses include hay production and grazing. The layout of your corrals should provide for all aspects of horses' needs: their movement, manure removal and footing surface care. The layout also must easily accommodate field equipment. When manure spreaders, mowers and baling equipment can come in and easily move around, both fence damage and work time needed decrease.

See our pre-built arena packages to get some ideas.

As you plan for your horse fencing needs, keep in mind some common pitfalls that can cause problems for your horses and endanger their safety. Feeding and water troughs should not be backed into a corner. Given this setup, a horse may try to block others from the troughs. A centrally located trough that is away from a fence or gate will prevent such bullying and also make refilling easier. A field with deep corners creates another problematic configuration. While mowing is certainly made more difficult, deep corners also create the potential for the bullying of one horse. For your horses' safety, do not leave sharp pieces of tractors or other items in your fields. Additionally, cattle guards can be detrimental to horses, and horses can get caught in shrubs, bushes and other greens that have grown too large. Finally, horse facility owners should know that rickety fences can both harm the horses and fail to act as an effective barrier.

The layout and arrangement of a horse facility are key to ensuring its success. Proper planning not only results in a safer environment for the horses but also augments the efficiency of managing the facility. Sheds should never be on low ground. To effect good drainage, sheds should be on high ground. Also, because horses are prone to kicking and chewing the siding materials on the shed, you as facility owners should build all sheds behind the fence line to prevent the horses from harming the buildings. Erosion also poses a threat to facilities with ponds and streams. To cut down on erosion, fence off ponds and streams and use gates to facilitate supervised usage of the water sources for drinking. Finally, avoid narrow areas where horses might get stuck. Such configurations also hamper mowing.