3 horses on 5 acres, can it work?

[AKB]

Try to design your barn for efficiency. Ideally, the horses should be able go in and out of their stalls at will, and go into the sacrifice area. When you want to let them out on the grass, it should be easy to just open a gate and let them out. If you design something that is too complicated, your tendency will be to leave them out on all of the pasture all of the time. Then, you won’t have grass.

We have 2 horses on a 5 acre lot. About 2/3 of our land is pasture; the rest is road, woods and our house. Our grass is good, but not lush. We feed hay year round. It works out well.

[katyb]

This has been a cool thread for me, as we are reconfiguring our property for the horses to be on it all the time. We had been leasing 30 acres next door, but he quadrupled the lease payments this year, so we declined. I have 4-5 acres in the fence, which was fine for 2 horses, but is getting pretty ugly with three. I have fenced an additional 1/2 acre in the woods as sacrifice, and I’ve added cross fencing to section off another 1/2 acre. We are building a barn in that area (just have to add the stalls, and it’s done). I plan to keep the horses in that 1 acre for the month of March, to let the grass in the pasture grow undisturbed. That should give us plenty of grass for 12/24 turnout or a bit more for the summer months. The biggest problem I’ll face, I think, is having to do something about manure. In the past, I’d drag periodically, and that was it, but three horses make a lot more poop than two.

[equinekingdom]

absolutely it can work!! there is lots of great advice here. We have one large pasture for our horses (about 4 acres), four long pastures about a half an acre each, 8 “sacrifice” pens that they are in when it has rained or the grass has stopped growing for the winter. They have plenty of room to run around the sacrifice pens even though they aren’t huge - most of our horses are older anyway and don’t want to do anything other than stand there are the round bales and eat - literally ALL day and night. That’s why we put hay nets on them.

We turn them out in the big pasture every few weeks for some run-around time, or in the long paddocks to take a break from the smaller ones. 95% of the time, they don’t move any more in the big areas than they do in the smaller ones.

We feed free choice-hay year round. In the summer, we need less hay becuase we keep our pastures rotated well.

[CM17]

This is a great thread! I am curious whether OP ended up on small acreage and what your experience has been.

Though my comments are late to the party, my view is that a lot depends on the layout of the property and the horses on it. I recently added a 3rd horse on our 5.5 acres, a property not originally designed for horses. On the plus side, it’s a mildly sloped property with spectacular oaks and conifers that has been nicely graded, it has great curb appeal to non-horse people, storm water moves through it fairly well, the perimeter is completely fenced, and we can ride to the community arena and trails in minutes. On the minus side, the house and gardens use nearly 2 acres and a lot of irrigation, the largest area suitable for contiguous paddocks is only 1 1/2 acres, the paddock gates are about 300 ft away from the barn and cannot be seen from the stalls, and the clay-heavy soil drains poorly.

The horses live outside 24/7 7+ months of the year, and more than half time the rest of the year. It was the 3rd horse that really tipped the balance away from the current set-up being workable in terms of paddock traffic, manure, and turnout and feeding efficiency. Our half-blind Andalusian mare cannot be housed with the geldings that inevitably try to to herd her or chase her off her food, and our retired WelshxQH needs to have his spring grazing restricted. While I could add a sacrifice paddock closer to the barn, it would cost a lot to grade, cross fence and foot an adequately sized area. I am now thinking of adding galvanized panel paddocks off my (converted garage) shed row stall fronts that could be removed should a future owner wants to use the building for another purpose. The area is already graded and has a crushed rock surface. Each horse would have a little under 500 SF in this configuration, including the stall space. Not ideal, but stall paddocks could work if used strategically AND I also sub-divide the existing paddocks and do a bit of rotation. I will also likely add a Newer Spreader to my farm equipment to deal with some of the manure, rather than picking up and composting 100%. If I had it do do over again, I would still have chosen a small acreage property, but one with a run-in barn and more acreage devoted to horse use.

[clanter]

well six years is a little late, but

I am now thinking of adding galvanized panel paddocks off my (converted garage) shed row stall fronts that could be removed should a future owner wants to use the building for another purpose.

here the future owner brings in a bulldozer removing all aspects of a horse ever having been on the land then build several new homes on the land that once was pastures… oh and then do one of two things either bitch about the livestock around them or want to impose subdivision restrictions upon others surrounding them who have not yet subdivided their land “so that they can see the pretty horses that others have” … or plan is to say sorry I hope you like the planned urban community of Section 8 housing that we are putting in

[4horses]

I have 4 horses on 2.5 acres. They are in sacrifice pens during most of the year, except for my old horse who is allowed access to half the property at a time and rotated. This past summer i had more grass then the horses could eat, but i only turned out at night due to the lack of shade.

All manure is mucked out, dumped on the pasture and spread with the lawn mower.

It works but i often wish i had a larger property with less mucking involved.

[Pennywell_Bay]

I have small acreage, about 6. I have a 6 stall barn, riding ring, 1 grass jump field that doubles as turn out in good weather, a dry (mud right now) lot where the barefoot ones go with a 24/7 round bale and a nice grass area for the one with shoes to go out with a buddy.

I used to have 30 acres and everyone lived outside with run outs. Now I downsized, consolidated and rotate. This time of year I want to scream. In the spring through fall it works with proper rotation and the fact that some are stalled for about 8-9 hours depending on the season.

[Stacie]

With just a few horses I found it’s cheaper to buy hay than to pay money for seed.

[Dressage59]

We have 3 horses and 5 1/2 acres. A lot of property is taken up by the house, front yard, etc. They’re in a dry lot (or equivalent) most of the day on a round bale and get a few hours out on pasture. During the summer, they’ll have more hours out on pasture. We may sure we rotate pastures, etc.