"Enough" land for three horses

[RooTheDay]

Related question: “how long is a piece of string”, right? But I’m curious as to where you, personally, draw this line.

Obviously, you can keep three horses on less than an acre, if you don’t mind keeping them California-style, you dry-lot the entire property, and you still like mud. Obviously Cherry Hill’s Horsekeeping on a Small Acreage has some excellent suggestions for maximizing your available space, whatever that happens to be. Obviously this also varies dependent on your horsekeeping style.

But what I’m asking about, and what I’m interested in, is your thoughts as to the amount of land required to make it pretty straightforward. To not spend a substantial amount of time and energy fighting the constraints of your acreage. To have riding facilities, adequate turnout, and not be in the horse equivalent of a 200 sq ft studio apartment.

What’s your minimum amount of land to meet that bar for three horses, and what does that look like in terms of your turnout arrangements and other factors? (e.g. out 24x7, in/out 12/12, group vs. individual, etc.)

Context, for those interested: Have been farm-shopping for a few years now. Would personally be happiest with a hundred acres and not able to see the neighbors. Given the other constraints, that’s not going to happen. Had previously been holding 15 ac as an absolute hard stop minimum, with an extremely strong preference for at least 20-25 ac, but recent economic changes (both macro and micro) mean that that’s likely not going to be a possibility for a few years. On the other hand, a farmette of 5-9 ac that meets all the other requirements is still feasible, but I’d rather keep boarding than spend all my time managing the limitations of the land; my ideal management style is 24x7 turnout with stalls for emergencies/occasional convenience (e.g. shipping early to an event or ice storms.)

[Christa_P]

5-9 acres should be very doable. I rented a 3.5 acre farm for 3 years and was able to keep my horses (at the time 6) my horse out 12-14 hours a day without a problem. I currently own 25 acres, but only have about 6 or 7 fenced and if I had shelter I could keep the current 4 out 24/7 with extra hay in the winter and early spring.

[fivestrideline]

3 acres: 3 horses out together, with a small(ish) ring, small 4 stall barn, trailer parking, and a little paddock/grass round pen. Totally doable, for 12/12 turnout or 24/7 turnout with shelters. I fed hay year round, but less in the warm months. I could’ve divided the pasture and done rotational grazing or had two turnout groups, but I never had to. The house was on an adjacent 1 acre property, but could’ve done with less (it was a huge yard to mow, not feasible for pasture otherwise I would’ve fenced it).

Benefits of the smaller properties (5ac and less) is less to maintain and everything is so central. Now, if you want a huge ring, indoor, or massive trailer storage or hay storage, you may have to be super smart with layout. If the land is mostly flat and clear, that’s easy. What’s hard is 5 acres of woods or hills!

Edited to add: I like 5 acres minimum, if the house has to be included. 7-9 is totally workable, if the land is good, it’ll be an easy setup.

[Scribbler]

It’s going to depend on the climate soil and topography. Around here no matter how big your pasture you will need to have the horses in a dry lot all winter or kill the grass permanently. And some parts of our district the grass grows all summer and fall, others it dies back in July depending on groundwater and drainage.

I don’t think you can keep horses here at all with out managing the limits of the land. Maybe 5 horses on 40 acres, but otherwise the winter carrying capacity is too low.

[Texarkana]

This is very location dependent. Regions of the country obviously vary, but even areas within the same region can vary depending on the soil, drainage, and lay of the land.

I have lived on 4 farms in 3 states. I’ve never had to “manage” my land as intensely as some horse people suggest you need to do. This is mainly because I’ve been blessed living in good locations with 4 seasons and ample grass.

Right now I have just under 11 acres for 4 horses; only about half of it is fenced for horses. The only maintenance I do is mowing. Occasionally I drag the fields if the manure is building up. I would like to spray because we have some weeds and buttercups (one paddock is particularly bad), but I always miss my window. Even without spraying, there is plenty of grass. The weeds have actually decreased significantly with regular mowing.

[JB]

Assuming a good enough grass coverage, with reasonable soil, and you want grass to provide all/most of the forage for most of the year (whatever that means for your location), generally you’re looking at 2 acres for the first horse, and another acre for every additional horse. That’s actual pasture, nothing else, and that’s going to require some strip grazing or paddock rotations to keep the grass healthy.

So, that’s 4 acres min for 3 horses.

Even that requires pretty careful pasture management

I had 4 horses on 6-7-ish acres for about 10 years, and 3 horses on those same acres the other 10. Having the 4 made an appreciable dent in the grass, especially later in the Summer, even when they were muzzled. The only separation is the barn pasture area is maybe 1.5 acres total, and encloses the barn. But it’s all free access, most of the time, not in any sort of rotational setup.

Our entire farm is a little over 10 acres, with about 2 of those being wooded. We have a reasonable size yard, a 100x180 ring, a 36x36 barn, which all brings the pasture down to around 6 to mayyyyybe 7-ish acres.

If the wooded areas weren’t there, it would easily accommodate full time grazing for 4 horses, even 5.

5 acres total is pushing it. 9 is absolutely doable for 3 horses. More turnout means less stall cleaning time. You’re still going to have to mow, and do fence repair, and weed eat fence lines, fertilize, drag the pasture every now and then.

2 acres per horse is going to work a lot better in terms of what they’ll tear up when things are wet. So all this is also location-dependent in terms of what your soil is like.

[LCDR]

Lots of factors are involved in determining the overall acreage needed. A 5 acre farm may only have 3 acres of pasture once you are done building the house, barn, driveways, equipment parking areas, composting bins, riding arena, non-grazing portion for lawn and for garden, run in sheds, and storage building, Also subtract any perimeter easements you cannot fence in. A standard dressage arena occupies one-third of an acre, as an example. A round pen occupies potential grazing territory.

[McGurk]

I’m in Central Virginia, and I would say 10 - 15 acres would allow you a riding area, three turn out paddocks to rotate, and a dry lot/sacrifice area as well. That’s if the property is well laid out, and you’re only cutting 1 - 2 acres out for the homesite, other outbuildings and the driveway.

With this setup, you could do 24/7 turnout, would only have to feed hay 5 - 6 months of the year and would not have to pick manure out of the paddocks. (You would have to harrow occasionally.)

[cutter99]

My first farmette was 4.7 acres, with a 60’ X 36’ three stall horse barn, and a 4 car garage at one end. The barn had 3 stalls on one wall with a 36’ X 40’ dry lot area, and the 4th stall had a 16’ X 50’ dry lot area attached. The remaining areas were a wash stall and tack room.

I cleaned the dry lots daily year round, and stockpiled my manure and composted it. I later used it in my flower gardens.

There were about 2 acres fenced for “pasture”, which I considered turnout for mental health more so than nutritional grazing. I fed hay in some amount year round.

I had a 60’ X 120’ ring that was more than adequate for keeping my horses legged up in my chosen discipline.

There was more yard around the house than I felt was necessary, and it could have been fenced for more turnout. The nice part about the size of the barn was it had a second floor hay loft that held approximately 1,000 bales. I filled up yearly, and never had to worry about sourcing hay at inconvenient times of year or running short.

I bought the property, completed for the most part, from a vet who had set up the barn her specifications. It was well set up, and the stalls with Dutch doors into small dry lots were beyond convenient!

[RooTheDay]

Really excellent and helpful posts so far. Thank you all much for sharing your expertise here.

@fivestrideline

Benefits of the smaller properties (5ac and less) is less to maintain and everything is so central. Now, if you want a huge ring, indoor, or massive trailer storage or hay storage, you may have to be super smart with layout. If the land is mostly flat and clear, that’s easy. What’s hard is 5 acres of woods or hills!

I do want a pretty big (outdoor) ring, at least 100x200. Indoor is not likely ever to be in the cards unless the property comes with it. Currently have a 2H GN, might upgrade to a 2+1 at some point but likely no bigger, so still not huge. And I do want hay storage, but can likely put it in the barn somehow.

@fivestrideline

Edited to add: I like 5 acres minimum, if the house has to be included. 7-9 is totally workable, if the land is good, it’ll be an easy setup.

House would be included in the lot size, and also potentially a 2nd house for family and a detached garage/workshop for the better half.

@Scribbler

It’s going to depend on the climate soil and topography.

Good call. I’m in the greater DC metro area (Maryland) and I would not consider wooded or other unusable portions as part of the total useable acreage.

@JB

Assuming a good enough grass coverage, with reasonable soil, and you want grass to provide all/most of the forage for most of the year (whatever that means for your location),

I would expect to have to supplement hay minimally November through April and would also be expecting to grain given the level of work. My mare at the moment is out about half the time on excellent pasture and eats 6 lb/day of Ultium plus free choice hay overnight additionally (usually about 30-40 lb) to maintain her weight working six days a week; that might drop a bit in full summer, but I’d expect still to have to grain her somewhat.

[luvmyhackney]

I only use the back 3 acres for my horses, but 2 are muzzled for spring, summer, and fall. If you have a small place, be sure to have a dry lot.

You could easily have three/four horses that are easy keepers on 4-5 acres. If we are talking hard keepers, it will be expensive.

[fivestrideline]

@RooTheDay

House would be included in the lot size, and also potentially a 2nd house for family and a detached garage/workshop for the better half.

Okay those two things are going to make your property needs FAR bigger than house + barn and pastures. Now you’re talking 10-15 acres, depending on how much vehicle access you need (is the shop for cars? RV? How many vehicles are you going to shuffle? How many driveways, turnarounds, etc, permanent second residence vs occasional visits that need less logistical planning).

I’d recommend getting an idea of how much space you need for you house(s), shop, and related infrastructure. The barn and pastures themselves can be 3 acres or so, depending on layout.

[joiedevie99]

@RooTheDay

House would be included in the lot size, and also potentially a 2nd house for family and a detached garage/workshop for the better half.

This is important. If you want the houses to have yards, gardens, pools etc, you need to draw that out and figure out the number of acres you want to set aside for those purposes.

My friend has 10 acres, which includes the following: indoor, outdoor, 16 stall barn/amenities, 2 medical paddocks, 6 nice paddocks, one ~3,000 sqf house with deck/yard, and an equipment garage with second story trainer’s apartment. It is tight - we have no extra space or fields to hack in - but it works. The fields need regularly maintenance/seeding, or turnout needs to be more restricted than we’d prefer to maintain good grass.

I would think a three horses on the same piece of land, with no indoor and less barn space, would be very comfortable.

[fivestrideline]

I agree. I don’t think you can do a barn, useable pastures, bigger ring, houses, shop, and all the “things” on under 10 acres. I’d expect closer to 20 would be needed, barring a perfect flat cleared rectangle of land with no site restrictions.

Speaking from experience: on any property you need to have space to turn a big (enough) trailer around easily, and not have to play musical cars every time SO wants to work on the project, or family visits. You’d be surprised how much land a functional driveway can take up, especially if you add a second residence.

[JB]

@RooTheDay

I would expect to have to supplement hay minimally November through April and would also be expecting to grain given the level of work. My mare at the moment is out about half the time on excellent pasture and eats 6 lb/day of Ultium plus free choice hay overnight additionally (usually about 30-40 lb) to maintain her weight working six days a week; that might drop a bit in full summer, but I’d expect still to have to grain her somewhat.

Oh sure, supplemental calories totally depends on the horse It’s just the forage I was referring to. I too feed hay from November-ish to March-ish, even as the horse nibble on Winter pasture

[Simkie]

I have about two acres of pasture for my three, which works, but isn’t ideal. It requires pretty aggressive management to keep useful. It took several years to turn it from the overgrazed, poor pasture when we purchased, to land that actually grows enough grass to not feed hay 100% of the year. I do still feed hay year round, but last year was the first I didn’t have to feed hay while they were turned out during the summer.

The other thing I’ve noticed is they just move less, because there’s less room. When we had more pasture, they’d go for a gallop every morning. That doesn’t happen with less. There’s a loss of base fitness that does seem to impact them, and that requires more work from me, too.

We had about 7 acres of pasture at our previous property in the midwest, and that was very nice. I was able to skip feeding hay a fair amount of the year. The pasture was overall a lot more resilient, because there was just more of it.

Overall property size is so dependent on layout and geography. Our previous place was 10 acres and so much more usable than our current place, which is 15.

[FromTheGalaxy]

I live in central Missouri and have 15 acres with 5 horses (now 6 technically I guess since my mare has a foal at her side). We have the house with a large fenced yard for the dogs, a small pond, a detached garage, 2 very large barns, an approx 50x50ft dry lot, and an outdoor arena (180 x 120 I think?) on that acreage. One field is approx 3 acres while our other field that we also hay is about 8 acres. I felt I had plenty of grass in the 3 acre field to accommodate 3 horses during spring, summer and fall in MO when we had sufficient rain. 5 horses is too much on that amount of land and they tend to overgraze/kill the grass. We try to get at least 2 cuttings of hay off the 8 acre field each year, so the horses have to stay off of it from March to about October/November. This has been a nice set up for us, until we had a bad drought last year and I ran out of grass early and had to start feeding supplemental hay in October instead of December.

EDITED TO ADD: Our land is fully clear pasture with no woods/unusable areas, outside of small areas around the barns and the pond is also fenced off so no one has access to it during the winter.

[RooTheDay]

@fivestrideline

Okay those two things are going to make your property needs FAR bigger than house + barn and pastures. Now you’re talking 10-15 acres, depending on how much vehicle access you need (is the shop for cars? RV? How many vehicles are you going to shuffle? How many driveways, turnarounds, etc, permanent second residence vs occasional visits that need less logistical planning).

Yeah, totally fair! That’s why I didn’t include that detail in the original post: the amount you specifically need for The Rest Of The Stuff is very layout-, use-case-, and size- dependent and I am factoring my own additional needs into the search based on individual property sizes/layout. (I am also an eventer, so need to plan for conditioning, but that’s also very property-dependent in terms of ride-out so I didn’t mention it.) I asked about overall size of property vs. pasture amount because I do find it interesting to hear what people have done with what acreage assuming an “average” farm.

In my own case, there are a few mitigating factors that reduce the overall footprint of what I’ve described from maximum potential sprawl. To wit:

• Cars rather than RVs or boats or whatever
• Workshop would also likely provide storage for farm equipment, such as the tractor
• 2nd residence is full-time, but more of a smaller ADU model (for my aging parents) vs. requiring its own full parking/storage infrastructure
• Currently have four vehicles and two trailers on two acres, and the driveway is a 90-degree turn up a hill too steep to get the gooseneck up, so already down with the Car Shuffle ™
• Planning to make any and all actual lawn except the septic field into pasture
• Everything I’m considering fits into the “flat square box” ideal model with a relatively ideal layout
• Stalls are a nice-to-have, but not necessarily a requirement, though of course I’d have to add hay/feed/tack storage somehow if there was no barn at all

@McGurk

three turn out paddocks to rotate,

I hadn’t planned to try to rotate fields on this size of property; I’d rather they had a bit more space to move, so I was planning on the fence-it-all-and-let-Dog-sort-'em-out model. I know I’ll have to drag for manure and that it will look beat up at certain times of year. Ideally I was hoping for enough land to avoid needing to fertilize/overseed regularly, but understand that that may not be realistic on such a small acreage–hence this thread.

[fivestrideline]

@RooTheDay

Ideally I was hoping for enough land to avoid needing to fertilize/overseed regularly,

Well on that, I have friends with really good land, about 25 acres of pasture, and 4 horses. They still have to fertilize and overseed every year. The trade is they need almost no hay and feed almost no grain.

[JB]

@RooTheDay

I was hoping for enough land to avoid needing to fertilize/overseed regularly,

you may be able to overseed just occasionally, but grass still grows and pulls nutrients from the soil whether it’s grazed or not, heat and drought can cause more mineral depletion, excess rain can do the same, so fertilizing needs to happen anyway, just soil test first to see how much of what, and when, rather than just guessing.

Soil pH still changes too, sometimes more and more often, depending on the type of soil and the climate, so the soil testing will help you keep that in range as well