We’re bringing our two horses home in a couple of weeks and I’m wondering how many bags of shavings per stall I’ll need. I’m ordering the shavings this weekend and was thinking 12 bags of shavings per horse for a month, so 24 bags. Is that enough or should I order extra? I know each horse is different and it depends, but I think I heard that it’s good to start each stall off with 5-6 bags and then 2-3 bags to maintain weekly. Is that right? And how often should stalls be completely stripped?
I use 3 bags to start, and then I add a bag every other day, and it seems like every 10 days I put in two. I’m a little psycho and never fully strip as I work hard to get most out every day.
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To give you a good answer, I would need to know:
How big are your stalls? What kind of shavings are you planning to use? What’s the flooring in your stalls and do you have mats? Approximately how many hours a day will the horses be in the stalls?
ETA: What’s your stall cleaning style? Good enough for government work or very picky? Also, do you plan to clean stalls every day?
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Oh man, this is really a “how long is a piece of string” kinda question 
Soooooo many different philosophies on bedding stalls!
24 bags sounds pretty light. I’d plan on just buying a pallet to start and going from there! Or however many you can fit in your truck, if you’re transporting yourself. Load it up!
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How big are the stalls and how deep do you like them?
I have 11’x12’ stalls and use 6 med flake bags, then add a bag a week. But I like deeper shavings and my horses keep their stalls pristine.
Messy horses get deeper as it keeps them from trashing the stall. Too much work to stall walk. Then they get the normal after I’ve broken their habit.
I rarely have to strip stalls bedding this way.
I refuse to have a horse smell like pee.
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Thanks for all the responses! My stalls are 12x12, we have stall savers for the stall floors, they’re going to be in their stalls for about 8-12 hours a day, and I was planning on using fine flake shavings like the queen easy sift shavings.
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Wow, at 24x24, you’re bedding eight 12x12 stalls for your 2 horses. Or 11 1/2 10x10s. I hope they are tidy!
You may also find that you go through a lot more bedding, and that things are just messier in general, until you all settle in and into a rhythm.
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I go through about 10 bags/month for my horse in a 12x12 stall. He’s sort of medium on the messy scale; only gets about 30% of the stall dirty overnight. We have stall cleaners, who are efficient but do a good job sorting/retaining the clean shavings. I only have to strip maybe every 8 weeks?
We bank the back side of the stall, leaving the front of the stall mostly clear for feed/water/etc. That might be an option for you depending on how your horses use the stalls.
Oh my gosh I totally did not mean 24x24 
I was thinking about 24 bags of shavings from before and I guess it was still on my brain lol my stalls are not 24x24, they’re 12x12
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I use 3-4 bags a week for my medium sized pony who can be messy and is inside a lot ( this is his choice, he’s 28 and rules the roost) and 3 bags for my 2 minis. I bed fairly deep, clean daily and have to strip rarely.
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Too many variables to give a definitive answer.
Can I assume that 8-12h stalled means overnight?
How big are the bags of shavings - # of cubic feet?
My feedstore gives a small discount for buying 10+, more for a pallet of 40.
They sell flaked, fine & extra fine in approx 40# bags.
TSC has 3 grades under their label:
Big Flake, Fine, Extra Fine & recently added a 4th different brand, bagged in brown paper.
This last bag is more densely packed & finer than the TSC brand. At 50¢ more per bag, worth it.
Occasionally, I take a 2h roadtrip to a nearby Amish guy who sells fine shavings in 50# bags for about 1/2 the TSC prices.
10 of those bags last me 3-4mos.
I use 1 bag per 12x12 stall when they’re as close to stripped as I ever get.
After that I can split a bag between 2 stalls once a week in dry weather, oftener if it’s been rainy or snowing.
My horses are out (by their choice) more than stalled.
I pick daily, 2 or 3 times. But there’s rarely more than a couple piles in any stall.
As I never strip to the ground - no mats - my stalls are bedded Deep Litter style.
No ammonia stink ever, my stalls are floored with 9" of decomposed granite (now 20yo & packed like cement) over clay soil & they drain well.
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If you are referring to the Tractor Supply type bags of shavings, here’s a way to get free delivery. Join their Neighbors Club and start to accrue bonus points. At a certain level you qualify for free home delivery for orders. And that order can be as little or as much as you want to buy at one time. I have had shavings and compressed hay bales and feed and a big air compressor all delivered this way.
But there’s a small down side. Don’t expect a big truck with a forklift. TSC uses Rodie for this. I had a pallet of Standlee compressed bales delivered once by a lady in her smaller size SUV who made two trips and had bales stacked in all of her seats. Another time the pallet of bales came in a honest-to-god church van stuffed full of individual bales. Once I had a real cargo van deliver 48 shavings bales , and the driver actually was strong and healthy enough to unload them all. Other times I was on the hook to do my own unloading as the drivers were so old and frail.
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I have 12x12 stalls and usually start with 4 bags in an empty stall. Right now mine are in overnight and I usually add 1/2 a bag a day for each horse. One horse is messier…so that one gets 1/2 bag a day, but 1 or 2 days a week gets a full bag instead of a 1/2. The other is not as messy (well, he tends to make more of a mess but it is all in one spot, so the rest of the stall stays very clean!)…he usually gets 1/2 bag a day and 1-2 times a week I can skip the 1/2 bag. I do a full clean everyday. Recently my mare has had a pee puddle in the back that the shavings aren’t absorbing, so I sprinkle some of the pellets just in that one spot as they absorb the urine better.
Tractor Supply
using the internet search neighboring Tractor Supply locations for pricing. Their shavings locally vary in cost by nearly 20% depending upon location even though the stores are less than ten miles apart
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So! My 2 stalls at the family farm are about 10x15, matted on concrete. When I first moved the horses out there, I put 4-5 bags of TSC fine shavings in each stall. I also use about 3 lbs of pellets in each stall every day for the wet spot. The first week or so I added a lot of shavings. I cleaned every day so I added pellets each day as well. I then remembered that I liked the aspen shavings (the ones in the brown paper mentioned above) from TSC much better the last time I had stalls to clean, so I switched to them.
After about 3 weeks of this I had a really good base of bedding and so as long as I added pellets every day, I only used about 1 bag of aspen shaving per stall per week. I usually added 1/2 bag every few days. I never strip the stalls completely. Horses were out about 8-9 hours a day.
The big stalls were a luxury - I actually think I was able to get away with so little bedding after the initial build up because they did their business in limited areas of the stall so there was always clean bedding to move around.
Bottom line: I really like the aspen bedding if you can find it. I think a combo of pelleted bedding and shavings works really well. This still doesn’t answer your question about how much but I think you will have to overbuy in the beginning and then develop your own style of cleaning and bedding depth.
Good luck!
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They delivered an 8x8 steel run on a semi without lift gate to me.
It could not get into my neighborhood and we ended up having to do store pickup after all.
There delivery is hit or miss it seems.
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I manage an 11 stall barn. One horse is mine, the rest belong to friends, and they pitch in with chores so we have 10 different people doing stalls (they all do a GREAT job, BTW). Stalls are 13 x 13, rubber mats over 4 feet of crushed stone. Horses are out all day unless the weather is really nasty.
We use what I guess you’d call medium flake shavings, and routinely sweep back the first quarter to third of the stall, with the remaining part bedded with up to 6 inches of shavings. This keeps the horses from kicking shavings into the aisle or mixing shavings into their hay. Hay, water and feed are in the front of each stall, or at least they start there. Over the 30 years I’ve kept horses this way, none have developed hock sores and they lie down comfortably. Every corner of every stall gets flipped/ picked daily, the oldest acceptable shavings go where the usual wet spot is and newer shavings in the rest of the stall. We never sprinkle clean shavings over the whole stall with older shavings underneath. It looks pretty but isn’t practical. With our method, bedding gets rotated and generally disposed of before the shavings break down into fine dust.
I budget three bags of shavings per horse per week. Most only need two, but there are always one or two who save all of their manure and urine for the stall, and 3 will do it for them… Horses on stall rest may need more, but during the day we bank the clean shavings and leave older ones on their wet spot. Most don’t want to lay down during the day.
Hope I didn’t rattle on too much!
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For maintenance, I assume 3 new bags of shavings per stall each week. It doesn’t matter the size of the stall, because you’re just replacing the dirty stuff.
To start a new stall, it’s very much a matter of preference. I remember when I first brought my horses home and was trying pellets for the first time, I ended up using about 8 bags of pellets in each stall to get started because it looked so uncomfortable before they broke down.
I now use smallish shavings. I rarely strip, but when I do I generally use 3-4 bags for a 10x12 stall to restart.
PS, try the pellets! Love them so much more than shavings. I just can’t use them because I have Dutch doors and the wind around here just blows the pellet dust everywhere.
They threw 50 fence posts out of the back of a van, literally, and just left them like that.
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Do not use fine flake shavings, sawdust, or pelleted bedding (except small amounts in wet spots) with Stall Savers if you want your Stall Savers to work as intended. The small particle sizes clog the pores in the fabric.
I love my Stall Savers, but there is an art to working with them. I bed on straw - it allows the Stall Savers to drain, and a single bale will bed a stall as deeply as 5-6 bags of shavings. My horses don’t normally stay in much, but, when they do, I typically will add about 1/4 bale per day and then strip everything as needed.
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