I’m in Northwest Georgia. On the north end of Bartow County near the border of Gordon County. I live close to the interstate and work 9-5 closer to Atlanta. I love this area, but there are not a ton of barns for boarding. We are building our barn to have horses at home so that’s not a big deal to me. I feel like we are close enough to Wills Park (Alpharetta) where they host a lot of shows and there are some local farms that host them. There is plenty of public trails in this area, in fact I’m 15 minutes from a public horse trail. There are some nice facilities near Cartersville, and Cherokee County is full of horses but still decently priced.
Whenever I visit GA in the winter, the only thing I want to do is head back to FL. Georgia is cold in the winter!
Thank you so much for this answer, don’t know how I missed it for so long! Certainly, the field produces enough hay for the three months you feed? That would certainly be acceptable. I’m so tired of the feed store!!!
Yes, we get about 40 round bales of the field annually. One of our typical round bales will last ten days to two weeks for our three horse depending on how cold it is. This 15 acres has also not been replanted or fertilized in many, many years, which we will finally get around to doing this year. Yield can really vary depending on how much maintenance you do.
We also made hay on 13 heavily planted and fertilized acres in PA, without horses on it, and our annual yield was about 5,000 50 lb. bales.
My personal advice would be to buy as much land as you can. We started with 5 acres, went to 17, and now have 69. We also have cattle, but I love having enough pasture to be able to keep my horses out and moving as much as possible. I have two that are 21 and 23, and you would never guess their ages. They keep their weight very well on pasture, and do not have issue with lameness or stiffness due to the fact they are always moving around.
How does the climate compare to North Florida? I think i would like to move farther North. Just not too far north. Ideally, i would like to have two separate properties. The summers in Florida are downright miserable. It would be so lovely to move north for the summer.
Even riding at 7 am, all you can do is walk/trot very lightly without risking heat stroke. I’ve had heat stroke twice and my horse collapsed on me last summer - you can go from I’m okay, to critically overheated very rapidly. When I was a child, i was outside from 7am to 6pm and never had an issue with the heat. (My horse was fine with a long ice water bath, but it scared the daylights out of me)… Someone else’s horse died last summer due to heat stroke - the bully horse chased it in the heat of day. The horse collapsed. They got the vet up but it was too late.
I don’t mind hot weather, but cooler mornings and nights would be nice.
@4horses, I was just having this discussion with my husband and also a friend that lived in Miami as this winter has been particularly miserable for N. GA. It hasn’t been obnoxiously cold, but very gloomy and muddy. Not much sunshine but lots of rain and overcast skies making things feel rather oppressive and depressing. Then when I look at goings on in the Ocala, FL area, it’s all sunny and warm and it got me thinking, that might be the place to retire. No state income tax, horse friendly, far enough from the coast so evacuating during hurricane season wouldn’t be necessary. A friend who lived in Miami said yes, it’s terribly hot but during the summers but there is always a breeze.
See here just south of Atlanta, it is often very hot, very humid and stagnant during the summers, meaning zero air flow, so I’m not sure that it’s much of an improvement over northern FL other than you may have a more constant breeze. Far north GA might be, but I really think you might have to go farther north to catch much of a break temp-wise and collaterally, you’ll have to put up with much more unpleasantness during the winter, i.e., icy roads, mud, frozen things like water hoses and troughs, pipes, etc.
At 52, I think I’d rather put up with a mandatory siesta during the hot summer months than deal with the cold, muddy, gloomy days.
I’m just outside Knoxville. It gets hot in the summer but we almost always have a breeze. I built my barn and arena such that I get the maximum advantage from that breeze. Still, for a couple of months a year (Aug and Sep) we used to go on “tropical hours” where we started at 7 a.m. and were done by 1 p.m. We are right AT the western boundary of the Eastern Time Zone so we can go more than an hour later in the day than our friends to the east. But that means sunset is late and so is sunrise. You just have to adapt! We have covered arena, not an indoor, and just being out of the sun permits more productive work. We still lose about 30 days a year to the combination of heat and cold.
Speaking of cold, right now it’s 28F, sunny, and about 5 mph of wind. But for my shoulder we could do basic stuff but not work up much of a sweat. But likely we would not! Most of the time our days run in the 40s or 50s and that good working weather. We also get a lot of rain meaning the cover is really essential if your going to be serious.
So those are the bookends of our weather. Colder than GA in the winter, cooler in the summer. If you’re looking from the perspective of the horse we are the better deal, as horses are cold weather creatures. From the human perspective, maybe not so much!!! 
G.
Fatcatfarm- that breeze is only near the coast. If you are in mid Florida, there’s not much of a breeze at all in the summer.
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