Pasture fence planning - Ideas please!

[sailor-sunset]

I am still a long ways out from putting down fence posts on my land and bringing home a couple horses, but just for fun and to fish for ideas–

If you had this land, how would you arrange your pastures? Just for personal use, designed for fewer than 5 horses and efficiency of horse care. Most importantly, where should I put the manure pile??

Some notes about the property:
Whole parcel is 10 acres.
Satellite image is outdated - RV trailers and piles of garbage are gone.
Water and electric accessible in the storage barn (light roofed building).
The soil is extremely sandy, no lush grass here! I will continue to improve the soil and plant grass, it was left fallow and weedy for a long time after growing corn a decade ago.
No low spots or areas prone to flooding. Thanks to the sand, it drains faster than it rains.
Green polygons are new windbreak tree plantings - the trees are all horse safe (red and white pines) but they need to be babied, they’re very small. This means not getting trampled and easily accessible by my watering trailer. Eventually they will offer shade and protection.

Notes about my goals with this property:
I do not plan to build a “real” barn. I will build run-in shelters, with at least one that can get closed up as a stall for emergencies. But no classic barn with stalls.
Fence will be some type of electric, TBD on what type.
I do want to rotationally graze…eventually.
I plan to leave space for a perimeter hack trail around the property, and I’m sure I’ll chop a couple trails through the wooded area in the back. And room for a riding area, at least the size of a full dressage court.

Thoughts?

[Bluey]

If those white roofs are out of there, make that the arena.

Run a lane down the middle connecting two bigger pastures at the bottom and have one more, shorter pasture on each side of the lane, giving you four pastures and have your sheds on the ends of those two smaller pastures, on the left, easy house access to them?

Run one water line to each shed and on down the lane and put two more tanks where they split the two pastures on each side.

Put enough gates so you can use pastures alone or connected to others as needed.

Tried to draw a few rough lines of the pastures and arena, a guess as I don’t have feet to go by, but they don’t show in that dark picture:

[sailor-sunset]

Thank you for your response! RE: the riding arena, unfortunately previous owners put a big pile of scrap metal there where the RVs are in the image and I’ll be picking up nails/other bits of metal with my magnet til the day I die… I’m not too concerned with the location of the riding arena, I’ll figure that out some other day.

I like the four pastures idea, I was thinking way more complicated than that! The distance from property line to property line the short way is ~370ft. Definitely will run underground water lines regardless!

I do intend to have a dry lot of some sort, hopefully centrally located and accessible. One idea I’ve had that I don’t know if it would work is to have a fenced in access lane. Where I could open the gate for the pasture and the dry lot and let them wander to and fro. I know it is done with rotationally grazed cattle (my academic background) but I’ve never seen it with horses. Image attached, black bars are gates, pink box is dry lot. I can run down to open the gate to a back pasture and open up the gate at the dry lot, and the other three can rest. Then there’s one central(ish) dry lot location for feeding time and the waterer, plus the shelter(s). Just a thought!!
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[Mango20]

A fenced access lane will work for horses as long as it’s wide enough and there isn’t anywhere that a horse could get trapped by a bully.

[sailor-sunset]

Totally, I’m sure I’ll put in a track system in the dry lot too so lanes shouldn’t be a problem. Appropriately wide of course.

[Bluey]

The arena could go on the other side, where there seem to be a bare spot right where the curve starts on the road.

Yes, trash piles are dangerous, stuff keeps showing up for years.
We use a magnet every place, find old and also new stuff.

I was trying to have as few fences as possible, hard on a long and narrow plan.

Could make the two smaller pastures of different sizes, the smaller one a dry lot?

For just two horses, could you start with the perimeter fence and one shed, most anything will work to start, then add cross fencing later as you see what may work better?

[mmeqcenter]

Unfortunately, your wind-break tree lines, though obviously an excellent idea, are going to remove a fair bit of pasture space since they’ll need to be outside of the pastures until well grown. But, those areas can double as your hacking perimeter lane. Then, of course, the trees at the back are blocking some room. Unless you want to fence in the trees in the pasture, which could be really nice for shade and such. Just depends on what you want to do.
Here’s my preliminary attempt.
I think four pastures is a lot to try to get out of this space, especially with up to five horses, so I went with three. Still leaves a lot of time for resting when rotating. Each pasture is just under an acre, by my estimations.
Having had a farm that was all sand, you have pros and cons to everything of course, and I LOVE sand. No mud. Amazing. It’s also really great for riding on grass and not needing to spend money to put in a footed arena. But as you said, no lush grass will be had, no matter how long you rest those pastures. It’s just hard for grass to root really well in sand. But since it sounds like you want to try to keep them as grassy as possible, I’d go for a fairly large dry lot since five horses will likely be in the dry lot a majority of the time.
Then you could do three run-in sheds that each have half in the dry lot and half in the pasture, so there’s lot of shelter spaces for five horses to not get in fights over. This also gives you lots of space to be able to use temporary fencing to separate the dry lot into smaller ones if you ever need to separate horses.
I’d trim up any lower limbs of those front yard trees, and re-route the “driveway” (see blue line). Then, you can fit a good-sized arena in there.
The little brown circle by the now-gone RV is the manure pile, but without knowing what is North, South, East, and West, and your location to know the prevailing winds, it’s hard to recommend a spot for that.

[Bluey]

I was thinking only two horses …

[sailor-sunset]

Realistically, 2 or 3 horses. But room for an accidental 1 or 2 more

[sailor-sunset]

Thank you for your insight and the diagram! I really like the giant dry lot right at the front, very easy to access. And you’re right about being able to separate within it, the farm that my lease is at has generally peaceful and quiet horses in their paddocks, but it only takes one to start a problem. Glad to hear that your farm on sand is good overall, there’s a couple farms nearby that manage their grass really well and it looks incredible. That is the goal!
What is the recommendation for locating a manure pile? I do not know the prevailing wind direction, I’m in northern Michigan. The satellite image is oriented with N at the top, that field to the north of the brown dot is actually a cattle field, the fence posts are right on the property line. So no strangers to bad smells, its all farmland out here. My intention would be to properly compost it and spread it to help my very low soil organic matter, but of course it needs somewhere to sit until its ready for that.
As @Bluey mentioned above, I’ll most likely start by putting down the perimeter fence, and probably temp fence some divisions to test it out.

[mmeqcenter]

Usually you want it upwind of your house based on summer prevailing wind, to reduce the smell in your home. Unless you have neighbors’ house super close and located where that would have THEIR house upwind of the manure pile.

[Christa_P]

@mmeqcenter

Usually you want it upwind of your house based on summer prevailing wind, to reduce the smell in your home. Unless you have neighbors’ house super close and located where that would have THEIR house upwind of the manure pile.

I think you meant downwind, away from the house or the house upwind of the pile.

[mmeqcenter]

Yeah, oops, Whichever means the wind blows at the house, then the pile, moving the smell away from the house.

[Ajierene]

I agree with @mmeqcenter - except I may just have two pastures attached to the dry lot. Where I am, this is similar to what we have - the dry lot and the barn in the dry lot. Horses have free access to the barn. The automatic waterer is in the back of the dry lot as it has a side for the horses and a side for the cows. The configuration is a bit different - to the left is the gate to the horse field, middle is the gate to the north cow field, to the right the gate to the garden/middle field. There’s other gates as well.

In this configuration, I would put the run in shed/barn in the dry lot, automatic waterer near that, tack room/feed room attached to shed or close to the fence. You would have one gate out into THE WORLD, then one gate on the left to one field, the other on the right to another field - easy rotation. Horses come in to eat, while they are doing that you open one gate, close the other.

[OzarksRider]

I designed this pass through for easy access from the yard to the field. I also have another one to access a small paddock that I use if I need to confine a horse for the vet. I really like not having to open a gate every time I want to walk into the field. The farrier and vet also like them.

[sailor-sunset]

I would love a pass through gate! The horses aren’t too interested in it? I just wonder if someone decides to get creative and wiggle halfway through. Is that also a hot fence shut off right there? So helpful, hiking back to the barn to turn off the fence sometimes has me just risking the shock instead!

[OzarksRider]

@sailor-sunset

I would love a pass through gate! The horses aren’t too interested in it? I just wonder if someone decides to get creative and wiggle halfway through. Is that also a hot fence shut off right there? So helpful, hiking back to the barn to turn off the fence sometimes has me just risking the shock instead!

The pass through is too narrow for a full grown horse. Even if they tried to squeeze in, they couldn’t make the turn. A goat or a very young calf could get through, but I only keep horses in that field.

Yes, that’s a shut off for the electric fence. It’s really convenient to have it there.

[Ajierene]

I forgot about the pass through idea - we have two. One into the barn - there is a gate across the aisle that attaches to a post that allows just enough room for us to squeeze through. The other is on the other side of the barn where the gate to the sacrifice area is. Ours doesn’t have a turn, it’s just a small space between the post and wall. My friend says it helps keeps us thin because it’s just enough for use to turn sideways and go through.

They are great, though!

The other thing we have is a post in the middle of the doorway to the tack/feed room. The tack/feedroom opens to the barn aisle and the horses have free access to the barn. Not only did we have to be careful about closing the door, her older gelding knows how to open doors with knobs. So then we started putting a stallguard up but some of them would push through and break it and the same older gelding also knows how to open some of the snaps. The post in the middle of the doorway finally stopped him from helping himself.

It’s a bit annoying when you are taking the saddle out or bringing a bag of feed in but the alternate is showing up to a big, brown, drafty butt sticking out. Then you yell and he saunters back out and looks at you like “what, you weren’t here so I started breakfast for everyone…I swear!”