Which scenario would you be concerned with the most regarding potential sand colic:
Horse kept in sand lot with haynet hung over rubber mats.
Horse kept in large pasture with short, grazed vegetation growing in sandy soil. Round bale outside, too.
#2 is the bigger risk, since they are actively biting close to ground level, and likely pulling up some grass with roots and sand attached. But, it also depends on how much time they spend grazing, vs eating off the round bale
Ingesting sand from picking hay off the ground really isn’t a big risk
I will go with door #1. I base this on living in sandy South Carolina. My pastures are coastal bermuda and have a matted web of stolons between the grass blades and the sandy soil, so I seldom see a horse pulling up roots, and that is typically attached to an occasional weed rather than the bermuda.
But I feed hay on rubber mats next to the barn, and a lot of fine sand blows over the mats so when the horses are lipping up the hay dust and fine pieces they could get sand along with it. I imagine it may be the same with hay nets hung over mats if your mats collect sand between feedings like mine.
So, I use a leaf blower to remove the sand from the mats each time before I put out their flakes of hay.
I would go with #1 . In MN we had very sandy soil and my horses were on short " green" stuff to search through for a snack year round and their only source of real nourishment was hay. Years in that environment and zero issues.
I think because they had room and enough green to not actually eat the dirt/ sand like they would on a smaller dry lot.
I had a horse colic in scenario #2, but there was no roundbale. I was feeding flakes on the ground (short grass, 3 acre pasture with just 3 horses). This was in my second year of horse ownership, before I knew any better. Now I feed all hay in nets or on pallets. But I also refuse to keep a horse in a sand pen because I know a horse that died of sand colic while living in a sand pen. I don’t know how his hay was fed.
I understand that sand footing is practical for many scenarios, I just haven’t learned how to manage the risks because sand pens are not very common around here. I’d be inclined to consider footing alternatives like pea gravel or hog fuel over sand.
I think if I had a horse in a sand pen, I’d feed the hay in a hay ring with the hay on top of a mat or something. The hay ring reduces how much hay makes it off the mat. I currently feed hay on top of a plastic pallet, under a net, in a hay ring. Very little waste and hay is out of the wet or muddy ground.
When I lived in New Mexico, my ponies were in a sandy dry lot. I fed hay in porta-grazers, and fed grain in buckets over mats so that any spilled grain didn’t get mixed in with the dirt. I also fed seven days of Sand Clear each month as a preventative.
My Shetland had a bad colic episode once, and of course I worried it was sand colic since I’m sure plenty of sand was ingested even with the management mentioned above. I took her in, and the vet did an abdominal x-ray to check for sand in the gut. I was shocked that she had very, very little sand! Turned out the colic symptoms were due to discomfort from ulcers (treated for ulcers and the pony was fine 
). It made me feel pretty good to see on the x-ray that all the things I was doing was keeping her GI tract safe from sand buildup - the vet said it looked great and to keep doing what I was doing.
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