Does anyone have a sloped sacrifice area? The area i had initially chosen for a sacrifice paddock slopes down to a stream at the bottom. At first I thought this was a good idea because it will always drain well. But recently I was thinking if this place becomes mud it will become a horse slip n’slide. The reason I chose this area is because I’m not going to do anything else with it, i figure having a horse on it could trample the weeds down and I don’t have to mow it. Most sacrifice areas I see on Pinterest, etc are all very flat.
How sloped is your sloped area?
A steep hill that is slippery is bad.
Some slope, even when it is wet, should not be an issue.
You can always add traction (sand/gravel/stone dust) to the footing to prevent it from being as slippery. Removing the organic matter (manure) regularly will help with it being wet too.
My horses pasture is fairly sloped in several areas and we have neither mud or any slipping issues year round ( even if the grass is super short).
The degree of the slope and what is there for cover would be the main issue. How big an area is it?
Some slope is definitely good.
That being said…a sacrifice lot draining directly into a stream is a horrible idea from a water quality standpoint. The amount of sediment and nutrient that will be being dumped, even if you pick manure everyday, is significant. Can I please recommend a riparian buffer strip? Please?
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How big is it? Will there be any grass at all? My dry lot is sloped. It is a pain in the rear, it gets eroded and I have to scrape everything back up the hill and level it. If it’s going to be eaten down to dirt and it has a slope, everything will end up at the bottom. If the bottom is a stream… this is a very bad idea.
It’s about 50x70 with what I have cleared now. It goes long ways to the stream at the bottom (it’s more of a seasonal ditch that goes down to my seasonal pond, there’s no actively running water. There’s only water if it rains. But that’s another consideration I didn’t think about.). My very inexperienced guess is that bottom of hill is maybe 15 feet lower than top of hill. Right now it’s covered in dense vegetation than I’ve knocked back with a brush cutter. It would come off the end of my barn at the top of the hill. There are trees along the stream which shade the bottom end. I might look at extending it more wide and not running it as deep down to the stream.
It’s hard to say without seeing it, but my barn and dry lot sit atop a hill and the rest of my paddocks, including winter sacrifice paddocks, slope all the way down to the pasture (about 1/4 mile away) where it levels out again. In the winter, my horses are out in the cleared sloped area and have never had issues with sliding around on the hill…but they’re also out 22 hours a day and are smarter than to act like idiots when the footing is less than ideal.
If anything, like someone else mentioned, you can add a load of stonedust at the bottom of the hill to give them some traction if needed.
I also have a sloped sacrifice field that gets heavy use all winter. It drains really well, and I never get deep mud. If we have heavy rain, I will move them to a couple small all-weather stone dust paddocks I have next to the barn while the sacrifice yard drains for 12-24 hours. By doing this, they don’t have the chance to mix the water into the soil, so it runs off and the paddock doesn’t get slick and deep.
My sacrifice area has a slight slope—the water drains downhill if you will, but it’s maybe a 4% slope. Will you leave this area native soil or put down footing like gravel? Where does the water in your ditch and pond end up? Confining livestock creates a lot of manure runoff which is not good for the water or animals that use it. Here, clean water laws make access to creeks or waterways by livestock problematic. Our horses are fenced off our creek for that reason, and we are careful of manure handling.
Due to the long wet season and our clay soils, most sacrifice paddocks here are gravel, cleaned daily. How many horses will use this space?
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15 feet isn’t that much of a drop. My paddocks are practically terraced as they slope downhill significantly. Everything drains into the sinkhole.
Erosion is a big problem. We had a load of dirt put in early this year and it’s already washed away. I’m thinking of putting in drains in each paddock.
I think that’s why I’ve decided I’m not going to try to add any special material except to the run in/eating area. Seems from comments that it’s a pain on a slope. I may create like a 12 foot fenced expansion to the run in and then have gates that I can open and close to the paddock if things get really messy. Toying with the idea of dividing the paddock down the middle and having 2 gates so I can switch which side they have access to every few days. It will be 2 horses max on my property.
