I live in New Zealand and am blessed not to have extreme weather conditions to contend with. My horses live out unless I feel they need a break from horrific wind, or torrential rain - or fireworks.
I lived in Massachusetts for 3 months and appreciate the cold weather and snow, but if you’re in a warmer climate, why are horses stabled so much?
Mostly so you can keep more horses on a smaller piece of land. Secondarily to keep them clean and convenient. But mostly it’s so you can fit 60 horses onto a couple of acres and have room for an indoor riding arena and client parking.
mine actually enjoy turnout in the winter cold more than the summer heat and bugs - at +40c, humid and relentless bugs my guys quite appreciate being in the barn with bug sprayers and fans.
Ah, I forgot about the business aspect of keeping horses in America. I have 2.5 horses on 12 acres / 4 hectares. Two being my competition horses, the half being my 13.2hh 33 year old retired pony that kicks around being cute 
almost every one would do pasture care if they had the room and in the back country they do. In our suburbs and exurbs though you need a certain population of horses to support an indoor arena. You can find boarding barns with great arenas and pasture board with no amenities but nowhere can you find the two in one spot. Land is too expensive.
Also, for better or worse, there is a portion of the population that does not like to turn out their competition horses for fear they will get hurt. Me - my FEI dressage gelding was always turned out as much as 24 hours a day if he weather was cooperating.
@KyrieNZ - the property issue is a real thing. if you have a barn with enough horses to support the facilities, if they are turned out 24/7, it won’t be long before you have no grass. When my horse was with a trainer in south Florida a couple years ago, he got limited turnout, but there were 20 horses on 10 acres with 7 small turnouts. None of the horses were turned out with other horses, and the trainer wanted to have some grass, so that equaled lots of stable time.
I personally will never understand the borderline-obsession people have with having grass. If you’re on small acreage, you’re on small acreage, and your grass isn’t going to be pristine if you use the turnouts even minimally. I would MUCH rather have acres of dirt lots with horses out 24/7 getting plenty of hay (round bales, usually) than have pastures with ample grass because the horses are in stalls for 18 hours a day.
Seems to kind of go hand-in-hand with this weird obsession people in the USA have with keeping a bright, green, lush, weed-free front lawn in the suburbs. It just isn’t that important, IMO.
Here some cover is important as if not, without some, we have erosion, much of it dust storms.
You may have dirt pastures without grass, here they are blowing dirt pastures if there is no grass in them.
Our carrying capacity is 30 acres per horse.
You go over that at your own peril to end up with acres of blowing dirt.
Pens and dirt roads blow every time the wind comes up, which does every day here.
We don’t want other to blow also, if we can help it.
We don’t graze anything in pastures if the grass is dry and may start blowing.
Some years ago we didn’t have a hoof in our pastures for four years, or they would not have recovered once it started raining again if all that topsoil would have been disturbed and blown away for those years.
Different places, different management.
I agree that where I live, in TN, summers are very hit and humid. The bugs are horrible even with spray. In summertime, fly sheets are just too hit and my horses sweat with them. So they come in during the day during summer. They like their fans.
Another reason for me personally is that I like them to be lead in and out and handled every day. I want them used to being in a stall for periods of time so that when we get to a show, the horse is not getting stir crazy in a stall. They are used to it.
That all said, they are out maybe 10 to 12 hours in the winter and maybe 12 to 14 hours in the summer.
There’s been quite a lot written about the loss of open space in the US, if you’re curious. Huge tracts of land have been developed into housing and suburbia, and that leaves quite a lot less for horses.
There are also lots of areas in the US with poor soil conditions, or very dry/very wet weather conditions. Keeping horses outside full time may be challenging in a desert or swamp, or may be really damaging to the land when the soil is fragile.
When we lived in the Midwest, I was BLOWN AWAY with how good the soil was, and how well grass grew, and how quickly everything recovered after horses just beat the crap out of the paddock. There’s definitely a reason why that region is farmed the way it is! Other areas–the dry land prairie of the west, or the rocky hills here–just cannot take that abuse without turning to eroded, muddy “dry” lot.
Yeah, as a society, we are probably more risk averse. Some people just don’t want their horses at risk of getting hurt. Some don’t want to deal with a muddy horse, or a 30 minute hunt for their horse in a large field, after dark, after driving 60 minutes to their boarding barn, on top of a 60 hour work week.
Most of us would love to have a beautiful grassy field out the back door, and horses that live out (yay no stall cleaning!) but that sort of bucolic vista isn’t the reality in many places 
Keeping some kind of vegetation growing on your property is pretty much essential to the preservation of topsoil and prevention of erosion. Acres of dirt lots are prone to both wind and water erosion, with the degree of degradation a function of factors like topography, soil type, and amount of precipitation.
Everyone needs to find the balance that works for them. To expand Bluey’s comment - different places, different priorities, different management.
Fair enough, sometimes it’s necessary for management.
But I’m still gonna hate on the BOs in Ohio I had who (after touting daily turnout to get you to move in) had 30 horses on 5-10 acres and one dry lot and started padlocking the grass “pastures” they used maybe a total of six hours per year so they’d always look pristine.
Those are who I had in mind when I made my first comment.
Well, here in my warmer climate right now we have some pretty impressive MUD. My pastures are pretty torn up because I do like my guys to be out as much as possible. However, there are (sadly a lot of ) times when the risk of injury is not worth taking. A surface of 8-10" deep sucking mud is a suspensory waiting to happen.
If I turned my horses out for a free for all (3 or just under 2 acres) I would not have any grazing for any months. I have a 36’x110’ sacrifice area that they have access to 23/7 365. The pastures, except for the last year when we got 70+" of rain and our normal is 35-40", are subdivided into 6 paddocks that they are able to rotate through most of the year (except when there is standing water). As a side note, because I am careful to not turn out when they would do the most damage I am able to protect the watershed.
My comment was aimed at barns who stall them 23/7 for sake of having perfect pastures. These are plentiful in Ohio. Maintenance reasons as Bluey described, and/or having a dry lot for turnout space don’t fall into that category.
Grazing horses is always problematical as they are “spot grazers.” Looking out my window at my four on just under four acres you can CLEARLY see the greens and roughs. The only way to address this is to rotate your stock and intensively manage the greens and drag the roughs. That can be done no matter where you are but just how you do it will be very different in FL or TN or MN. Or LA or TX or AZ.
When you see pretty picture of lush green fields you’re looking at hay growing, not grazing pastures.
Mine are out 24/7 in East TN. A few days in cold times they may come in (an ice storm, which we get occasionally, means they come in). During the summer the pastures they use all have natural shade and water. I sight them daily and ride 3-4 times per week so they get handled regularly.
In places where land is reasonable then 24/7 is possible. In places where land is expensive you’re going to see a lot more restricted methods used (stall, small turnout areas, etc.).
G.
horses adjust easily
We just got two that had been out 24/7/365 without any cover… one had been kept that way for the last six years the other at least the last two years… today they see me feed the cat next door and they meet me at that THEIR barn to be put up for the night… took each two days to understand which stall was THEIRS. No refusals at all to be put up at night or if there is a rainy day they have not attempted to tear the barn down to go stand in the rain, it is wake them up in the afternoon to feed
we have had two hot days where they were put up in the afternoon since there is no shade as none of the trees have leafed out … first days was oh what the hell is that when their fan was turned on…next day they walked to their stall and stood under the fan waiting for it to be turned on
Even within the same climate region, the durability and productivity of pastures will vary a lot depending on soil, grade, and water table.
Ive seen pastures that dry out and need supplementary hay in August and others that keep the horses going until snow falls in January. Within 15 miles of each other.
I have also seen pastures that are overgrazed and get trashed. It is not a pretty site. For one thing, if you have functional grass cover the manure breaks up and goes into the grass.
When you have no grass, in summer you end up with a dry lot completely covered in pulverized dry manure and in winter you end up with clay soup. After a year of this the grass rootballs are destroyed and all you have are clumps of buttercups which are toxic.
Good pasture management is getting the most use out of your pastures without destroying them. How you do that is dependent on your horse to acre ratio and the productivity of your pasture in your climate and soil zone. You might indeed need to keep.yiur horses off the pasture November to April in order to have good summer pasture.
I don’t consider it a good use of resources to keep horses entirely off the pasture unless obviously if it’s a hay field. The smartest use of pasture is to maximize graze time while not killing the grass. Killing the grass is a poor use of a resource unless you intend to just have big dry lots in which case you will need to do drainage and put down crusher dust and have a manure removal plan. Just having ruined pastures is nasty.
Obviously if you have a “lawn” that is part of the “street appeal” of a barn or home, you will keep the horses off that. Street appeal doesn’t appeal alot to me but it does to some!
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This aquatic conservation biologist would like to say THANK YOU for both recognizing & taking care of your watershed!!! 
To be honest, reading your posts prior to setting up my farm helped me to keep it in the forefront of my mind. (So keep preaching!)
The pasture is 30yds from the pond that our home overlooks. The space between the pasture and the pond is a wooded area. I would call it more park like, open woods than dense woodland.
We want to keep the pond beautiful for aesthetic reasons, and the bonus is that how we set up and manage the horse end benefits the environment and our view shed.
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