By Grand Prix Competitor/Coach/Clinician and published author Nikki Alvin-Smith
I simply love spending time in the barn. While some jobs are less favored than others, I am very content to complete the majority of the horsey housekeeping tasks. But most equestrians want more time riding and less time barn cleaning. For me, the meditational moments of mucking out a stall can be a peaceful interlude but for many horse owners they find the daily chores are time-consuming necessities that take valuable training time away from their precious hours at the barn.
A tidy barn is not only more pleasurable to use, but it also offers a more professional impression to visitors. A cluttered environment can also add stress, so keeping things tidy can help you focus and feel more peaceful in your barn.
Here are some tidy-up tips as a horse barn owner that you can employ to maximize efficiency and safety around the horse barn.
Make A Smart Site Choice
When you park at the supermarket you generally try to park close to the entrance doors. This saves time and effort walking back and forth with bags of groceries. Think the same way when siting your barn and the adjunct use areas. Careful selection of spaces not just for parking, but placement locations for manure storage, hay and bedding supplies and distances to turn-out paddocks, is a must do in the design phase.
The most common site design for a busy working horse facility, is to place the barn centrally on the site and span out the paddocks around the structure. But this is not always viable due to the restrictions of topography, geology and geography of the property. As a Portuguese fisherman once said to me when de-boning a complex fish for dinner, “You have to learn to work with the fish.” This is especially true if you have inherited a horse farm already built and designed by someone else. Existing farms can be improved with a little imagination. Review how you use the barn on a daily basis and eliminate those things that annoy you most or that cause the most problems. It could be an improvement as simple as adding a new gate to one side of a paddock or replacing worn heavy wooden entrance doors to the barn with sliding metal ones.
Minor changes are usually not expensive to make. You can have a concrete pad enclosed by three side walls installed for shavings storage or manure staging close to a barn that offers a drive-in option for efficient pick up utilizing a tractor with bucket attachment. Or have a ramp constructed with compacted materials that you can pull up to with a low-profile manure spreader on its downside to empty wheelbarrows of manure into the top. Sometimes a little ingenuity can save a big headache.
Consider the fire hazards and dust issues with siting combustible materials and supplies close to where the horses reside. Proximity of manure storage to the barn needs to be evaluated for its ease of use in all seasons. In summer, the choice of too close a site to the horse housing structure will encourage flies and other unwanted visitors to breed and infiltrate the barn, but if the manure site is too far away from the barn in winter in areas where there is significant snowfall, then manure removal can become difficult to manage over many months of cold weather. Best option for manure storage may be a transitional area where it can be temporarily stored and regularly removed.
Lose The Obstacle Course
There is nothing more annoying than having to move items back and forth to clean. Particularly when those objects are heavy or unwieldy to manage on your own.
Invest in a powerful vacuum with accessories that offer a good reach. Thankfully today you don’t even need to switch out filters to go from a dry vacuum to a wet vacuum. Which makes cleaning much simpler when you need to switch between tasks. While sweeping up with a broom is cheap, you are simply moving the dust and detritus around. Which is unhealthy for the respiratory well-being of you and your horses. Keeping floors clean will also minimize tracking of debris into tack rooms and feed rooms, saving the need for further cleaning.
Best practices for ease of cleaning are to keep blankets hung up and off the floor; place tack boxes in a designated space rather than in an aisleway; use collapsible saddle racks that mount on the wall; place ropes/halters on bridle hangers by stall doors; hang tools like muck forks on the wall; elevate the bottom shelving for grooming/bathing supplies to a 12” or more off the floor so you can easily clean beneath at every turn.
It is also a good idea to avoid creation of hard-to-reach corners in the building as these will inevitably become a haven for spiders, vermin, snakes and other unwanted visitors. Instead place larger objects or items along a wall, rather than tucked in a corner spot.
Ditch The Water Problem
Snow melt, adverse weather conditions like unusually heavy rainfall, can all cause unexpected problems with flooding that require massive efforts to clean up. Try to get ahead of the issue by keeping gutters and downspouts clear of debris all year around and have overflow ditches in areas that are likely to be prone to excessive water run-off.
While these ditches may remain dry for much of the time, their immediate availability when they are needed is a boon for preventative care of any structure and its foundations. Running water run-off downhill to daylight away from paddocks, walkways and structures is a great way to discharge it.
Keep The Barn Bird and Bug Free
Ensure that soffits are guarded from intrusion and nesting by birds with wire mesh if you want to avoid cleaning up bird droppings from water buckets, floors and walls. Bird infestations can also spread disease such as West Nile and Avian Flu, so keeping your barn free of birds is a good idea.
Make repairs to window screens and door screens before the insect season arrives, to minimize having to clean windows and surfaces of flyspecks and cobwebs. Seal small holes and refresh caulk around window sills to keep insect ingress to a minimum.
Whenever you switch out light bulbs take the opportunity to give a thorough cleaning to the fixture and the surrounding area.
A Tidy Barn Is A Safe Barn
Even without a catastrophic event like evacuating horses from a barn in a fire event or a river breaching its banks and flooding a yard with torrents of water, the barn that is kept tidy will not only be more pleasurable to use, but it will also be safer. Fire safety measures and the ability to quickly batten down the hatches of a barn to keep animals safely confined to its interior are all good barn management practices.
In any emergency it is obviously advisable to have unobstructed exits, but even during daily tasks of leading a horse from A to B, the absence of obstacles in aisleways and by entrance doors offer another level of safety should the horse spook or crowd the handler’s space.
I was once complaining to my mother about the recurring routines that come as part of running a household and she gave me some sage advice.
“Do one bit of extra housework every day. Even that small extra chore you do in addition to the necessary daily ones stops it building up into a massive task.”
This works a treat.
The best ways to manage any task is by following a regular routine. And of course, get everyone to follow it!
