Fall in Place: Create a Winter Paddock

You can greatly improve the health and productivity of your pastures by creating and using a winter paddock or “sacrifice area” to confine your horses.
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Fall in Place: Create a Winter Paddock
Fall is the time to get your horse property chore efficient and ready for winter. | Photo: Thinkstock
Probably the most important aspect of managing pastures is the time when you take your horses off the pasture. You can greatly improve the health and productivity of your pastures by creating and using a winter paddock or “sacrifice area” to confine your horses for this time period.

In the winter, keeping horses off saturated, rain-soaked soils and dormant or frozen pasture plants is critical if you want to maintain a healthy pasture next summer. Soggy soils or dormant plants simply cannot survive continuous grazing and trampling in winter months. Horses are particularly hard on pastures—the pounding of their hooves compacts the soil, which suffocates plant roots. In addition, when the soils are wet horse hooves act like plungers by loosening fine particles of topsoil to be washed away by rain.

A winter paddock is meant to be your horse’s outdoor living quarters. Your horses should be confined to this area during the winter and early spring, plus during the summer before your pastures become overgrazed

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Written by:

Alayne Blickle, a lifelong equestrian and ranch riding competitor, is the creator/director of Horses for Clean Water, an award-winning, internationally acclaimed environmental education program for horse owners. Well-known for her enthusiastic, down-to-earth approach, Blickle is an educator and photojournalist who has worked with horse and livestock owners since 1990 teaching manure composting, pasture management, mud and dust control, water conservation, chemical use reduction, firewise, and wildlife enhancement. She teaches and travels North America and writes for horse publications. Blickle and her husband raise and train their mustangs and quarter horses at their eco-sensitive guest ranch, Sweet Pepper Ranch, in sunny Nampa, Idaho.

3 Responses

  1. re: Fall in Place: Create a Winter Paddock

    Actually, Marnie, my climate is a cold climate (Idaho) with real winters. And I just returned from teaching classes in Fairbanks, AK. We had several articles last winter in Smart Horse Keeping about dealing with the conditions you mention and I plan to

  2. re: Fall in Place: Create a Winter Paddock

    I’m a little dissapointed that this article only addresses horsekeeping in moderate climates. In the future please remember that there are many horse people in cold climates where the ground is frozen solid under several feet of snow.  

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