93 Easy Barn Hacks for Equestrians

Compost! Keeping the pipes warm.

Barn Hacks for the Equestrian

• Wear a bandana under your helmet to keep things smooth. This also soaks up some of your noggin sweat. A stinky, helmet-lining bandana is much easier to clean than your helmet itself! Although some helmet companies have removable liners that you can launder.

• Invest in an ear cover for cold weather. Thinner wool styles can fit under your helmet and keep your ears warm. Be sure you can still hear things when you are wearing it! Smartwool makes one that is super thin and wonderfully warm.

• For fans of the layered look at the barn, a hook on a post near the arena gives your clothes a chance to stay put when you are riding and stripping layers at the same time. It also keeps your layers less likely to blow away.

• If you need help with zippers, this tip is for you. Use a little zip tie loop to your zipper pulls for easy on and off. Loops are helpful if you have arthritis, wear thick gloves, or need extra grip.

• For zippers that like to get stuck, use some Magic Sheen or grooming oil to slick things up and get your zippers moving again. You may also find that soap works here, too.

• Use vet wrap around your ring and middle fingers if your gloves are missing. Please use the most awesome color you can. Vet wrap is also great to use over your fingers when pulling a mane or braiding your horse.

Is there such a thing as too many handy hooks?

Hacks for equestrians in cold weather

• Wear nylon pantyhose or silk base layers in cold weather. They are thin enough to fit under breeches and help keep you warm! You can also find lined breeches, usually with some amazing fuzz on the insides.

• Ski pants are light enough and baggy enough to wear over your boots and breeches when you are not riding. Zippers along the outside make for easy on and easy off. You can also invest in thick, durable overalls suitable for the North Pole.

• Wear nitrile exam gloves under your riding or grooming gloves in bad or cold weather. These keep your fingers warm, and you don’t lose too much dexterity and can still feel your horse while grooming. Your riding gloves could also be lined with nitrile gloves if you like.

Lining your riding gloves also keeps your fingers warm in the winter.

Riding boot hacks

• If you are breaking in a new pair of riding or paddock boots, you can wear wet socks or dampen the inside of your new boots. As they dry around your foot, they will conform to your shape.

• You can prevent blisters as you break in new boots by using a body glide stick or pop tack cleaning sponges between you and the boots. These friction-blocking sticks also help prevent rubs near the saddle or girth area.

• Nylon pantyhose are GREAT for buffing a wicked shine onto leather boots. There are no fancy directions. Simply squish a pair into a ball to buff your boots after cleaning.

• Use polo wraps as half chaps if you forget yours, or they grew legs and walked away. It’s also a great way to get a feel of what it’s like to exercise with your legs bandaged. Food for thought.

GIANT hooks are suitable for blankets.

New Uses for Everyday Items

• Use a crockpot or instant hot water kettle to create hot towels in the cooler weather for stain removal. You can also use the hot water for warming bits, cleaning tack, mixing meds, and adding water to your horse’s meals. I can’t stress this enough – an instant hot kettle is GOLD at the barn.

• The paper lining of your horse’s feed bags makes excellent poultice paper! Then, you can use the outer shell as a trash can liner. You can also use feed bags to move hay flakes around or line the chicken coop.

• Pick up some sticky-backed velcro at the craft store. Place your sticky-backed velcro inside cabinets or doors (or another vertical surface) to attach your horse’s boots onto. Now you have floor-to-ceiling storage.

• If you need to make your horse’s food and leave it out for a bit, use a shower cap to keep the flies out. No one wants fly poop in their lunch. My barn uses washcloths, which work just as well. If you have a cabinet that can hold larger buckets, that’s an option, too.

Feed bags have many great uses, like poultice paper!

Vinegar for tack and beyond

• There are endless uses for vinegar, from odor-busting to mildew removal. The best place to use vinegar is for tack cleaning. Any mildew or mold should bake in the sun, then get a wipe with vinegar to remove what’s left.

• Apple cider vinegar is tasty for some horses, and many equestrians love to add it to their horse’s feed. The verdict is still out on the effectiveness of this, however.

• Keep some white vinegar around to eat the rust from buckles, snaps, horseshoes you want to save, gate chains, or anything with some rust.

• White vinegar is also excellent at rinsing shampoo residue away and helping to brighten a horse’s tail.

Horse socks can also double as a girth cover in a pinch.

Barn hacks for horse medications, hoof care, and first aid

• Horse socks double as girth covers, fly boots, and mud-repelling socks the night before a show. Your horse will stomp less and stay clean!

• Keep panty liners in your first aid kit for instant horse-size band-aids. These are not as bulky as diapers and can be easier to wrap on your horse. Any lady will know these come in all sizes and thicknesses, so you have many options here.

• Have a stash of diapers on hand at the barn anyway! Size five works well for most horses. Diapers can be great bandages for wounds, they serve as wraps for hoof poultice or packing, and can be wet and frozen for icing weird horse leg areas, like fetlocks and knees.

• Tape some tabs on your small tubes of eye meds and other hard-to-squish things. The tabs can be easily labeled, and it helps you smush the contents up for easy application. Be sure you can still see the medication, and note any expiration dates on the tape.

These ointments are now super easy to use.

Giving your horse medications

• When you need to crush pills and make a paste for your horse, try this instead of mixing a paste in a cup and then trying to spoon it into a syringe. Put all the pills into your dosing syringe, then suction some water into the syringe. Shake and wait for your pills to dissolve in the syringe. There is no mess to clean, and all the medication is ready to go!

• Use a different container to hold your very gooey and stain-y thrush medications. Ketchup bottles with a fine tip work well. I have also used spray bottles from the home improvement store, but the pumps can clog a bit. When applying messy and runny thrush medications, you can use a syringe for added control.

• Veggie baby foods are excellent mixers for gross-tasting medicines! Be sure to pick a flavor your horse likes, like carrot or apple, and avoid broccoli and other toxic veggies. A list of toxic treats can be found here!

There’s no waste when you mix your horse’s meds in the syringe.

Random items that have a double life at the barn

• Use a lingerie bag to wash and dry your polo wraps. The bag prevents the dreaded “spaghetti” effect of untangling your polo wraps. If you prefer a huge laundry challenge, that’s fine, too!

• Speaking of polo wraps, use scissors to cut a design into the ends of matching polo wraps. You can always match up the correct pairs, even after rolling. You can cut a notch out, clip off one of the corners, create a zig-zag, etc.

This is an easy way to pair up matching polo wraps. Some polo wraps are embroidered, which makes them easy to pair.

• You can also label the ends of polo wraps with numbers, letters, or names. Labels make finding the pairs much easier.

• Hang a safety mirror in your horse’s stall and trailer if he gets nervous alone. This “company” is also good for horses on stall rest or horses that weave. This usually helps them feel better when seeing another horse. If your horse is food-aggressive, hang the mirror away from his hay pile so he doesn’t pick a fight with himself.

• Use colored duct tape to make tabs on blanket hardware, making things much easier to grab and wrangle with gloves. Colored duct tape can also help identify which blanket goes with each horse if your barn is color-coded. There are LOADS of colors to pick from.

Barn hacks beyond the curry for horse grooming and bathing

• Use Shapley’s No. 1 Light Oil to coat the bottom of your horse’s hooves to help prevent snowballs from forming. Incidentally, this grooming oil also adds condition and shine to your horse’s coarse winter coat.

• Plain white vinegar is a great post-shampoo rinse to eliminate all suds, add some shine, and repel some bugs. Some bugs seem to like vinegar, though, like gnats.

• Use baling twine as a sweat scraper. It’s nice because it can cover lumpy, bumpy, bony areas. And baling twine is everywhere. Just hold it taut over your horse and squeegee along their body. You will want to use a towel on their face and legs, but the twine removes most of it from their bodies.

• Cut static when vacuuming your horse by spritzing the inside of the nozzle with water. You may need to repeat for the other side of your horse. You can also cut static under blankets by rubbing the lining with dryer sheets.

• Use some Vaseline to soften chestnuts and ergots if they have reached prehistoric size. Then, you can peel them off with your fingers. There’s rarely a reason to trim these weird growths. If your horse is scraping his other legs with his chestnuts and ergots, then be sure to keep them soft and trimmed.

• When braiding your horse, use a rubber band on your comb to mark the width of each braid. Your finished braids will all be perfect! Well, at least they will all be the same width.

• Skip the bucket and sponge when you are bathing your horse. Instead, use your grooming gloves. Pour a little shampoo into your palm and smear it across your horse to get the bubbles going after you have wet your horse.

• Grab some shop towels from the auto section. Shop towels are more absorbent than paper towels and great for making your own grooming wipes.

Baling twine makes a quick sweat-scraper.

Clipping tips

• Use detangler, grooming oil, or shine product on your horse’s clean body before clipping. The slippery layer helps the clippers slide through the hair and prevents some hair from landing all over you! Sheen products can be excellent, but some have a lot of additional alcohol, which may be drying.

• When clipping your horse, toss your hot blades on an ice pack to cool down quickly. Be sure to wipe any oil or spray lube from the ice pack before it goes back into the freezer. Also, know that hot clipper blades are a sign your clippers are working hard, which happens if they need sharpening or your horse is not clean enough. If you use coolant, follow up with oil.

• If your clipper blades are circling the drain, retire them to your grooming box. Use old clipper blades to shorten a mane. Backcomb (aka rat up) the hair and use the old clipper blade to chop off the ends of the hair. Some clipper blades can only be sharpened once or twice, then they can live on in your grooming kit as a mane tool.

Bathing tips

• Use your sweat scraper to remove excess suds and shampoo during bath time before you rinse. You will save water and time! If you are exceptionally coordinated, you can rinse and scrape at the same time to help get rid of all shampoo remnants.

• Use your hose nozzle’s flat or fan setting to liquid-squeegee the dirt from your horse. It may also be called the flat or angle setting. So satisfying when you are rinsing your horse! This is especially good for cleaning the legs. You can sometimes skip the shampoo and use a nozzle to clean dirty legs.

• Use your favorite hoof dressing on the sole of your horse’s hooves to help dirt, mud, poop, snow, you name it, have a harder time sticking. It also makes cleaning your horse’s hooves easier.

• Pick up some baby wipes, too. These guys have a million uses. I would be lying if I said I don’t use them to tidy up before going out in public after the barn. For a more complete list, see this article here on the uses of baby wipes. Opt for sensitive skin or no-scent-added varieties just in case your horse’s skin is sensitive.

• Using a dish brush with soap in the handle is a great way to scrub buckets or horse legs. For buckets and feed tubs, fill with dish soap. For legs, fill your brush with shampoo.

Bathing is easier when you skip the bucket and use your gloves. 

Hacks for Equestrians – Barn Management:

• Use a sled to move hay around when there’s snow on the ground. You can also use a sled to slide around a manure bin to do some pick-up without carrying anything. Also, go sledding.

• Rub a bar of soap (Irish Spring is particularly potent) on everything your horse chews, wants to chew, or thinks about chewing. There are chewing deterrents at the tack shop. Some include ingredients that may test positive at shows, so do your research!

• In the summer, create a bit of evaporative cooling in your horse trailer by tossing some ice cubes on the shavings. Use a lot of ice, which reduces dust in the trailer, too.

• Use old rubber mats as wide drains under the eaves of buildings. You’ll keep the earth from washing away, and you can better keep the water away from your barns. It’s also weed control against your buildings, so there’s less gardening to do.

• Save the desiccant packs from your supplements to store with your rarely used tack. These packs help keep mold and mildew away. For moisture control, you can toss a few into your helmet or tack trunk.

• Spray your snow shovel with your favorite horse shine product, like Magic Sheen, to prevent snow from sticking as you shovel around the barn. I have “stolen” horse grooming supplies from the barn for this very purpose.

• Put your compost pile to work by spreading a thick layer over the ground that covers pipes. The poop layer keeps everything toasty if your pipes are not buried as deeply as they should be.

Fencing is no longer a delicious snack when it’s covered in soap.

More barn tricks

• Bring an old yoga mat to the barn. These mats are ideal to cover saddle racks to keep the dents out of your saddle’s flocking and padding. There are loads of other uses for old yoga mats at the barn.

• Use bike tape on your stall cleaning tools for easy grip, especially in winter, and no blisters if you can’t find your gloves.

• Use a brush attachment on your screw gun to deeply clean buckets, feeders, troughs, trailers, stall walls, you name it. These turn your screw gun into a scrubbing machine!

• Use the little trays from mushroom containers to hold and catch the spills from your favorite hoof dressings. Or leak bottles. Or a cracked bottle. Or a drippy bottle.

• Use baling twine as a saw to cut through other baling twine if you don’t have a knife handy. Hang onto each end of the V-shaped piece and quickly saw back and forth.

• Use dryer sheets to repel rodents and flies around the barn. I have heard that you can also get rid of static cling and electric shocks in your horse blankets by rubbing the underside of your blankets with a dryer sheet.

• To keep shavings inside the stall, you can create a soft, hoof-friendly lip with a piece of stall mat. You can also use the bristle end of a push broom.

• Hang a hoof pick on your horse’s stall door to pick his feet before you exit the stall! This habit tidies your barn aisle and creates less mess to sweep later. Hoof picks are also great for installing screw eyes at horse shows and leveraging open tubs.

These rice hulls are held in with the bristles of a push broom.

And the list goes on and on

• Use a tire rim as a hose holder to make the most awkward horse barn chore of rolling the hose up easier. This may be trickier to find than an actual hose holder, but at least you’re upcycling.

• Use a PVC tube with a closed-end as a whip holder. Mount on a wall or post and drill a hole in the bottom for drainage. You can always make a closed end with duct tape. You don’t have to find a PVC cap.

• Toss limp carrots into a bucket of cold water to revive them. Throw out or compost any slimy carrots.

• You can use big, chunky mulch at gates when it’s rainy and yucky. Mulch is also great for shows, just outside the stalls. Help keep the mud and water outside, not in your horse’s house. You can also use the handle end of a muck rake or broom to carve some shallow channels away from the show stall if needed.

• Use a pool skimmer to clean water troughs. No long handles are needed. Small skimmers are especially handy after a windy day, anytime in the fall, or if there are a lot of bugs floating around.

• Use a stall freshener made from zeolites under your horse’s bedding. It’s super absorbent and eliminates all ammonia, making your bedding last longer and saving dollars. Zeolites also help with fly control and creating traction on ice.

• Keep a tennis ball on the end of the cross ties to avoid the super annoying CLANG. Also, it may give your barn dogs something to stare at for hours. Tennis balls can also discourage a mouthy horse from chewing the cross ties during grooming.

Horse Show Barn Hacks

• Bring some white vinegar to rinse your horse after a trip to the wash rack. Vinegar adds shine and helps remove any remaining suds if you shampoo while at the horse show.

• Use a large syringe (about 60cc) to rinse your horse’s mouth before you bridle. Rinsing prevents any mouth foam from being green or grainy and landing on your white breeches or your horse’s chrome.

There’s no green foam if you rinse your horse’s mouth.

• Bring about two feet of sturdy chain from the hardware store and a durable lock to secure your tack and grooming stall. Some stalls are fine with a lock, and some need chains, so bring both.

• Bring a laundry bag and a stain remover stick. Pre-treat any stains on your show clothes or horse gear, and toss them in the laundry bag to separate them from clean things.

• Stall chains make great storage when tacked up to a wall. You can hang saddle pads, boots, and wraps.

• Or, clip your cross ties together to do the same thing. If there’s anything you can do to annoy your friends at a show, it’s to string some cross ties together. This trap lets them clothesline themselves, and you can also hang things from it to dry.

• Turn any bulb into a socket with this handy attachment from the hardware store – great for shows! You never know what to expect at a new horse show venue, so be prepared. Pair this with an extension cord!

Get organized at horse shows

• Grab some address stickers from the home improvement store to label buckets and trunks. Labels help prevent theft and ensure you are not making your horse’s dinner in the tack-cleaning bucket.

• Invest in some shelving for horse shows. This allows you to see your items without digging through a trunk. Boldly labeled buckets also help you stay organized and prevent you from mixing a mash in the soapy tack-cleaning bucket.

• Start your packing with a list! You can find the ULTIMATE horse show packing list here. Ignore or mark out what you don’t need, and pack the rest. Lists prevent you from forgetting your saddle or horse. It happens.

• Those handy wine bags at the store conveniently hold a six-pack of adult grape juice or a six-pack of horse grooming stuff. You can hang it for shows, freeing up shelf space.

Shelves plus labels – mostly organized.

Hacks for equestrians – the saddle, bridle, and horse supplies

• Pull-on bell boots test your arm muscles, and your patience. Soak them in hot water before using them to make them more pliable!

• Skip spending big bucks for fluffy, furry earplugs for your horse; get some soft little cat toys instead. Look for soft, perhaps fuzzy, round cat toys that don’t have a squeaker or bell inside.

• Grab a handy repair kit with giant needles when repairing your horse’s stuff. The larger needles are easier to thread and strong enough to fix tough barn things. Use dental floss as the thread for extra holding power.

• Use a few rubber braiding bands as bridle keepers until you can make it to the tack store to pick up some replacement keepers.

• Pipe insulation – One, for pipes. Two, for covering metal saddle racks so your flocking and saddle don’t get dented. Three, use the thicker pipe insulation to stuff in your tall boots.

• There is never a better way to move mats than with vice grips. Or anything else bulky, cumbersome, and heavy you need to drag around.

• Window insulator kits are amazing sheets of plastic that you stick and blow-dry onto a window to create a draft-proof window. This barrier keeps things more climate-controlled, which may help with mold and mildew in tack rooms.

• It’s well-known that coffee makes the world go round for most of us. Sacrifice just a few gourmet drinks for some old-fashioned supermarket brand (OMG GASP WHAT), and you have a super container to store pre-measured feed.

Color coordinate blankets, buckets, and grooming supplies with duct tape. 

Blankets and pads

• Stitch some sheepskin halter fuzzies on your saddle pads piping if your horse gets rubs. Or find a saddle pad that doesn’t have piping. Your saddle’s cantle should not rest on the edge of the saddle pad or numnah.

• Use bright duct tape to mark halters for turnout or blankets while stored. You can also color-code each horse so they wear the right one.

• Keep a hoof pick on a carabiner to attach to your belt loop, a hook outside your horse’s stall, or the paddock gate.

Tuck a quilt between your horse and blanket for some rub protection.

• If your horse gets dented hairs from the blanket on their chest, use a leg quilt over the blanket’s neck opening to alleviate this. This padding is also suitable for rubbed-out manes and withers. You shouldn’t need another blanket to hold it in.

• Remove horse hair with a piece of shelf liner. This sticky stuff is excellent for saddle pads, clothing, wool coolers, and horse blankets. Cut some sticky liner into 8″ x 8″ or so to remove horse hair from all sorts of places.

• Use a dog hair slicker brush to fluff up sheepskin and fleece. And maybe your dog, too! This is especially helpful after the sheepskin has dried. If you launder your sheepskin horse stuff, you can re-fluff the fuzzy parts after it has dried.

• Hooks – For all things that need hanging. Big giant hooks are great for blankets if you are not the folding type. Hooks that dangle from chains are great for tack-cleaning stations. You don’t have to use hooks from the tack shop – hit the hardware store, too.

Fancy piping can rub your horse, so stitch some fleece for protection.

What hacks for equestrians should you avoid?

Don’t do any hacks that sacrifice safety for convenience. Time savers should not be dangerous. For example, hay nets are not great at ground level or in herds. Hang nets higher than a hoof can get stuck, and add more nets than horses to a paddock.

This once contained coffee, now it’s used for feed that needs a cover.