What's Under Your Horse's Bedding?

What’s under your horse’s bedding?

Most of us don’t think too long or too hard about what is under that beautifully fluffy pile of shavings in your horse’s stall – until spring cleaning time, the mats start to warp, or there’s an earthquake or major rainstorm. Preventing major repair work in the future depends on what’s under your horse’s bedding now.

Jump to shopping

The vast majority of us have stalls with shavings over mats or dirt, and that’s the end of the story. However, there will be a day when the once smooth dirt is now a giant bowl or the mats are warping because the ground underneath is soaked and moving.

Horses are *usually* wonderfully predictable in their bathroom, resting, and sleeping routine. All those urine spots and weight-bearing hoof marks can create a giant pain in your stall-cleaning butt.

Simple shavings over mats.

Dirt floors in a stall

A pile or two of shavings, and the rest was a bare dirt floor. Well, you have the drippy waterer, the horse that paws, and the chronic “will only pee in one spot ever” horse. What time you save in sifting through only a tiny amount of shavings was quickly eaten by raking and packing the stall floor daily.

This stall mat system is atop gravel, which is atop the earth. Extra drainage.

Add mats to your horse’s stall.

This is great – except that every now and again, the cracks would let the urine sink into the ground below, and add a hoof on top, and over time, this makes a nice mat-warping urine sinkhole thing. So, you pull mats, scrape out wet spot, replace with dirt, cover with mats, re-bed.

If you are unlucky enough to live in an area with clay soil, you know that this stuff moves and shifts, if you have earthquakes or not. One heavy rain can push those clay streams right into your stalls, even up through the mat cracks from the area around the barn. Not fun.

Horses + the earth will cause mats to shift. Shifting mats allow urine and water to get under them and warp them. For tips on stripping stalls and dealing with this, you can read this article!

Mats that interlock will go a long way.

Interlocking mats tend to stay put, despite your horse’s best efforts to disrupt them. They will allow some urine to leak through, but it’s not the same amount of shifting that occurs with non-interlocking stall mats.

You can also invest in a netting type system to go under your stalls, or just under your bedding, to keep things from shifting. These systems help prevent holes in the dirt floor of your barn, too!

This “netting” type of system helps keep floors level. Use under mats, or not!

Here’s a similar type of netting used outside in a high-traffic area, great for drainage and lots of hooves.

Another option is to install a mattress system.

These systems are wall-to-wall (no seams) super thick and cushy solid surface stall flooring. I love these!! You can minimize the amount of bedding used, as the cushion replaces the need for heavy bedding. There are also flooring systems that are wall-to-wall, but without the cushion.

This stall, complete with wall-to-wall mattress, allows for cushion and negates the need for piles of shavings.

You also have the option of concrete, then mats, then shavings. This is great for the horse that has a clay pit under his stall or only likes to urinate on the seams. I have known many horses that thrive on this combo of solid concrete plus mats.

Stall flooring, of course, gets much more complicated when you factor in what sort of soil is native to your area.

I have seen barns in the desert that simply use the sandy landscape as bedding! I have also seen barns that have needed to be raised to keep the moist soil below from interfering with the stalls.

More importantly, the soil in your area will determine how to prep the flooring for drainage, stability, and insulation. Insulation is critical if you live in an area that freezes – must protect the pipes!

The best thing to do is to talk to a grading contractor in your area that specializes in drainage. Get prepared to learn about stone dust, gravel, DG, and great dirt! Creating the proper base for your stall mats will alleviate the need to remove mats, clear out the offending area, refill the offending area, and replace the mats and bedding.

Ammonia

Sometimes, that dangerous ammonia smell can linger in stalls when the drainage is poor, the bedding is sub-par, or the stalls are not cleaned enough. You can treat caustic ammonia fumes with topical products, use absorbent bedding, and have mats and stall floors that suit your horse’s urination habits.

How do you layer your stalls? And before you guys go nutso about cushy stalls and bedding up to their whiskers, let me put this out there ….. For horses given a choice of where to sleep and spend their time, they most likely want outside on the hard ground in the dirtiest place possible. Just some food for thought. But you do need to have level stalls that are safe and not filled with pee potholes.

Stock up here for your horse supplies! As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases, but it’s ZERO extra cents to you. You can also visit my Amazon storefront here: PEG storefront.

Sweet PDZ Zeolite Powder

~~$50.85~~ $46.73