For our Blog this time we welcome a new guest writer.
A recent customer of ours, Amy Caraway in Salisbury North Carolina has been kind enough to share her excitement about getting her new barn but also provides some insight to how she handles her horses during what would be a more mild winter in a more Southern region. Her story also provides a good view of how our horse barns fair in North Carolina’s climate. It also demontrates the importance of good horse barn ventilation.
Thank you Amy for sharing with us and we hope her experience provides all of you with some helpful tips. Amy’s Barn is a Low Profile with a Raised Center Aisle.
One of my favorites.
Low Profile Barn
As far as winter goes, this is part of the reason I liked all of the options Horizon offered during the barn building process. Ventilation is important both summer and winter and having the ridge vent, the functional cupola and the gable vents assure me that air can escape the building even if I have the barn doors and windows sealed up tight. Use of Dutch windows and sliding aisle doors allow me to meter how much wind or air I want to let into the barn depending on how hot or cold the temperature is, too. My old barn did not have enough ventilation, my farrier was always complaining about there being no air when he came to shoe my horses…so when I chose the options for my Horizon barn this was in the forefront of my mind as I made upgrade decisions. To be honest, I think my horses LOVE the colder weather until they they get wet, then they want to be inside the barn. If I have only one horse at home, I usually leave one door open to the pasture and give the horse free choice to be either inside or outside unless it is bitter cold and then I have them stay up at least during the night time hours. If I have more than one at home then I have them stay up at night during the winter. I fill up a lot of extra water buckets when the temperature is predicted to be lower than 32 degrees in case the water lines freeze and I feed extra hay in the winter to supplement the loss of grass in the field. Sometimes I will put extra hay outside in the field with them too when it is really cold. Since I live in North Carolina, our winters tend to be on the milder side. I normally don’t blanket my horses unless I have a horse who is scheduled to go to early spring shows or unless I have an older horse who needs the extra help with insulation. Another thing I try to remember is to pull any medications out of the barn and bring them in the house if it gets extremely hot or cold.
