Healthy horse standing in pasture with environmental water conservation symbols, promoting sustainable horse keeping practices.
Creating a Confinement Area for Your Horse: The Best Pasture Management Technique
A wooden horse shelter in a pasture surrounded by lush green trees for sustainable land management and horse health.

Probably the most important aspect of managing pastures is the time when you take your horses off your pasture. You can greatly improve the health and productivity of your pasture plants by creating and using a paddock or confinement area to house your horses when pasture plants need to grow. A confinement area becomes your horses’ outdoor living space when they aren’t on the pasture. Here are a few tips on creating a confinement area.

Begin by locating an appropriate site for your confinement area which is:

  • On higher ground

  • Away from creeks, wetlands, or other water bodies and surface water flows

  • Surrounded by a grassy or vegetated buffer for biofiltration of any runoff

  • Convenient to your barn to make it easy to maintain and to care for your horse

A confinement area can vary from the size of a box stall, 12’x 16′, to that of a long, narrow enclosure where a horse can trot or even gallop to get some exercise.

Using proper footing in your confinement area will prevent erosion and reduce mud. Some horse healthy footing options include:

  • Gravel (crushed rock, no larger than 5/8″)

  • Coarse, washed sand

  • non-toxic wood chips (often called hogfuel)

Installing rain gutters and downspouts on barns, sheds and outbuildings will divert clean rainwater away from your confinement areas and substantially reduce mud and runoff.

Choose the very safest fencing you can for your confinement area. Whatever type of fencing you choose, you may want to reinforce it with some type of electric tape or hot wire – a good “psychological barrier.” Horses are hard on fences and will test most types but they tend to have respect for electric fencing.

Be sure that corners are safe and there are no protruding objects where a horse could get hurt, like bolt ends, nails, boards, or the tops of metal t-posts.

Size all confinement area gates for the types of deliveries you expect (such as gravel, hogfuel and hay).

Stay tuned to Horses for Clean Water to learn more about how to integrate a confinement area into your pasture management regime!

Picture of Alayne Blickle
Alayne Blickle
Alayne Blickle is a lifelong equestrian, ranch riding competitor, and the creator and director of Horses for Clean Water. Well-known for her enthusiastic, down-to-earth approach, Blickle is an educator who has worked with horse and livestock owners since 1990, teaching manure composting, pasture management, mud and dust control, water conservation, chemical use reduction, fire preparedness, and wildlife enhancement.  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.
Picture of Alayne Blickle
Alayne Blickle
Alayne Blickle is a lifelong equestrian, ranch riding competitor, and the creator and director of Horses for Clean Water. Well-known for her enthusiastic, down-to-earth approach, Blickle is an educator who has worked with horse and livestock owners since 1990, teaching manure composting, pasture management, mud and dust control, water conservation, chemical use reduction, fire preparedness, and wildlife enhancement.  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.

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