Your Horse’s Tack: Different Nosebands and Their Uses

6:00 pm
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At its most basic, the noseband’s purpose is to keep a horse’s mouth shut around the bit. A horse can evade the bit by gaping open his mouth, so nose pressure assists in keeping his mouth closed and adding a measure of control. However, one glance inside any tack room can tell you there are many different nosebands on the market. Use of these different nosebands can apply to certain training or behavioral applications, so let’s take a look at some common nosebands and their use.

Feature Photo: Drop noseband

The Plain Noseband or Cavesson

Six Easy Hacks for an Organized Tack Room

6:53 am
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Get organized! Your barn and tack room are tough to keep ahead of. With boarders, students, and clients in and out all the time, to say nothing of barn staff never putting things back in quite the same place twice, we know even the best-designed tack room is going to slip into chaos without constant intervention. Prevention is the best way to tackle a lack of organization! With this in mind, we have six easy hacks to a more organized tack room, feed room, and barn

1. Go #MatchyMatchy to organize tack belonging to multiple horses. Tired of seeing […]

Ice-Free Strategies for Keeping Your Horse’s Water from Freezing

7:13 am
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Frozen water buckets: they can affect your life almost anywhere in the United States. Even in the warmest winter refuges of Florida, a freeze can sweep over your farm and harden your horse’s water buckets or trough to a solid mass overnight, leaving your horse without water, and you with the unpleasant task of breaking all that ice. In extreme climates, when the air temperature drops well below zero for extended periods of time, it can be hard to get by without purpose made bucket warmers. For those times when it isn’t an arctic blast, however, you might […]

4 Bandages Every Horse Owner Needs

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We all keep horses for different reasons, but whether your horse lives out on pasture and goes for occasional trail rides, or spends most of his time working in an indoor and eating hay in a stall, there are certain necessities every horse owner must keep around the barn. These are the four bandages every horse owner needs on hand… just in case!

1: Self-adhesive wrap. With brand names like Vetrap, self-adhesive wrap might be the one of the most important things in your emergency kit. It’s useful in a pinch when you need to […]

Why Natural Light Matters to Your Stable (And How to Get It)

Horses are outdoor creatures. Frequently, however, they’re living indoor lives. And while some horses will let you know they really prefer the sheltered experience — we’ve all known that horse who demands to be returned to his stall the moment a cloud appears in the sky — the fact is, their physiology is still designed for wide open spaces. They require motion, fresh air, and natural light.

Natural light is superior to electric light for a number of reasons, and its effects on both horses and humans is well-documented. Exposure to unfiltered natural light allows the development of Vitamin […]

5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Barn

Does your barn need sprucing up? Sometimes just a few little changes can make a big difference to your productivity (to say nothing of your mood). If you’re a little over your barn’s design, need to organize some chaos, or just plain want a change, we have five easy fixes to make your barn a better place.

1. Install removable feed buckets, for a cleaner barn with better pest control. Even if you don’t feed sweet feed, the molasses in commercial grain mix can create a sticky mess in your horse’s feed bucket, as […]

5 Horse Show Essentials You May Not Have Thought Of

6:55 am
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You’ve perfected your horse show packing list. You’re a pro. But horse show packing goes way beyond remembering all your tack and brushes. Take these extras with you to your next horse show and you’ll be ready for any eventuality.

Personal Medicine Kit: Of course you have every medication your horse could ever need stashed in your trailer, plus bandages of every description. Don’t forget about you — you’re working pretty hard, too! Make sure you have a human first aid kid with band-aids, burn cream, cortisone (for bug bites and allergic reactions […]

How to Use Recycled Materials to Cut Down on Equestrian Arena Costs

If your budget is the only reason you keep putting off your plans to build your own equestrian arena, here is some good news for you. While you can definitely save money by doing much of the actual construction yourself, you can also possibly cut down on costs by using recycled construction materials wherever possible. For example, choosing crushed glass instead of silica sand can save you a lot of money when it comes to putting together your sand surface. Additionally, recycled materials are eco-friendly and will help you bring down the carbon footprint of building your own equestrian […]