From: Stu
My wife and I are looking for articles regarding construction of sacrifice areas or dry lots for our horses. Our pasture area is in a high water table spot and would like to find methods to create a better drainage situation. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks. Stu and Pat
You can also check with your county extension agent, and finally, I promise you that you'll find quite a lot of material online. Don't just look for "sacrifice areas" - use other search terms such as "mud management and "pasture management".
Meanwhile, you can take a good look at your property and figure out just how you can best keep the water where you want it - and away from the places you know you don't want it. Digging ditches, installing French drains, building berms, planting trees and even planting a wide (50' or wider) band of grass around the outside of your sacrifice area can all be useful methods of keeping it reasonably dry and minimizing the amount of runoff.
I hope that you have a nearby source of inexpensive gravel, because if you want your sacrifice area to have a reasonably firm and flat surface that drains at all well, you're probably going to have to use a lot of crushed rock or gravel. If your horses, the weather, and the water table work together to generate a lot of mud in high-traffic areas such as runs, pens, and other small turnouts, bringing in two or three inches of gravel won't do the trick. The gravel will sink, the mud will rise, and after one season, you'll be almost back where you started.
It seems that those of us who are blessed with high water tables and a lot of rain are simply going to have to become "frequent buyers" at the local quarry, because judging from the various mud-control methods that I've seen at various farms in wet areas, the best solution is to put down geotextile, then 8"-12" of 1" rock, then several inches of screenings or stone dust. I've also heard of people installing geotextile, then six inches or more of rock, then a second layer of geotextile, and THEN 12" of gravel. It makes sense. If you do that, the gravel will stay more or less where you want it to, the water and mud will stay more or less where you want them to, and you'll have a safe surface for your horses instead of a quagmire in wet weather and a mass of frozen holes and ridges in cold weather. But - there's always a downside - unless you have your own bulldozer AND your own quarry, the project won't be a cheap one. It would be MUCH more fun to invest the same amount of money in, say, a new driveway, or base and footing for a riding arena... but if you're in a wet region, the fact is that your horses will probably spend four or five months of every year in that sacrifice area, so the footing there has to be one of your top priorities.
Good luck, and if you discover a good, inexpensive method of mastering mud, please let me know. My own horses are up to their fetlocks in mud as I type this...
Jessica
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