[AT] OT Barn floor question

[Dudley Rupert]

Cecil's post on this subject a couple of days ago got me to thinking of my
growing up days after the war on our little farm.  The two farms immediately
to our West both still had horses.  One farmer had bought a Farmall H during
the war and the other bought a WC Allis shortly after the war.  However,
both farmers kept their horses until the early fifties.   As I recall, for
the first three or four years after the war the only real tractor implements
these farmers had were a moldboard plow and a tandem disc.   These farmers
had worked horses since they were kids and it seemed that they were unable
to get rid of them cold turkey when they acquired a tractor.  During the
summers I hired out to them from time to time and drove their teams pulling
such light implements as a spike tooth harrow, a single row cultivator, a
hay rake and hay wagons, first with loose hay and then a couple of years
later baled hay.  None of these horses had ever been shoed and, except for
feeding or harnessing, they spent very little time in a barn.

Let me fast forward to today - My daughter and SIL came by tonight and I
brought up this subject of horse stall floor material.  My SIL (he has been
a full time farrier for the past ten or eleven years) told me that virtually
all of the new barns/stables he's been in have concrete with rubber mats.
Off hand he could only think of a couple of exceptions.  One was a couple of
stables that cater to the dressage community. The stalls in these stables
had blown in foam (about an inch thick) on top of the concrete with a poly
urethane finish on top of that (and then the rubber mats).  The other was a
stable where clay was brought in and then rubber mats were installed.  He
ventured his opinion that he would never use clay (in his own 12 stall
stable he has concrete).  The problem with clay, as he sees it, may not be
inherent to the clay itself but when the urine gets down below the rubber
the clay becomes an awful slimy, gooey mess that virtually no one wants to
clean up.  And so, in the stable he was referring to, no one did.

Let me hasten that I claim NO knowledge about what should or should not be
put under horses hoofs.  I merely pass this second hand information along
for what it might be worth.

Dudley
Snohomish, Washington



-----Original Message-----
From: at-bounces at lists.antique-tractor.com
[mailto:at-bounces at lists.antique-tractor.com]On Behalf Of Cecil E Monson
Sent: Tuesday, October 19, 2004 5:52 AM
To: Antique tractor email discussion group
Subject: Re: [AT] OT Barn floor question


	I'm not posting this to take issue with anyone as to how to
take care of horses. I'm just relating how my father took care of his
horses. He loved them almost as much as he did his family. I never saw
him raise a hand against a horse or mistreat them in any way.

	My father had a team of Belgians for his heavy work and several
teams of light work horses for pulling wagons and other light stuff. I
never knew him to have any of the horses shoed and they were all kept
in stalls with concrete floors. I remember well because one of my chore
jobs was to clean the stalls and put in fresh oat straw for bedding as
well as to feed and water them. My father kept their hooves trimmed and
well cared for and as far as I know, never had a problem with them. It
seems to me the farmers who had problems with their horses had them on
dirt or wooden floors. Maybe my father's success with his horses came
from his insistence on those stalls being cleaned daily and that they
always have fresh clean straw to stand on. I never saw fancy floors in
horse barns or shoed horses until I came out East. Maybe the lack of shoes
was because he was phasing out the horses and didn't work them as much as
he did before he got the first tractor in the mid 1930s. I wouldn't know
about anything prior to 1936 or so as that is about as far back as I can
remember.

	Thinking back, we didn't have any rough or rocky ground to cut
horse's hooves or drive them on crushed rock roads or pavement. Hell,
there wasn't any pavement closer than 4 or 5 hours by horse to where we
lived. Even taking a triple box of grain to the elevator in Le Roy was
on old time gravel roads. Even the main street in Le Roy wasn't paved
until 1947 - I should know as I worked for the Minnesota Highway Dept
and helped pave that graveled Main Street in the summer of 1947.

	As kids and later teenagers, we had horses to ride from the time
we were little. I had a bay mare named "Trixie" that began life as a bronco
in northwest Montana for my primary horse and a black with a star on the
forehead named "Dime" that I rode sometimes or shared with my brothers.
These two were also kept in stalls with concrete floors and were never
shoed.

	FWIW, the concrete floors in the stalls had never been troweled
smooth but appeared to have been rough screeded off and left rough. Troweled
floors would have been too slippery, even with straw for bedding.

Cecil
--
The nicest thing about telling the truth is you never have to wonder
what you said.

Cecil E Monson
Lucille Hand-Monson
Mountainville, New York   Just a little east of the North Pole

Allis Chalmers tractors and equipment

Free advice

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