Horse Bedding - Top tips to reduce your costs

Winter is Coming: Make Your Horse Bedding Work Harder For You As The Cost Of Living Rises

With the longest day behind us there’s no escaping we’re on a downhill slope to winter. This winter brings with it the added worry of increasing costs. With horse bedding being an essential in your stable, here at Chestnut Mill in partnership with Bedmax, we want to help you make your bedding more economical without compromising on your horse’s health and welfare.

Here are our three top tips to make your bedding work harder for you:

1. Starting with a good, deep bed is key. We often find people use less bedding in a bid to save costs, but this is really a false economy. Putting down a minimum of 6-8 inches of Bedmax Shavings allows it to work efficiently and manage urine effectively. In each bag of Bedmax is a specific volume of small, medium and large flakes which form layers – the large flakes on the top allow urine to drain away from the surface and be absorbed by smaller flakes at the base of the bed.

2. Skip out droppings in the evening. If it’s an option, skipping out the droppings in the evening will minimise the mess the following morning, and in turn reduce waste. It’s amazing how much muck a horse can produce in the few hours between feed time and bedtime! If you are able to, pop in and remove this before it gets trampled into your horse’s bedding which will make it much harder to separate from the clean bedding material.

3. Remove wet once a week. On the whole, this goes against what we advise as removing urine daily helps to reduce the risk of ammonia and bacteria. However, sometimes there has to be a compromise, and thankfully, because Bedmax Shavings  are made using predominantly pine, they offer unique antibacterial action against harmful bacteria which can cause damage to the hooves and respiratory system of your horse. Thankfully, because Bedmax is designed to drain urine away from the surface, leaving the wet in the base and keeping the surface topped up with clean bedding reduces waste whilst still protecting the horse from moisture and ammonia.

It also might help to buy in bulk to take advantage of multibuy discounts. Chestnut Mill offer a lower price per unit on a pallet rather than individual bales.  If a pallet deal does not currently exist please contact us info@chestnutmill.co.uk to ask for a full pallet quote