Keeping Horse paddocks dry; The Dream Solution

Land aeration

You have acres of horse paddocks, you live in the UK, your problem; the paddocks spend half the year as a quagmire. If you had an unlimited budget, what is the dream scenario to keep your horses hooves dry all year round?

The first step is to establish what the problem is. Nine times out of ten, the problem starts with hyper compacted ground. Which isn’t hugely surprising, because all year round the field has half a ton of horse walking and running around it 24 hours a day. On top of that, most people insist on rolling fields to attempt to get rid of divets and ruts caused by the horses hooves. All this does is compact the ground further, leading to more drainage problems, more water, more divets, more rolling, the cycle continues and simply gets worse and worse (hint, instead of rolling out divets and ruts, rotavate them out and reseed!)

So, the problem, hard ground. The solution to this: Aercore it. What this does is punch hundreds of holes through the compacted top layers into the looser areas underneath. This allows the water on the surface to get through that compacted layer. What does this part cost? Well, to Aercore an acre takes about 2 hours, so £110

It’s all very well punching lots of holes into your field, but how do you keep them open? Each hole is only about 10mm in diameter, it won’t take many horses hooves to block up those holes and reduce the efficiency of the drainage. The solution, You Top dress it. This is a spreading machine that spreads sand over the top of your grass field, this sand then drops into, and fills up the holes drilled by the Aercore, this in turn stops the holes being blocked and keeps them open. The sand remains porous thus allows the surface water to drain through the now penetrated compacted layer. Unfortunately, Top dressing is bloody expensive! To top dress one acre of field to a layer of approximately 3mm, would require about 45 tons of sand! Sand is approximately £20 per ton, leading to a cost of approximately £900 per acre in materials and a further £500 per acre to spread the sand.

Cost so far per acre, approximately £1,500

It doesn’t stop there though. Assuming the field has no natural drainage at all, before you carry out the above process, one has to mole plough the field and lay drainage pipe at 2 metre intervals. This tube is perforated and collects the water that passes through the holes punched in the compacted soil. These tubes then all need to be fed into a drain and the process is then complete.

The cost of this, a 1 acre field is approximately 63 metres square. You would need 31 x 63 metre lengths of tubing to adequately cover the field. at £1 per metre for the tubing; £1,953 in material cost. Add on £1,100 in costs to lay it and the total cost to mole plough and lay drainage in a 1 acre field is £3,000

So, what does the dream drainage scenario cost to keep those horses hooves dry all year round?