Manufacturers Of Permeable Stall Floorings

It’s 20 degrees even in the barn, and there you are mucking stalls again. Or rather, you’re excavating stalls — your slob of a gelding has managed to create a stinking, sodden crater in the center of his stall floor. As you wipe the sweat from your brow and haul the fourth disgusting wheelbarrow of urine-soaked shavings and dirt and heaven knows what else out to the manure pile, you can’t help thinking, "There has got to be a better way!"

Fortunately, there are manufacturers who agree with you. Perhaps having faced some of the same frustrations themselves, they’ve created a range of products that promise to take the back-breaking labor out of stall cleaning. By covering a dirt stall floor with a durable, liquid-permeable surface, they promise to eliminate those stinky craters, cut down on the damage your horse can wreak with pawing, stall-walking, or weaving, and help save you tons of bedding. Sounds good, right?

Permeable stall floor coverings function differently than rubber stall mats, whose main purpose is to provide cushioning for your horse’s legs. Rubber is basically waterproof, so urine and other liquids pool on top of such a surface, to be soaked up (one hopes) by the bedding in the stall. Permeable stall systems, by comparison, let urine percolate through the material to be soaked up by the ground underneath-thus keeping the bedding drier and cutting down on mucking time and effort. They don’t provide much in the way of cushioning, but they can act as a protective layer for the floor, shielding it from a horse’s more destructive urges