A few fun facts and photos about horse life in Germany.
Left: The stalls here have great hay feeders. You can fill them easily from the aisle and it slides down in the rack. Center is view from inside the stall.
Left: They don't clean stalls here, they just lay a clean layer of straw over the old muck every day. The stalls floor is maybe 18" below the aisle height to accommodate the build up. Periodically (twice a year?) the hinged stalls walls are opened and they clean out the whole row with a tractor. It works reasonably well but for the geldings the pee place in the middle gets pretty ripe overnight. And remember Claude is gray. Bathing his chest and elbow every day with icey cold water is not my favorite chore. The straw bales are taller than me.
Center: Claude is eating monster size pellets twice a day, and I give him a meusli (pictured) at lunch. He is still thin but he was too fat at home. He looks more athletic now....
Right: The grain is delivered stall side in a motorized cart.
Left - Hay comes in monster bales they fork into carts.
Center- We bought some "alfalfa" for Claude to have before his rides. It is weird chopped stuff with molasses.
Left - Grooming stalls. Three for one hundred horses. Enough said. Although it is rare you have to wait. Accept when the lesson program gets going after school. Then there is a pony invasion.
Center: Tack lockers are sweet. They fit quite a lot of stuff and keep it organized. Wish someone mass produced them in the US at a reasonable price.
Right - Rows of tack lockers are opposite the grooming areas.
The ponies. Makes me smile every time I see them. It is fun to see kids of all ages jumping and doing vaulting and dressage and fighting over their favorite lead rope and braiding forelocks and all the stuff. And they all march over to the rings with little bitty coolers on!
I don't understand the German obsession with twig brooms. I have used it often for our aisle and I don't see the appeal. And the farm owner said brooms will cost 700 euro more this year than last year, so I can't imagine what the total cost is. He also said the power bill increased by 20,000 euro this year, so again, where did it start? The energy crisis is real here. (For those of you not tracking the exchange rate every day, the euro is roughly 1 to $1.07).
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