Our property lay out
Here's a quick map up of our property (5 acres, approximately 2.8 acres under paddock) - we're developing a semi permanent laneway that runs along the back and down the sides so that the horses can have access to any of the paddocks we choose without having to change too many fences and gates!
They always have access to the drylot (which I've drawn a little narrow here, oops!) and then go either right or left into the laneway that gives them access to whichever section we're currently grazing. They have roughly 4x4m stables with large yards at nighttime. If you check out the previous post you can see how the drylot shelter etc is set up.
The dotted yellow lines are roughly where we might put our temporary electric fencing for each grazing section - I've drawn them all in to show you how might divide up the paddocks, but there would only be one set up at a time. Video of me setting up a new section.
How long the horses graze in each section depends on how much grass there is, how quickly they're eating it etc, but we would typically graze each bit for 1-2 weeks (bearing in mind because of our laminitic they are only out for a half day in the mornings most of the time). We usually sacrifice a "winter paddock" (often the one I set up in the video as it gets more sun in the winter) and leave them their much longer to trash at the end of winter while waiting for the grass growth to get going early in spring.
When they are using the bottom left paddocks we use the arena as an extension of the laneway (there are gates at each end and on the sides) and the horses use it as a secondary snooze sport.
Top tip when thinking about how you might set up a grazing system, especially if you are using laneways is that many horses find it INCREDIBLY difficult to turn back on themselves to get somewhere (i.e. use a maze). So if the end of your grazing section is closer and in line of sight to the dry lot, it will take some convincing to get them to turn around, go through the gate to the laneway and back around. But, everyone gets more exercise :P
If you look at the mapy and compared it to the laneway walk and talk video, I hope you can get a good understanding - as always, feel free to comment!
Thanks so much for that Sophie. I can see some similarities with my set up (including size and number of paddocks).
How many horses do you have on the property?
It looks like (based off the presumed arena size), that the temporary grazing sections are typically about 20 x 40m?
How do you access the temporary sections from the semi-permanent laneway (it looks like the semi-permanent laneway is tape and treadins)?
Also, I can't see how all the temporary sections link up to the semi-permanent laneway.
We have 3, 13something hand Icelandic, 15.1h draft cross and Andalusian.
Yes I'd say roughly that size, but we vary the size depending on how much grass there is (and how fat they are!), lots of grass err on the smaller side, if we don't want to move them so soon because it's wet or we're busy etc, bit larger.
I've added some more arrows to try and explain, but possibly just more confusing! On the left side we have actually just built the laneway as we move down the sections, ending it 3 or 4 metres before the horizontal strip fence. So they enter where the red arrows are, sequentially down the paddock (it's also down hill), and the laneway gets longer to block off the previous cell.
The orange arrows show gates, so we'd leave these open for access (and the arena is fully fenced fyi, I didn't draw it in!), so to access the bottom right and middle paddocks they go through there.
And I've drawn in new green dotted lines to show how we'd adjust the grazing sections to allow access - some areas around gates will get regrazed.
Does that help??