haul water over to the corrals and feed the horses, come back
Haul water over? You don't have an water spigot for the horses? My horses used to go through 75 gallons every couple of days. That's a lot of water to haul.
The horse corrals are on the other side of our property from the house, which is on a timbered north slope. In the summer we have about 800 feet of hose running over there which makes it fairly convenient. In the winter we haul five gallon containers of hot water over there with one of the vehicles. Three horses need 15 to 20 gallons per day in the winter.
We put the corrals where we did because it is the only mostly level ground that we have (other than up on top of a hill), and there is another road running along the north side of our land. It gets sunshine over there, too. Can you imagine what a corral would be like, with all the grass eaten off to the dirt, either mud or frozen mud or slick ice on a slope most of the fall-winter-spring? Either the horses or us would have broken legs before summer.
Oh, yeah - there is another bit of flat ground down in the bottom of the coulee below the house, but it gets about twenty degrees colder down there. And in the springtime it gets really wet - a dirt corral would there probably be knee-deep or more in mud :(
There is yet another easement running up the coulee below our house. The fenced pasture is (for now) all on the other side of that driveway. The guy that now owns the place behind us lives out of state and only comes out here for a 2 or 3 separate weeks every year, so we may eventually fence the south half around our house too. Actually, I may someday try to talk him into letting us graze part of his 40 too ...
