120 Determining moisture content in equine arena footing on-farm

Abstract

Arenas are important fixtures on equine farms as they provide constant surfaces for horses to work and train on. Water serves to help control dust issues and increase the shear strength of the footing. Some footing companies indicate an optimal moisture content for their product, but without a method to determine the moisture content, arena managers and owners rely on dust production to decide when to add more water, which is an unreliable method. Oven drying of soil/arena footing is a common method for determining moisture content in the research settings but is not a practical solution on farms. This study sought to compare 3 different methods for determining moisture content in arena footing: oven drying, microwave drying, and a FieldScout TDR 350 Soil Moisture Meter. The 3 methods were tested with 3 footing types: a straight sand footing, a sand and fiber mixture, and a sand with organic material mixture. The oven drying method consisted of drying 3 samples of at least 30 g in a 100C oven for 24hrs, the microwave method also used 3 samples of at least 30 g that were dried in a standard microwave oven until all water evaporated, and the TDR moisture content method utilized the average of 3 TDR measurements in the footing. Paired t-tests were used to compare the microwave and the TDR methods to the oven drying method for each footing type. Though the paired t-test analysis for the microwave drying method determined statistically significant differences for the sand with fiber (P < 0.001)and the sand (P < 0.001), nominally the difference in the moisture contents of the 3 footings are unlikely to have an impact in on-farm use as all were within 0.6% of the oven-dried moisture contents. In comparison, all of the paired t-tests determined statistically significant difference for the TDR method (sand with organic material P < 0.001, sand with fiber P < 0.001, and sand P = 0.003). The TDR determined moisture contents were at least 1.6% higher than the moisture contents determined with the oven drying method. Overall, the microwave drying method provides a viable on-farm solution for determining the moisture content of footing, provided that the footing material is microwave safe.