Wood Chips Surfaces for Racehorses

At D&E Behan, we are truly committed to providing high-quality equestrian surfaces that ensure the safety and performance of your horses. Researchers highlight that the performance of racehorses is highly dependent on the quality of the surface used for training. Bearing this idea in mind, we create various types of high-quality surfaces that are meant to suit the needs of horses, while meeting all the current safety standards. We currently offer several types of equestrian surfaces, such as wood chips, sand and fibre or rubber surfaces.

This article will provide a clear explanation of the characteristics of wood chips to help you understand if this type of equestrian surface suits your current needs.

Wood chips come with a number of advantages such as:

• They are probably the most economical solution (contact us for detailed prices of our wood chips surfaces).
• Wood chips are a renewable source, so they are easy and safe to dispose of after usage, due to their non-chemical content
• Less prone to freezing
• Easy to install and maintain
• Free from pests, weeds and pathogens
• Free of foreign objects that might harm your horses
• Suitable for gallops, horse-walkers, paddocks
• Provide cushioning for horses to avoid injuries
• Can be mixed with sand according to needs
• Aid responsiveness and elasticity

The disadvantages of wood chips are:

• They need to top up after a few years
• Regular watering is required
• The longevity of your wood chips depends on constant maintenance, so there’s some effort required from the owner

Furthermore, it is important to emphasise that the particle size of wood chips matter for the performance and safety of racehorses. This is why we offer the ideal mix of wood chips, to create a blend that ensures comfortable training, safety and performance. To optimise the quality of our equestrian surfaces we use:

• Coarse wood chips (25 mm), which consists of fine wood chip fibre to bind surface and provide cushion to horses to build strength.
• Very fine wood chips (2mm-8mm) suitable for a very smooth finish, builds up speed.

The reason why we mix wood chip particles is to prevent them from blowing around the wind or becoming lodged in the hooves. This is why a mix between coarse and fine wood chips works best.

Our company’s focus is to provide quality and safety for our customers, which compete on an international level and have won prestigious competitions. We understand that equestrian surfaces can be a big investment, this is why we aim at providing our customers with all the required details before their purchase.