pasture and property

management

Caring for your property is as important as caring for your horses. Good property management includes managing the pastures and facilities properly, how to deal with water and with waste and the management of horses and their impact on the property and the wider environment. Good property management has many benefits including protecting the health and well-being of your horses, the water, the land and wildlife. It also increases the value of your property and it keeps your neighbours happy.

Good property care does not need to be an expensive undertaking. In fact often a slight change in operations can lead to big savings, for example improved pasture equals smaller feed bills, reduced mud or dust mean better horse health and fewer vet bills, better manure management results in a liability becoming an asset.

It is possible to create property management systems that, once established, are easy to run both in terms of time and expense and at the same time are less damaging to or even enhance the environment. For example, pasture that is grown for horses protects the soil, trees that are grown for shelter or even fodder also provide habitat for birds.

Good land care involves such practices as improving the pasture, rotating horses around paddocks so that pasture has time to recover, harrowing larger paddocks to spread manure and fertilising when necessary. A better-managed property provides a variety of plants that in turn supports many animals - an ecosystem. The more diverse the ecosystem, the better it can cope with environmental disasters such as floods, drought, pests and disease.

This page covers only some aspects of managing pasture. My book Managing Horses on Small Properties (published by CSIRO) is an in-depth guide to sustainable horsekeeping. It covers property selection and planning, pasture establishment and management, water conservation and supply, facilities, trees and plants, manure management and lots more. Although this book is written for Australian and New Zealand conditions much of the information and concepts are applicable world-wide. I also give talks at pony clubs/riding clubs and hold workshops on this subject. See the end of this page for more information on the book and the talks/workshops. See the workshop page for upcoming dates of workshops in Australia, New Zealand and the UK.

 

Good property care does not need to be an expensive undertaking. In fact often a slight change in operations can lead to big savings, a better environment and an increased property value.

managing pasture

Pastures often get neglected due to overstocking and lack of land care. If horses are left to their own devices they tend to overgraze part or all of the paddock. Many horse paddocks have bare patches, weeds, rank grass, erosion and compaction. This can lead to respiratory problems for all of the inhabitants of the property, including humans (from the dust), skin problems (from the mud) and general poor health.

Horses also have a unique dunging behaviour which causes them to group their manure into areas of a paddock. They then will not eat in these areas which causes the grass in them to become long and rank. The other areas in the paddock tend to get overgrazed Good pasture management can reduce the effects of this dunging behaviour.

Good pasture is very beneficial for horses. Badly managed pasture is an eyesore to all and creates degradation to the environment, through contaminated run-off (rain water washes manure and soil from bare paddocks into the waterways), erosion, dust/mud and loss of habitat for wildlife. Aim to improve your pasture and then to manage it well so that it maintains this level rather than becoming degraded again.

If horses are left to their own devices they tend to overgraze parts of the paddock and leave other parts to grow long and rank. Good property management can reduce the effects of this behaviour.

the benefits of pasture

An Australian survey revealed that the average cost of feed for a horse each year was $880 (1998) and was the largest amount spent on the horse. Many people would spend a lot more than this. By utilising any available pasture this feed bill can be reduced or even eliminated altogether. Well-managed pasture is an excellent feed source and provides a cheap, convenient and balanced ration for most horses. Pasture has been calculated as costing one-tenth of the cost of the next cheapest feed, pasture hay.

Other benefits of pasture include better health of your horses - the lungs are healthier due to the fresh air (as opposed to the ammonia and other airborne pollutants that a horse is forced to breathe when stabled) and the lowered head grazing position maintains the drainage system of the airways naturally. When a horse is allowed to graze it is following a natural pattern of eating. These horses do not develop the behavioural disorders seen in confined horses. Even horses that have already developed behavioural disorders (from previous confinement) show a reduction in these behaviours over time when living a more natural lifestyle. The importance of browsing and foraging for horses cannot be underestimated as time spent at this activity forms the largest part of the day in a wild horse.

Horses thrive on a high roughage diet. Without it the gut cannot function properly (much more so in a horse than an omnivorous human) and the horse is plagued with gastrointestinal problems such as colic and gastric ulcers. Horses kept in herds of two or more horses at pasture can interact with other horses naturally and benefit from their companionship.

Horses need a high roughage diet in order to thrive. Horses that do not get enough roughage are prone to gastrointestinal problems such as colic and ulcers.

Horses at pasture are exposed to sunlight so that they are able to synthesise vitamin D. They are also able to exercise freely. The advantages for the owner are many also: keeping a horse at pasture saves on bedding and stable chores; the owner has to adhere to a less strict timetable; and the horse does not necessarily have to be exercised every day. In this way, time spent with the horse can be 'quality time', i.e. riding and training rather than finding that there is no time to ride because stable chores take too long.

For all these reasons, the pastured horse generally has a better quality of life than its stabled counterpart. For many owners however a compromise has to be reached between confining horses due to not having enough pasture and allowing horses to graze, yet this is still far better than no grazing or turnout at all.

The priority should be to maximise the amount of pasture available so that in the future your land is producing pasture to its full potential. Initially this may mean reducing your horse's access to pasture until it is well established and able to withstand longer periods of grazing.

grazing management

Pastures are far easier to manage if horses are rotated in groups around the various paddocks than if each horse has its own paddock. Even if grass is irrigated and fertilised it will not be able to cope with continuous pressure from the hooves of horses and their ability to eat grass right to the ground. It needs time to recover and time to set seed. With correct management most of the negative effects that horses can have on pasture can be reversed. By utilising grazing systems horses can be persuaded to eat evenly and, by using manure management strategies such as harrowing, the effects of their dunging behaviour can be reduced. Correct management also results in a decrease of parasitic worms.

On a property that does not have enough pasture to support the horses for all of the year a good set of yards or stables are required so that horses can be safely confined when necessary. If not a 'sacrifice' area can be created in the paddock using an electric tape fence so that the horses can be confined to one part of the paddock while the rest gets to rest and recuperate. Then grazing time can be increased when pasture is available and decreased when it is not. Supplementary feed such as hay and possibly concentrates is used to make up the shortfall. As pasture is improved over time, the time spent grazing can be increased, with less reliance on supplementary feed. It is far better to confine your horses some of the time so that the time they spend in the paddocks is 'quality time' (eating grass), rather than having them standing around all day in bare, dusty/muddy paddocks, making them even more bare and dusty/muddy.

Somewhere to confine the horses to when the pasture is not producing enough grass is integral to the management of your property.

grazing systems

On most small properties there is a limit to the amount of available pasture and a combination of grazing and confinement will need to be used. Using grazing systems combined with confinement will increase the productivity of the pasture and will allow more flexibility in the number of horses that can be kept on a particular piece of land.

With the exception of set stocking, which is not recommended as a management system on a small horse property, the grazing systems outlined here are all variations on the same theme of restricting horses to one part of the property while the other parts get to rest and recuperate. With the use of good safe confinement areas, time spent grazing can be increased when pasture is available and decreased when it is not. Supplementary feed is used to make up the shortfall in pasture as and when needed. As a pasture is improved over time, the hours spent grazing can be increased.

The amount of time that a pasture can be grazed without damage will also vary throughout the year and from year to year depending on climatic changes such as drought.

Grazing systems allow you to manipulate the amount of grass horses consume and therefore the grazing pressure that horses put on the pasture.

set stocking: set stocking is the practice commonly used on poorly managed small horse properties where horses are allowed access to all of the land all of the time (either individually, i.e. one horse per paddock, or as a group, i.e. the horses have access to the whole property all of the time). This practice leads to unhealthy land and unhealthy horses as the land becomes degraded. A paddock that is set stocked can still be harrowed and mowed so that some of the effects of the grazing behaviour of horses are reduced. However, this will vastly increase the worm burden of the horses as a paddock should be rested after harrowing so that worm larvae are not able to go to the next stage. Set stocking is to be avoided as a management practice on all but very large grazing properties that have enough land to ensure that the horses are not exerting too much grazing pressure on the pasture.

rotational grazing: having several smaller paddocks rather than one large paddock allows paddock rotation which improves pasture growth and parasite control and reduces land degradation. This method of management will help to prevent the under/overgrazing pattern present in so many horse paddocks. Paddock rotation allows grass species to recover where they would otherwise die out if submitted to constant grazing pressure. Horses tend to eat only what they like and leave the other species. This results in certain species, including weeds, taking over the pasture. Horses should be allowed to begin grazing a paddock when it has reached an average height of approximately 15-20 cm. When they have grazed the paddock to an average height of 5-8 cm they should be moved to another paddock.

Any areas that have less than 70 per cent ground cover or are bare, dusty, or boggy should be temporarily fenced off with electric tape when the horses have access to the paddock. These areas should be mulched with old (weed free) hay, manure etc. This protects the soil and gives new grass shoots something to grow into.

When the animals are moved on, the now empty paddock is harrowed, mowed or slashed to an even length and then rested and allowed to re-grow. At this point the horses can graze the paddock again. The length of time that it takes the paddock to recover to an acceptable grazing length depends on factors such as the time of the year and the pasture species. If the situation occurs where none of the paddocks are recovered enough for grazing then the horses should be confined until they are.

limited grazing: this is the practice of removing horses from the pasture for part of each day in order to either conserve the pasture or to limit (manipulate) the amount of feed the horse consumes. This should be carried out in conjunction with other systems such as rotation, strip grazing and so on, as the paddocks will still require a period of weeks or months with no grazing pressure and for paddock management such as mowing and harrowing to be carried out. Limited grazing is a good strategy for making your available pasture last as long as possible, for reducing the intake of horses that tend to get fat and are prone to laminitis and for reducing land degradation.

The horses must spend at least four hours and maybe as many as twelve hours (with good pasture) away from the paddock in order for conservation of pasture or reduced feed intake to be effective. This is because horses will simply condense all of their eating time into the one long session if necessary. This said, removing horses for a few hours each day, while not reducing their total daily intake, will reduce the amount of time spent loafing or sleeping in the paddock which will reduce land degradation. Horses cause just as much damage to the land during these behaviours as when they are grazing. All horses (even those with weight problems) must be given forage when confined if the period is more than four hours. Horses should not have long periods without forage passing through the gut as their digestive system is not designed to cope with being empty.

cross-grazing: rotational grazing using other animals has many advantages because they tend to complement each other in their grazing behaviours. For example each species will eat around the dung of other species but not their own. This is thought to be a parasite prevention strategy because most parasites (worms) are host specific, which means they can only complete their life cycle in one species of animal, so grazing animals avoid their own dung areas but not those of other species. Another bonus of using cross-grazing is that the land ends up with different kinds of manure on it.

The disadvantages of cross-grazing are that the extra animals eat the available feed and there are extra expenses involved such as worming and foot care. Horses tend to be dominant over other grazing animals including cows, and smaller species do require an area that they can retreat to in small paddocks. In order for this system to work, the property needs to be producing grass at its optimum level otherwise the extra animals are just more mouths to feed when the grass runs out. For this reason it is a strategy that could be employed later on when the property has been improved.

strip grazing: strip grazing is a system of grazing that involves using an electric fence to monitor how much the animals eat each day. This system can be used in conjunction with rotational grazing, for example the animals are still rotated around paddocks but are strip grazed across each paddock in turn. This method results in more even grazing as the animals move slowly, day by day, across the paddock rather than eating what they want and trampling the rest. It is more labour intensive than just turning the animals into the whole paddock because the fence must be moved on a regular basis so that the grazed area does not get too short. This method is especially advantageous for use with horses that put weight on too easily and are at risk of associated conditions. With this method the horses get a fresh but controlled amount of feed each day. Other advantages are that horses are less likely to run around the paddock due to the smaller available paddock size and that if you are picking up manure it is easier to both find and pick up. This method requires portable electric fencing. This can work with either a portable energiser or, if the perimeter fence is electric, the strip fence can be joined into that.

putting it all together: the use of various grazing systems offers great results for your property. If this all seems a little complicated, try to remember that rotational grazing is the main system you should use. All properties need to practice this system so that paddocks get periods without any grazing pressure at all. The other systems are used in conjunction with rotational grazing to fine tune the management of either too much or too little grass and to manage horses that either require more or less feed.

The most important message that you need to understand about pasture is that it needs periods with no grazing pressure at all.

workshops

I provide workshops to educate people to improve their properties and increase sustainability whilst enhancing the environment. See the workshops page for any dates that may be coming up in your area. Pony club/riding club talks can also be arranged. I live in SE Queensland (Tamborine) Australia and travel frequently to other states/countries not contact me to discuss the possibility of arranging a talk or workshop. If there is enough interest for a workshop/series of workshops it may be possible to organise something. Local Authorities (Councils) are often worth contacting initially if you would like a workshop in your area. Many Local Authorities see the environmental and community benefits to improved horse property management and are happy to support these workshops, which are an effective way of bridging the gap between council officers and the horse community.

People interested in attending or co-ordinating workshops in their area please contact:

email: jane@equiculture.com.au or phone: 07 55438623

Attention Riding Club Members/ Pony Club Members etc

Workshops and talks on many subjects can be arranged through your club as a social event or even as a fund raiser for your club.

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