Saving The Precious Pastures
We attended
a pasture management seminar a couple of years ago. It was the best
information on managing your pastures. What seemed to be simple
logic is something not many of us do. Control the grazing of our
horses.
Start by creating
a small corral close to or attached to their stalls called a “sacrifice
area”. That is exactly what it is. We need to sacrifice any
pasture here for the luxury of pasture in the rest of the fields.
A good ground
cover to prevent mud build-up is hog fuel. The pen is fine as dirt
only but hog fuel will control soft muddy areas. Make sure water
run off from barn is not draining into the pen. You may need to
use gutters or ditching to prevent this.
Create compost
bins to store manure. Manure piles should be picked up daily to
combat flies and mud build-up. These compost bins can be located
inside a corner of the sacrifice area for convenience of “scooping
the poop”. Keep these bins covered with a plastic tarp. The
manure composts down to great soil for gardens and or spread it
over the pastures for fertilizer.
Horses
only need to graze a couple of hours to satisfy their appetite.
When they are allowed to graze free-will they eat all day and
it’s not necessary. That’s why there is never any
grass in a horse pasture. They eat it all! We let our horses
eat 2 hours in AM and 2 hours in PM only. The balance of the
time they are in sacrifice area. They are plenty fat and guess
what? We have lots (almost too much) grass in our pastures.
I thought maybe the horses would not like being confined. They
seem to like it. The pen is attached to their stalls so in the
summer they go inside the stall for shade. After they have been
grazing for their 2 hours I just call them and they come running
back to the pen to be locked up. They seem to like the routine
and I like having the grass.
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