Caring for your property is as important as caring for your horse. This can also be as rewarding ascaring for your horse once you have the requisite knowledge and skills. Horses are not native to Australia. Thismeans that horses have a huge impact on the environment if they are not managed well.

Property management includes how the pastures and facilities are managed, how to deal with water and with waste andthe management of horses and their impact on the environment. Good property management has many benefits includingprotecting the health and wellbeing of your horses, the water, the land and wildlife. It also increases the value ofyour property and it keeps your neighbours happy. It does not need to be an expensive undertaking. In fact often aslight change in operations can lead to big savings, for example improved pasture equals smaller feed bills, reducedmud or dust mean better horse health and fewer vet bills, better manure management results in a liability becomingan asset.

It is possible to create property management systems that, once established, are easy to run both in terms of timeand expense and at the same time are less damaging to or even enhance the environment. For example, pasture that isgrown 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 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 avariety of plants that in turn supports many animals – an ecosystem. The more diverse the ecosystem, the better itcan cope with environmental disasters such as floods, drought, pests and disease.

Managing Pasture
Pastures often get neglected due to overstocking and lack of land care. Many horse paddocks have bare patches,weeds, rank grass, erosion and compaction. If not properly managed, the paddock can become muddy, dusty, sandy oreroded and can cause respiratory problems, colic, thrush, laminitis/founder, obesity and loss of condition.

As a landowner it is important that you maximise the potential of your grazing land (not including other areas suchas remnant vegetation) for two reasons. The first is to maximise production of a cheap nutritious pasture yield andthe second is for the landcare benefits that result from healthy vigorous pasture.

Good pasture is very beneficial for horses. Badly managed pasture is an eyesore to all and creates degradation tothe environment, through contaminated run-off, erosion, dust, loss of habitat for wildlife, and water pollution.

The Benefits Of Pasture
An Australian survey revealed that the average cost of feed for a horse each year was $880 (1998) and was thelargest amount spent on the horse. Many people would spend a lot more than this. By utilising any available pasturethis feed bill can be reduced or even eliminated altogether. Well-managed pasture is an excellent feed source andprovides a cheap, convenient and balanced ration for most horses. Pasture has been calculated as costing one-tenthof the cost of the next cheapest feed, pasture hay. Supplementary feed need only be given to certain horses whenpasture is scarce, or the horse is in heavy work, is experiencing rapid growth, or lactating.

Other benefits of pasture include better health of your horses – the lungs are healthier due to the fresh air (asopposed to the ammonia and other airborne pollutants that a horse is forced to breathe when stabled) and the loweredhead 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 thebehavioural disorders seen in confined horses. Even horses that have already developed behavioural disorders (fromprevious confinement) show a reduction in these behaviours over time when living a more natural lifestyle. Theimportance of browsing and foraging for horses cannot be underestimated as time spent at this activity forms thelargest 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 anomnivorous human) and the horse is plagued with gastrointestinal problems such as colic.

Horses kept in herds of two or more horses at pasture can interact with other horses naturally and benefit fromtheir companionship. Pastures are far easier to manage if horses are rotated in groups around the various paddocksthan if each horse has its own paddock.

Horses at pasture are exposed to sunlight so that they are able to synthesise vitamin D. They are also able toexercise freely.

The advantages for the owner are many also: keeping a horse at pasture saves on bedding and stable chores; the ownerhas to adhere to a less strict timetable; and the horse does not necessarily have to be exercised every day. In thisway, time spent with the horse can be 'quality time', i.e. riding and training rather than finding that there is notime 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. Formany owners however a compromise has to be reached between confining horses due to not having enough pasture andallowing horses to graze, yet this is still far better than no grazing or turnout at all. The priority should be tomaximise 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 withstandlonger periods of grazing.

Grazing Management
Even if grass is irrigated and fertilised it will not be able to cope with continuous pressure from the hooves ofhorses and their ability to eat grass right to the ground. It needs time to recover and time to set seed especiallyif it also has to compete with weeds. With correct management most of the negative effects that horses can have onpasture can be reversed. By utilising grazing systems horses can be persuaded to eat evenly and, by using manuremanagement strategies such as harrowing, the effects of their dunging behaviour can be reduced also. Correctmanagement also results in an increase of pasture and a decrease of parasitic worms.

Grazing Systems
Horses can be kept using different management systems ranging from 100 per cent confinement (stable/yards) to 100per cent grazing. It is not desirable for a horse to have no access to grazing as grazing is so important for thewellbeing of a horse. On most small properties there is a limit to the amount of available pasture and a combinationof grazing and confinement will need to be used. Using grazing systems combined with confinement will increase theproductivity of the pasture and will allow more flexibility in the number of horses that can be kept on a particularpiece of land. With the exception of set stocking, which is not recommended, the grazing systems outlined here areall variations on the same theme of restricting horses to one part of the property while the other parts get to restand recuperate.

With the use of good safe confinement areas, time spent grazing can be increased when pasture is available anddecreased when it is not. Supplementary feed is used to make up the shortfall in pasture. As a pasture is improvedover 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 toyear depending on climatic changes such as drought.

Set Stocking
Set stocking is the practice commonly used on poorly managed horse properties where horses are allowed access to allthe land all the time (either individually, i.e. one horse per paddock, or as a group, i.e. the horses have accessto the whole property all the time). This practice leads to unhealthy land and unhealthy horses as the land becomesdegraded.

A paddock that is set stocked can still be harrowed and mowed so that some of the effects of the grazing behaviourof horses are reduced. However, this will vastly increase the worm burden of the horses as a paddock should berested after harrowing so that worm larvae are not able to go to the next stage. Set stocking is to be avoided as amanagement practice.

Rotational Grazing
Having several smaller paddocks rather than one large paddock allows paddock rotation which improves pasture growthand parasite control and reduces land degradation. This method of management will help to prevent the under/over-grazing pattern present in so many horse paddocks.

Paddock rotation allows grass species to recover where they would otherwise die out if submitted to constant grazingpressure. 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 areasthat have less than 70 per cent ground cover or are bare, dusty, or boggy should be temporarily fenced off withelectric tape when the horses have access to the paddock.

When the animals are moved on, the now empty paddock is harrowed, mowed to an even length and then rested andallowed to re-grow. At this point the horses can graze the paddock again. The length of time that it takes thepaddock to recover to an acceptable grazing length depends on factors such as the time of the year and the pasturespecies. If the situation occurs where none of the paddocks are recovered enough for grazing then the horses shouldbe confined to yards 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 thepasture or to limit (manipulate) the amount of feed the horse consumes. This should be carried out in conjunctionwith other systems such as rotation, strip grazing and so on, as the paddocks will still require a period of weeksor months with no grazing pressure and for paddock management such as harrowing to be carried out.

Limited grazing is a good strategy for making your available pasture last as long as possible and for reducing landdegradation. The horses must spend at least four hours and maybe as many as twelve hours (with good pasture) awayfrom the paddock in order for conservation of pasture or reduced feed intake to be effective. This is because horseswill simply condense all of their eating time into the one long session if necessary. This said, removing horses fora few hours each day, while not reducing their total daily intake, will reduce the amount of time spent loafing orsleeping in the paddock which will reduce land degradation. Horses cause just as much damage to the land duringthese behaviours as when they are grazing. All horses (even those with weight problems) must be given forage whenconfined if the period is more than four hours. Horses should not have long periods without forage passing throughthe gut as their digestive system is not designed to cope with being empty. Another alternative is to let the horsesgraze for two shorter periods per day rather than one long one so that their grass intake is spread over the day.

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

The disadvantages of cross-grazing are that the extra animals eat the available feed and there are extra expensesinvolved such as worming and foot care. Horses tend to be dominant over other grazing animals including cows, andsmaller 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 extraanimals are just more mouths to feed when the grass runs out. For this reason it is a strategy that could beemployed 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 eachday. This system can be used in conjunction with rotational grazing, for example the animals are still rotatedaround paddocks but are strip grazed across each paddock in turn. This method results in more even grazing as theanimals move slowly, day by day, across the paddock rather than eating what they want and trampling the rest. It ismore labour intensive than just turning the animals into the whole paddock because the fence must be moved on aregular basis so that the grazed area does not get too short. This method is especially advantageous for use withhorses that put weight on too easily and are at risk of associated conditions. With this method the horses get afresh 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 sizeand that if you are picking up manure it is easier to both find and pick up. This method requires portable electricfencing. This can work with either a portable energiser or, if the perimeter fence is electric, the strip fence canbe joined into that.

This article is an abbreviated version of one of the chapters of the book Managing Horses on Small Properties(Jane Myers). The subject of pasture and its management sometimes baffles horse owners if they do not have a ruralbackground. Horse paddocks are often regarded as somewhere for horses to exercise when in fact they should beregarded as a feed source. Managing pastures as a feed source also has many other benefits including increasedgroundcover which reduces dust/mud on the property and makes it harder for weeds to become established.

Disclaimer: While the author and publisher have taken all appropriate care to ensure the accuracy of thisarticle's contents, no liability is accepted for any loss or damage from or incurred as a result of any reliance onthe information provided in this article.

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