Small Acreage Horse Keeping
Sharing my Experiences
Horses eat grass... don't they?
OK... this is a tricky one. At the moment my boys eat hay and crushed barley grain and nibble on something that is supposed to be pasture. With a major drought on in Australia, I am lucky to have a little bit of green coming up after the rain, though as soon as the hot Westerlies blow, the ground and any vegetation on it dry up. So... I need to grow some pasture to supplement the supplementary feed ... you get my drift... right? Besides after doing some reading in regards to how much horses eat I really have to do something so I can feed them mainly on grass as my budget really doesn't stretch to feed them commercially prepared feed and I include hay into that.
I recommend you have a read of this interview with Dr Kohnke titled "The Basics of Feeding Horses" and if you do have some time to spare have a look at the Equine Research and Development Programme at the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation. It's full of great info and has some invaluable resources for sale via their e-shop. One of the resources on the must buy list is the book "Plants Poisonous to Horses".
Now, back to getting this pasture going. When you want to grow pasture you can't just use any type of grass, but you have to do your research. Questions that need answers are:
Which climate do you live in?
What is your predominant soil type?
What is your soil chemistry (alkaline, acid, which macro and micro nutrients does it contain)?
What is the average annual rainfall?
Is the pasture used for grazing only or do you want to be able to harvest hay?
What grasses/vegetation is currently growing?
Get the hint? Well, all these questions were causing me nightmares so I toddled of to the local agronomist and asked his advise. His answer to my questions was: "Oh you are out there... yeah they took a lot of topsoil of there so there is a lot of sand out there ... oh you have sandy loam... lucky... you'll get something to grow there. Get some Rhodes grass into the ground and some legumes to get some nitrogen into it and you should be fine. You've got couch on your place? Yeah the horses eat it and it recovers quickly, just oversow it with a good quality pasture mix ... and pray for rain."
Where to get a good quality pasture mix... off to the local rural store. Lucky me they employ an agronomist and guess what... same advise, right down to the ... and pray for rain. He then proceeded to advise me of pasture mixes suitable for horses and the area I live in and how and when to sow it, and how to nurture it along.
I ordered 15kg of horse pasture mix made up mainly of Callide Rhodes grass which is drought tolerant, establishes quickly and like poor sandy soils. The mix also contained legumes in the form of clover and lucerne. Those 15 kg are supposedly enough to seed 2.5 acres. But...
Important tip... look at the guaranteed germination percentage and the sowing rates. The pasture mix I have has a germination rate of 63% if sown by farmers who have the equipment to allow for correct sowing rates and encourage that germination rate, using direct drilling or sod seeding. Well, I was going to broad cast the seeds by the handful and from what I had learned from doing courses and reading books, germination rates drop when seed is broad cast as not all seeds get into sufficient contact with the ground, get eaten by birds or fail due to some other reason. Anyway... you half your germination rate and double the amount of seed you need. Get the picture?
Working on a budget... I can not afford to loose too many seeds, so rather than simply broadcasting I dug... yes dug with a spade.. all the really compacted areas, added fertiliser in the form of horse poo, let it sit for a couple of days, then raked it all to a fine tilth. Watered it (with collected rain water) to get some stored soil moisture, broadcasted the seeds, lightly raked them in, and then mulched the lot lightly with spoilt hay. After all that I knew every muscle in my body, but all that effort paid off and after only three days and some nice real rain, a light haze of green is developing. Now I am praying for more rain, but in the meantime I use my collected rain water to keep my pasture growing. By Christmas my boys should have a lush green paddock and I...?
I want a tractor for Christmas.
Oh and rain so I have enough water for my horse over the hot summer months. Oh yes, something else to consider, go on turn the page...
I recommend you have a read of this interview with Dr Kohnke titled "The Basics of Feeding Horses" and if you do have some time to spare have a look at the Equine Research and Development Programme at the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation. It's full of great info and has some invaluable resources for sale via their e-shop. One of the resources on the must buy list is the book "Plants Poisonous to Horses".
Now, back to getting this pasture going. When you want to grow pasture you can't just use any type of grass, but you have to do your research. Questions that need answers are:
Which climate do you live in?
What is your predominant soil type?
What is your soil chemistry (alkaline, acid, which macro and micro nutrients does it contain)?
What is the average annual rainfall?
Is the pasture used for grazing only or do you want to be able to harvest hay?
What grasses/vegetation is currently growing?
Get the hint? Well, all these questions were causing me nightmares so I toddled of to the local agronomist and asked his advise. His answer to my questions was: "Oh you are out there... yeah they took a lot of topsoil of there so there is a lot of sand out there ... oh you have sandy loam... lucky... you'll get something to grow there. Get some Rhodes grass into the ground and some legumes to get some nitrogen into it and you should be fine. You've got couch on your place? Yeah the horses eat it and it recovers quickly, just oversow it with a good quality pasture mix ... and pray for rain."
Where to get a good quality pasture mix... off to the local rural store. Lucky me they employ an agronomist and guess what... same advise, right down to the ... and pray for rain. He then proceeded to advise me of pasture mixes suitable for horses and the area I live in and how and when to sow it, and how to nurture it along.
I ordered 15kg of horse pasture mix made up mainly of Callide Rhodes grass which is drought tolerant, establishes quickly and like poor sandy soils. The mix also contained legumes in the form of clover and lucerne. Those 15 kg are supposedly enough to seed 2.5 acres. But...
Important tip... look at the guaranteed germination percentage and the sowing rates. The pasture mix I have has a germination rate of 63% if sown by farmers who have the equipment to allow for correct sowing rates and encourage that germination rate, using direct drilling or sod seeding. Well, I was going to broad cast the seeds by the handful and from what I had learned from doing courses and reading books, germination rates drop when seed is broad cast as not all seeds get into sufficient contact with the ground, get eaten by birds or fail due to some other reason. Anyway... you half your germination rate and double the amount of seed you need. Get the picture?
Working on a budget... I can not afford to loose too many seeds, so rather than simply broadcasting I dug... yes dug with a spade.. all the really compacted areas, added fertiliser in the form of horse poo, let it sit for a couple of days, then raked it all to a fine tilth. Watered it (with collected rain water) to get some stored soil moisture, broadcasted the seeds, lightly raked them in, and then mulched the lot lightly with spoilt hay. After all that I knew every muscle in my body, but all that effort paid off and after only three days and some nice real rain, a light haze of green is developing. Now I am praying for more rain, but in the meantime I use my collected rain water to keep my pasture growing. By Christmas my boys should have a lush green paddock and I...?
I want a tractor for Christmas.
Oh and rain so I have enough water for my horse over the hot summer months. Oh yes, something else to consider, go on turn the page...Interim Report
Christmas came and I got my wish, well at least some of it... it RAINED for two days. It was lucky it did as my water reserves had dwindled considerably. I also made the decision to concentrate on only one paddock due to the lack of water.
I started buying in round bales of Rhodes grass hay to help my paddocks to get some rest. This decision, though not as economical as I had hoped, has made a world of difference to the paddocks, plus I was, and still am, able to put the horses on a neighbour's 5 acre property for a couple of hours every few days. This does help to save some hay as a round bale will only last me for 4-5 days. Admittedly these are smallish round bales.
So... what do my pastures look like at the moment?.... Voila!
Not that much improvement overall, at least not at this spot. The soil I am dealing with is rather crappy, plus I missed a couple of days of watering and had a whole lot of seedlings die, so this patch has been reseeded.
As you can see... crappy soil... no water holding capacity at all so it dries out really quick and any seedlings just shrivel up and die, the greenery there is blue couch(?) and either Bambatsi panic or Callide Rhodes (the taller looking stuff)
These are the middle and back paddocks... it's green but no 'pasture'. I didn't seed these paddocks as I just didn't have enough water to get anything established, but after the Christmas rain it's starting to green up... the middle paddock (front one on this photo is going to be seeded in the next few days.
View from the front paddock to the back... you can tell the front paddock has been watered.
Looking from the neighbour's fence towards the side paddock (you can see the round bale of hay in the back ground). I am using any water source I can get my hands on, thus the purple gray water hose
Hehe.. same paddock now looking towards the neighbour's fence and the sun is out... doesn't look too bad
Close-up of what's actually growing there... couch and millet I think
This is up the top of the front paddock, where the big bare patch is/was... I took this pic a bit closer to the ground and you can see the new growth slowly starting. Crossing my fingers that it will rain a bit more so I can get this bare patch covered in something green (millet, couch, weeds anything to prevent the soil running off when it does rain).
My very very tender looking lucerne and/or burgundy bean seedlings coming up... crossing my fingers for rain even more now!
CORRECTION: What I thought was the lucerne and burgundy bean turned out to be some kind of weed, well... at least it's a ground cover keeping the soil where it should be.
I started buying in round bales of Rhodes grass hay to help my paddocks to get some rest. This decision, though not as economical as I had hoped, has made a world of difference to the paddocks, plus I was, and still am, able to put the horses on a neighbour's 5 acre property for a couple of hours every few days. This does help to save some hay as a round bale will only last me for 4-5 days. Admittedly these are smallish round bales.
So... what do my pastures look like at the moment?.... Voila!
Not that much improvement overall, at least not at this spot. The soil I am dealing with is rather crappy, plus I missed a couple of days of watering and had a whole lot of seedlings die, so this patch has been reseeded.
As you can see... crappy soil... no water holding capacity at all so it dries out really quick and any seedlings just shrivel up and die, the greenery there is blue couch(?) and either Bambatsi panic or Callide Rhodes (the taller looking stuff)
These are the middle and back paddocks... it's green but no 'pasture'. I didn't seed these paddocks as I just didn't have enough water to get anything established, but after the Christmas rain it's starting to green up... the middle paddock (front one on this photo is going to be seeded in the next few days.
View from the front paddock to the back... you can tell the front paddock has been watered.
Looking from the neighbour's fence towards the side paddock (you can see the round bale of hay in the back ground). I am using any water source I can get my hands on, thus the purple gray water hose
Hehe.. same paddock now looking towards the neighbour's fence and the sun is out... doesn't look too bad
Close-up of what's actually growing there... couch and millet I think
This is up the top of the front paddock, where the big bare patch is/was... I took this pic a bit closer to the ground and you can see the new growth slowly starting. Crossing my fingers that it will rain a bit more so I can get this bare patch covered in something green (millet, couch, weeds anything to prevent the soil running off when it does rain).
My very very tender looking lucerne and/or burgundy bean seedlings coming up... crossing my fingers for rain even more now!
CORRECTION: What I thought was the lucerne and burgundy bean turned out to be some kind of weed, well... at least it's a ground cover keeping the soil where it should be.
It's getting better
After 6 weeks on agistement the horses have come back home. Those 6 weeks were badly needed by my paddocks. We also had a bit of a lucky break with rain falling and really boosting the grass along.
Here are the latest photos of the paddocks.
This is the front paddock. The horses were in there overnight, so this is the 'freshly grazed look' so it looks pretty bad, but compared to the photos of 4 months ago the paddock is looking great.
Same paddock, different angles. The break in the bottom of the fence line leads into a temporary paddock. The 'lawn' needed mowing so the horses had the pleasure of mowing in there overnight as well... they did a great job.
This is the middle paddock... a work in progress. We had some pretty heavy rain recently (50mm in about 6 hours) and it washed away some soil which was caught by the grass at the bottom of the paddock, so I am now dumping soil we rescued from the old chook shed (before our new garage went up) on the paddock and it has recently been sown with more Rhodes Grass, Gatton Panic, Vetch and Lucerne. Hopefully it will soon be nice and green. You can't see it on the photo, but there are shoots starting to appear.
In the background is one of the neighbours the horses have a 'mowing contract' with. They are on 5 acres.
Still the middle paddock, just from a different angle, looking towards the front paddock.
And here the pack paddock still looking pretty dismal. At the moment it is part of the 'Sacrifice (Side) Paddock an just there on the right side you can see my make shift round bale feeder.
The make shift round bale feeder... there is a pallet as well with the 4 steel posts on either corner and hessian chaff bags tied to it. This works amazingly well and the horses don't spoil too much hay at all.
Here are the latest photos of the paddocks.
This is the front paddock. The horses were in there overnight, so this is the 'freshly grazed look' so it looks pretty bad, but compared to the photos of 4 months ago the paddock is looking great.
Same paddock, different angles. The break in the bottom of the fence line leads into a temporary paddock. The 'lawn' needed mowing so the horses had the pleasure of mowing in there overnight as well... they did a great job.
This is the middle paddock... a work in progress. We had some pretty heavy rain recently (50mm in about 6 hours) and it washed away some soil which was caught by the grass at the bottom of the paddock, so I am now dumping soil we rescued from the old chook shed (before our new garage went up) on the paddock and it has recently been sown with more Rhodes Grass, Gatton Panic, Vetch and Lucerne. Hopefully it will soon be nice and green. You can't see it on the photo, but there are shoots starting to appear.
In the background is one of the neighbours the horses have a 'mowing contract' with. They are on 5 acres.
Still the middle paddock, just from a different angle, looking towards the front paddock.
And here the pack paddock still looking pretty dismal. At the moment it is part of the 'Sacrifice (Side) Paddock an just there on the right side you can see my make shift round bale feeder.
The make shift round bale feeder... there is a pallet as well with the 4 steel posts on either corner and hessian chaff bags tied to it. This works amazingly well and the horses don't spoil too much hay at all.
