Horse Environments and Conservation
Written by Hiddenhorse on 12/05/2010 – 2:39 pm -Introduction
I’ve recently been reading a book on, ‘pasture management for horses’, you might think that’s probably because I have too much time on my hands and not many friends. Neither of which is true, I hasten to add. Anyway, the book has raised some interesting questions. The approach taken by the (otherwise excellent) author is rather conventional. I would describe it, not so much as sound advice to the horse owner more as one way of looking at pasture management. I tend to think of this approach as ‘Penelope’s perfect pasture plan’. – (probably for Penelope to keep her perfect pony in), but enough of this alliteration.
It is based on optimizing grazing, by treating the grass as a crop. Also a great deal of it appears to be geared toward creating a ‘tidy’ appearance to your paddock.
I’ve seen this type of thing before, way back in the 1970′s when I was a young agricultural student. The advice given is really designed to maximise production from a single grass species, because that will in turn maximise the production of meat and milk and wool from a given area of pasture. Being at Agricultural college at this time was both exciting and terrible; exciting because we were told we would be entering a brave new world of agricultural production, and terrible because in many ways we were being taught how to tear down an agricultural system that had been in place for over a thousand years. Everything in those days was about the movement away from mixed species farming on small family farms towards bigger and more mechanised and more profitable farming methods, or as we call it today ‘agribusiness’. Worst of all was the utterly profligate use of chemicals to impose man’s will on the environment. I remember being issued with a big blue book published by, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, it was a long and comprehensive list of sprays and fertilisers we could use at will to control our environment. Almost all of the chemicals listed in that book are now illegal. I would also go on to say that almost all the techniques we were taught have now been discredited and we are still paying the price for the appalling mistakes we made. For example demolition of hedgerows, draining of wetlands, dissolution of mixed farms. Yet, we still see the legacy of those times in our countryside today, as farms get bigger, machinery gets bigger less and less people actually work on the land and not only people, but even livestock become further removed from the environment. This was a BIG mistake.
Before I finish this rant, you might like to know that on a Wednesday afternoon we were allowed to do ‘options’, for example you could work towards your sprayer certificate qualification, or improve your pig keeping skills (no, really!) but I, and two others chose this new option called ‘conservation’ – much to the amusement of my fellow students. If you go to my old college today it is no longer an pure agricultural college, now more or less the whole college is devoted to that one subject of conservation, I think they call it something like environmental management, – but they mean conservation.
To return to the subject of pasture management for horses, the point of all this is to show you that most equestrian pasture management, in the UK at least, is still using that old thinking from the nineteen sixties, seventies and eighties. People are still trying to control the environment using weed killers, still dishing out nitrogen based artificial fertilisers (a by-product of the oil industry), still killing unwanted insect species using insecticide, still trying to maximise what they consider to be ‘good grasses’, and still trying to create a uniform productive, efficient and above all, tidy field in which to keep their horses.
But nature doesn’t work like this.
Nature produces riotous, untidy, vigorous, environments, that work and interact and have a life-cycle. Plants work with insects, insects feed predators, fungus and bacteria breakdown and recycle nutrient and energy back into the soil. Animals, feed and graze, they break up and aerate the soil with their feet allowing air, water and sunlight in. The cycle of birth life and death functions continually throughout the years and throughout the seasons.
There are no weeds in nature.
A farmer will tell you, that horses ‘impoverish’ the fields, they will tell you that the activities of horses always lead to over-grazing and ‘horse-sick’ pastures and weeds. If you leave your paddock they will bring in their machinery and sprays etc. and attempt to return the pasture to agricultural mono-crop sterility as quickly as they can.
As I said, that is one way of looking at it, another way to look at it is that horses do exactly the opposite! They enrich pasture, that is they create areas that are more or less grazed, (micro-environments), these increase the opportunity for plant and animal species to colonise the field so that there is an actual increase in the number of grass species, Mature grasses bring increases in the biomass (roots) beneath the ground. This biomass is store of nutrient and other chemicals such as nitrogen and carbon dioxide. The natural activities of horses create space for wild plants and indigenous, hardy, native grass species to grow, horses also produce large amounts of processed plant material in the form of recyclable, organic droppings. So they increase the number of insect species, fungus and bacteria and this, in turn, attracts in more birds and mammals, and even reptiles and amphibians. In other words, if managed properly, horses can give us a greatly increased biodiversity of our countryside, a huge helping-hand for nature and a chance to put right some of those post war agricultural mistakes and all as a by-product of keeping horses . And if you extrapolate this across the countryside as a whole think of the accumulative effect this could have on our countryside, not to mention the health of our horses.
That I would say is another way of looking at pasture management. In the next post I will look at practical ways of using your paddock paradise arrangement to control weeds (in a good way -absolutely no chemicals)! A simple technique to break the life-cycle of intestinal worms and generally help the hedgehog and butterfly populations live happy and fulfilled lives. Until then…
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