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Rotational Grazing of Small Acreage WORKS for Horse Owner

Rotational Grazing of Small Acreage WORKS for Horse Owner. - Doug Tregoning suggested I put the photos into a powerpoint and send that out, so here ya go! (Good idea, Doug).

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Rotational Grazing of Small Acreage WORKS for Horse Owner

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  1. Rotational Grazing of Small Acreage WORKS for Horse Owner - Doug Tregoning suggested I put the photos into a powerpoint and send that out, so here ya go! (Good idea, Doug)

  2. In the picture below, you can see the back of my barn, we are looking south, and you can see a horse just north of the barn.  The horse is standing in field 7 (field 7 has one strand of 1” electric tape on each side and one short strand separating field 7 into half).  I can see from this view that I have just mown field 2 and I have fairly recently mown fields 1 and 5.  In this picture, there are only two lines of electric tape up (one line on each side of field 7)

  3. I put in white lines to more clearly delinate the fields (the orange outlined area is 44 blueberry bushes contained in electric tape).  The fields are not uniform in size, but they don’t need to be.  As each field gets grazed down, one electric tape line is “bunny hopped” over and the horses are moved to the new field.  I have so much yield, that, barring poor growing conditions, I can keep two horses on fields 1 through 4 alone!  This is 24/7 grazing, mind you, not half day turnout and half day in the stall.  The two mares (16h/1100lb and 16.1h/1250lb TB mares) just can’t keep up with the yield.  Last year I “borrowed” the neighbors two horses to help graze it down.

  4. I’d say it’s a good problem to have except I’m mowing more than once a week now and when this field was broken only into three (see the purple lines, below), I rarely had to mow – just once when they left the field to keep the weeds down.

  5. Field 11 actually no longer exists.  I have a 20’ path along the southern end of all the fields, an alley, if you will, which connects to field 11, and an alley along the entire northern line of the fields.  So, the fields are even smaller than these pictures show.  They alley opens into the woods (to the east, the left in the pictures) along the entire southern boundary of the large field, along the entire western boundary and the entire northern boundary – all connected.  If the temperatures are below what will allow grass to metabolize (any time in the winter, or cool nights in the spring/summer/fall), the girls are locked out of the grazing areas and only allowed in the alley (what I call “the track”). 

  6. The mares are barefoot and the entire southern line of the track is in 4” deep pea gravel (reference Dr.Robert Bowker, MSU). The northern line will be all in pea gravel in a matter of a few weeks.  And, there is a “sandbox” in a swale on the western line of the track, which the girls use daily for rolling and sleeping.  In the picture below, the round pen is in the foreground.  In the images above, the round pen is in the upper right, to give you an idea where the swale is.  The sandbox has been doubled in size since this photo was taken.

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