Grazing plans and pasture management. Firstly I recommend reading the link regarding pasture, which can be found on my notes page information. Living with equines, paddocks and Sycamore Trees. I thought it would be useful to share our management, we have a system that makes life easier for us, though it is NOT a proven make it safe system, I have no idea if our equines have any immunity or not, we have historically had two cases, one fatal, one survivor and two unaffected. The latter three are still with us. Firstly, know your land, spend time walking around it, which way does the wind blow? are there any areas there is no wind and where leaf litter/seeds could sit there un-disturbed? How long is your grass? Where is the field shelter if you have one? and your water trough? This time of year is ideal for studying where the heavy seed fall is on your pasture and will help you learn about your paddock and the lay of the land. By doing this you can give your paddock zones, and organize your grazing using these zones. I have attached some pictures and some basic drawings. The pictures show the zones of our field, Black (where the wind never blows and below the Sycamore trees), then Red, Orange and Yellow. We have portable water troughs that we feed by hose on a syphon from the main water trough, giving our horses fresh water where ever they are. I am hoping the pictures will help you understand the type of routine I am trying to explain. I have also attached some photos of grass, to show the difference between a sparse paddock and longer grass - this is our own little experiment and the photos were taken today from the red zone where we have deliberately allowed different lengths of grass to grow to see the affect on the settling of seeds. We have not cleared the red or orange zones at all yet, there are ample seeds still on the trees, we shall commence sweeping it up the moment all seeds are down and ideally after some breezy dry weather - which we have found the seeds are easier to sweep up.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Nov 2014 18:12:17 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015