How to manage your horse pasture naturally to save money and time

[@TooSickToDressVictorian]

I love the way you speak, thank you, this is very informative!

[@hallhv01]

You look like the singer from ABBA

[@user-cx7kd6mj8u]

Thank you so much for this interesting video. I would to rescue some horses and keep them as natural as possible! Very helpful :)

[@alexmarr6598]

Everything sounds great on this video, however I don't like horses being kept in stables as they need to be kept together & keep their bodies moving & also its more natural for the horses so I would favour of a equiCentral or a track system with rotated grazing.

[@fruitfulorchardcic]

Wow really excited to learn this. Thanks for sharing

[@janetemmerson529]

Hi, I have only recently come across info about regenerative land management for horses and mob grazing and loving the idea, which I am going to do my best to implement. I have a couple of questions. I understand your explanation about the thistles and docks from the video and your reply below. However, I don't have a ragwort problem as we pull it or spray the small amounts that grown on the 8 acres. What should I do in future with ragwort?

[@jakestephens4868]

over time as the pasture improves the soil and conditions change in a way that decreases the opportunistic early succession species and favors later-succcession species which tend to be more nutritious, safe, and easily digestible. so if you can train the horses to avoid it, it will likely "go away" more or less on its own. do your horses like to eat the ragwort? most noxious forage is less pleasant to the organism and is passed over unless more preferable forage is unavailable (animals left on overgrazed pasture and not moved frequently are much more likely to eat and get sick from noxious forage). if your horses are moved before all the preferable forage is gone, you may be able to observe that they avoid it on their own. if not, spray/douse them with cayenne or something unpleasant but safe before moving the animals to that area. (just some ideas)

[@GEMINDIGO]

Yep all good on the biodiversity front but docks and thistles produce thousands of seeds each year so in my informed opinion as someone 100% dedicated to organic farming, you might need to get out with the grubber and remove a few of the problematic plants for a while.Or am I missing the point?Does nature somehow magically create all the conditions for a balanced ecosystem all on it's own?

[@naturewayfarm595]

:-D Nature indeed somehow magically created all life on this planet in the middle of absolute nowhere, and it has been doing it for millions of years. It's pretty good at it - it's us who are completely ignorant to its processes and functions. Back to your dock and thistle problem. Both plants (and other weeds as well) occur in nature for a reason. Thistles are one of the only plants capable penetrating a capped soil surface - i.e. hard and compacted surface where water has created a cap that other plants cannot penetrate through. But thistles can. So they grow and continue doing their job until they are no longer needed - i.e. until the conditions have swayed in favor of perennial plants. Weeds like thistles are low succession plants. If you think of upward succession of plant bio-system from bare rocks and capped soils, to moss, to thistles and other weeds, to annual grasses and plants, to perennial grasses, to bushes, to forests. There, you can see that if your soil is becoming more habitable to thistles, there is a reason for it, as it's going downward in succession, and nature is responding in trying to push it upwards (thistle colonies), otherwise you would end up with moss or bare soil. As for docks, they are great nature's recovery tool too. They have a deep taproot, usually deeper than thistles. They often occur in waterlogged, poorly drained acidic soils. Docks also indicate mineral deficiency of the soil, and that's what they are bringing up from deep layers of soil - calcium, potassium, phosphorus and iron. In practice, what I do with weeds, I scythe them down as and when we move through the pasture (unless the horses have trampled them down), so that their leaves and stalks decay and can release such minerals to the soil. Over time (however long needs to be), they won't be needed. I don't bother removing the seedheads - weed seeds can survive pretty long in soil (I think docks for 20 years), so it's a waste of time, as the soil seedbank already contains all kinds of weed seeds.

[@susehendricks6217]

Ouch! Major disagreement with your first point. A perfect design as nature or our body, does not create itself out of nothing. It had to have a designer. Otherwise, I’d agree. We are the problem. The Bible states that clearly.