Izzy Taylor from Animalweb talks to equine land management expert Laura Hobbs
What if the weeds, mud and struggling grass in your paddocks aren’t simply problems to eliminate—but signs that your land is trying to tell you something?
In this episode of the Animalweb Podcast, Izzy Taylor from the Animalweb team is joined by environmental consultant and equine land management expert Laura Hobbs to explore how horse owners can create healthier, more resilient land by working with nature rather than constantly fighting against it.
From managing grazing on limited acreage to dealing with mud, weeds, flooding and increasingly unpredictable weather, Laura explains why many of the challenges horse owners face above ground begin with what is happening beneath the surface.
But improving your paddocks doesn’t necessarily mean spending a fortune on fertiliser, reseeding or expensive machinery.
Laura shares a practical and refreshingly different approach to land management, helping horse owners understand what their soil and plants are revealing, make better use of the resources already available and introduce realistic changes that could benefit their horses, their land and their finances.
Throughout the episode, you’ll discover why traditional agricultural advice may not always be appropriate for equestrian land, how continuous grazing can affect soil health and why many plants commonly dismissed as weeds may actually be carrying out valuable work.
Whether you manage several acres or are trying to make the most of a small paddock, this episode offers practical ideas and a fascinating new perspective on one of your most valuable resources.
In this episode you’ll discover:
• What the plants growing in your paddock could be telling you
• Why traditional agricultural approaches may not always suit horses
• How overgrazing affects soil, forage production and land resilience
• Why mud, flooding and summer drought may be more closely connected than we realise
• Whether fertilising, reseeding and soil testing are always necessary
• How to manage grazing more effectively on limited acreage
• Why some weeds could be helping your land recover
• Simple and inexpensive ways to improve your paddocks
• How healthier land can support healthier horses and reduce long-term costs
Most importantly, you’ll hear how changing the way you look at your paddocks could help you move away from repeatedly reacting to problems and towards creating a more sustainable system for both your horses and your land.
If you own horses, manage a yard or are responsible for paddocks and pasture, this episode is packed with practical advice, fresh thinking and expert insight that could completely change the way you view the ground beneath your horses’ feet.
Listen now and discover what your paddock may have been trying to tell you all along.
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Transcription
Here is a transcription of the podcast. (Please note this is an automated transcription, so we apologise for any errors from the original podcast.)
Hi everyone and welcome back to Animalweb Podcast. Today we’re going to talk about something that every horse owner relies on but probably doesn’t think that much about, which is the land and ground beneath their horses’ feet. I’m joined today by an environmental consultant and equine land management expert, Laura Hobbs. Laura helps horse owners better understand their land, from grazing and pasture management to considering the whole system around their horses and how they are managed day to day. So, first of all, thank you so much, Laura, for joining us and joining the Animalweb team. Before we get into chatting about land management and what you do, I was wondering if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to work in this area and yeah, your journey so far.
Absolutely. Well, thank you very much for having me to start with. So I’m Laura and my background is as an ecologist and a natural capital consultant. And so I actually started in academia where I studied ecosystem interactions and evolutionary behaviour. And so that sort of set the scene for being able to then start going out in the field and looking at how things actually work on the ground. From there I started looking into not just biodiversity but the environmental value of our systems as well. So how the different habitats that we have impact the water flow and flood regulation and carbon sequestration, air quality impacts, and how that has impacts on our own health as well. And I started working with a lot of farmers who are actually realizing that with Climate change with these more extreme weather events and the way that they were currently managing their farms wasn’t actually being productive and they were struggling year upon year. So we were looking for a different solution. And so a lot of the work that I’ve done the past few years has been working with those farmers on individual sites, but also on landscape resilience projects to actually help them work with the land, work with nature to actually increase the productivity, but also improve the health and welfare of their animals. So a lot of that was focused on cattle systems and sheep. And I kind of realised a lot of these farmers have horses as well, but they still seem to have this little block that we can’t do anything different with our horses. And I’ve always had horses, I’ve been a horse girl since about six years old, much to my parents’ yeah, fear and trying to spend so much money down the stables. And so I’ve always had a real interest, and they were a focus of a lot of my academic studies as well. And I sort of realised that a lot of these things the farmers are putting in place. We can actually do with our own horses as well. And the systems that we were keeping them within aren’t actually working for our horses’ biology. And this is something that is reflected in the most recent equine welfare reports as well. So the ones that were released by RSPCA last year, and but also in Australia and America, that shows that we’ve got a rise in equine health issues, namely obesity, metabolic syndromes, and but also a lot of behavioural issues as well. And a lot of these can actually be traced back to the environments that we’re keeping them in. So yeah, I set up S.W.I.T.C.H Equine to try to bring all these different aspects together and actually show how we can manage our lands in a way that actually works for our horses, for our horses’ biology and their evolutionary behaviour as well. And but also works for lands and that works in improving our resilience as well. So we are in the middle of a climate crisis. We’re getting more and more extreme weather events. Hay prices are going through the roof. I’ve spoken to some farmers that have put this year as well and who actually have a lower yield this year than last year. So you know forage is going to be really hard to come by, but we can actually build a lot of resilience into our systems that we’re keeping our horses in so we can actually have more forage available. Longer throughout the year so we don’t get stuck in this situation where we’re relying on having to pay out more for our horses and with them actually suffering with health and behavioural issues as well. And so we try to take that whole systems approach to look at how can we support both, improve the environmental resilience of our land and save us a lot of money in the long term hopefully as well and as well as saving on vet bills for our horses.
Yeah, and I think that that’s become a really important part of like through the last couple of years of the climate change and the warmer summers affecting that the forage yields that we’ve had. I think people really started to worry about that. So your like approach of starting to think about how to how to come through some of those issues, I think is is definitely something that we need to start considering as horse owners. So I was wondering, could you tell me a little bit about your sort of day-to-day like consultancy? So when you go out to your horse owners, do you go out to your horse owners and give this kind of advice, or is it more of a an online procedure, or explain a little bit more about that?
Yeah, but I’ll do all of the above. So understand that everyone’s in a completely different situation and everyone has different resources available to them. So I like to create things that are best for my clients. So I don’t believe that there’s a one size fits all approach. So I have clients who they might just want to see how can I improve biodiversity on on my yard. And that’s something that’s you know you know it’s a lovely thing to go and have a look at. I’ve got other clients that have companies that are really struggling with my horse’s interim levels or the respiratory they’ve got a lot of those philocity issues. Can you help me look at the environment and see is there something going on in the systems that might be contributing to that? And so that can be going out on site and having a look at the soil, doing some soil testing, some forage analysis, and trying to bring all those pictures together to actually see what might actually be going on within that system and how the horse is responding to it. So I do go on site to help owners on site, but I can also provides advice online as well. So I’ve got an online coaching platform and so people can book whether it’s just an hour call so we can have a chat through your problems and your issues and we can try to figure out what might be going on and or that can be a remote report as well. So we’ve got a lot of environmental data sets now, which are a lot of them are actually publicly available. And they’re getting so much better at actually telling us what’s going on on the ground without actually having to go out to site. So there is actually a lot that we can do remotely and you can start to build a really good picture of what might be going on. Obviously information on sites is always great, but if someone’s struggling for budget or resources or that I’m based in North Wales, I’ve had a couple of clients in America, yeah, that sort of site visit isn’t going to be yeah, that’s going to be pretty expensive to go out. So it’s trying to still be able to support people when logistics don’t work out.
Yeah, definitely. And do you do you find like are you from obviously coming from a farming and like agricultural side of things, you were saying how like they take a lot of care and you know how how they manage their land. You say sort of like the it doesn’t always transfer into the equine world. Have you found that people are becoming more curious about how to better manage their land, or do you find that it’s mainly comes from people wanting to better manage a horse’s condition or where do you kind of feel that like problem stems from to then reaching out to you? Or people maybe being recommended to you by a nutritionist or a vet, or how does that kind of work for you?
Yeah, so I think a lot of people come to this when they have a problem or something and they don’t know where to start and they don’t know what to look at. So they’ll they’ll come to me and ask, Well, well, can you help them? Can we have a look at things? And that might be a problem with the horse that you know, they’ve they’ve spoken to the vet, they’ve spoken to the nutritionist, but they still can’t get to the bottom of what might be going on with them. Or it might be that they’re really struggling with managing the lands, you know, they flood every winter or they’re really struggling with the drought or they’ve got problems with a lot of weeds. And they’ve you know they’ve tried a lot the traditional management and the you know Facebook advice groups and things like that, but they’re still stuck in in this sort of situation where they can’t get out of. And so they’ll come to me and they say, well, how can we probably get ourselves out of this without ideally spending a lot of money on it? Because actually that’s a great thing as well. A lot of time these fixes are actually quite cheap to do, which yeah, is great for all of us. And yeah, I think I forgot what the other part of the question was.
A bit sort of like talking about do you often get nutritionists or vets to be get recommended by you or are you still a bit of you know, this is a new and kind of a new area that people perhaps aren’t maybe utilising as much as say going straight to your vet, like how how do you find that kind of like paraprofessional relationship with the rest of the equine world to be.
So I think this is still a new way of looking at our horses and a lot of the times, you know, we’ve got so many different professionals, we’ve got our farriers, we’ve got our physios, we’ve got our vets, and we’ve got our nutritionists, we’ve got our bodyworkers, we’ve got our trainers, and they’re all absolutely amazing in their little thing of what they do. But if your horse has got a problem, you might then get, you know, seven different opinions on what you should do and what might actually be able to solve the issue that you’re dealing with. So I try to actually bridge all of those different industries. So I wouldn’t say I’m perfect I’m a professional in any one of them, but being able to bring them all together to be able to understand enough of what each each professional is saying to provide advice to people to say, well actually this might be what’s going on and this is what’s going on in your wider system and in the environment that you’re keeping your horse in, which might be contributing to these problems. I think the other things that we struggle with a lot as horse owners is a lot of us didn’t get into land management because we wanted to manage land. We got into land management because we want horses, we love our horses, and you know, we’ve we’ve kind of fallen into it. So a lot of us don’t have that background in land management and we don’t have that education and there’s really minimal educational resources out there. I think the latest book on horse pasture management is about 20 years old. And you know, the thinking has come a long way since then. And so, you know, we might go and we’ll talk to our farmer next door and we’ll ask them for advice and we’ll take what they say in terms of how they might might manage the land. And that doesn’t mean that their advice is wrong, but a lot of the time their advice is geared for cattle or for sheep who are ruminants. So they have a fundamentally different biological system than our horses do. They have different grazing behaviours and different herd dynamics. They you know, our horses need a lot more movements than the likes of cattle or sheep might. That farmer is also trying to maximize productivity. So they those animals are intended to go for the slaughter, so they want to put on as much weight as quick as possible. So when we then take like those sort of management approaches, which have completely different aims a lot of the time for what we want to our horses. It doesn’t always work. So we need to actually apply these decisions with that framework of thinking, what is our horse? What have they evolved to do? What have they evolved to eat? What is the herd dynamics? What are my ultimate aims? And to be able for that for land management to be able to answer those questions without compromising the health of animals.
Yeah. And I think that that’s kind of the biggest The biggest problem with the equine world is like we try to do the same as farming in a lot and a lot of you a lot of the time. But as you say, you know, we don’t we don’t want our poor little laminitic ponies to get any fatter than they possibly are. So so advice from your farmer who wants as much calories as possible is perhaps not the not where we want to go with that. I think a problem which I know I was thinking about when I heard you were coming on to talk to us was a bit about I think a lot of people hopefully will agree with me that the that livery yards and you know even having space at home, a lot of the time space is quite a limiting factor in your sort of managing of land and owning horses. It’s not always as luxurious as having an acre for each one as sort of your recommended in the books and things like that. So I was wondering if you had any sort of practical tips for how to, you know, manage in our in our in our changing climates of when we have that restricted space to, you know, making sure that our horses are getting the best possible stuff out of the man the land we provide them with.
Yeah, absolutely. That’s one that comes up quite a lot. ’cause people say, well, this always sounds really idealistic, but I haven’t got tens of thousands of acres to turn my horses out on. Which, yeah, if we look at what they would be doing naturally, they originated on the steppe, so they’d be in the mountainous sort of range and they’d be covering countless miles every day. And they’d have a really big home range and we just can’t, especially for people in the UK, we just don’t have That sort of land available to us. So it’s less about needing more land and more about thinking a bit differently about how we actually manage our land. Because a lot of the time there is a solution without having to buy more land. And there’s a lot of different systems that are coming out now. So and track systems are becoming much more popular, which is if you’re really constrained, that can be great. And but that’s not the only solution either. And so one thing that can be great for horses and actually can increase the productivity of your field so you have more forage available through for longer of the year is rotational grazing. Now a lot of the time when you say rotational grazing to horse people don’t say yeah I rotationally graze. I’ve got a summer paddock and a winter paddock and we rotate every sort of six months. That’s not rotational grazing that’s just having a summer paddock and winter paddock. Rotational grazing at its core is letting the grass recover before it’s before it gets overgrazed. So when you and when an animal goes and eats and bites top off a plant, that plant then uses its stores from its roots to try to regrow. And this tends to happen within say four days. So when we go back and regraze that plant again before it has a fully recovered, then that plant has taken up more of its stocks from its roots to try to regrow. And this is when we start to get compacted lands, we get stressed grass, and we end up with this really short spot. But actually, if we section off our fields into smaller parcels and we move our horses on more regularly, and we give say at least sort of 30 days of that parcel once it’s raised to actually recover, then our plants get a lot healthier, they grow a lot quicker, and we can have more forage available for longer throughout the year. And just doing simple interventions like that can make a massive difference and that can really help with, you know, buying in more forage, buying in more hay and things like that as well. So it’s not necessarily about needing more land, it’s just thinking a bit differently about how we manage the land that we have.
And would you say that’s something that like a horse owner could you know, if if they don’t know much about how to identify that, is that something that they would be able to sort of start to identify themselves or is that something that you’d need to sort of get someone in to look at or how how would you advise they sort of like is it is it something that would happen like week by week you kind of need to go and assess your pasture and see how it’s faring or is it something that is more of a like you need to ring someone and or send you a WhatsApp picture or how would that kind of
it all depends on the level of support that people want, but they can absolutely do it themselves. So some real simple observation exercises when you go out to your field is just have a look at how healthy it looks. What diversity have you got in your field? How long is the sward? If we’re talking about whether the plants have recovered or not, go out when your horses have just grazed and you see all the all the grass has like a really sharp edge to the grass, so where it’s been bitten off. And it’s a real clean cut edge and that’s really obvious. So go out and have a look and you can see what that looks like. If you go out, if you leave a section for a few weeks and then you go back out, then you can see as a plant starts to regrow and it ends up it gets this more rounded or sort of a bit more of a tip on its edge and at the top of the leaf, and that shows that it has actually recovered. So when you get to that point, you know, okay, well that that plant has recovered. I mean the majority of the plants in that pasture have recovered, that’s probably an okay time to then go and graze. Obviously the longer you can leave it, al is always going to be better. But yeah, there’s a there’s a balance to be had between how much land you’ve got and how much your horses are eating.
And I mean I would assume as well that’s perhaps affected by the like at the moment the maybe the heat we’re having, you know, does that have an an impact on how how quickly the grass is obviously going to grow back and recover.
Yeah. Yeah. So whenever the plants are stressed, and that might be during floods, during frosts, during the drought, so any heat at the moment, or if they’re overgrazed, then they’re going to slow down that growth. Because they just can’t use the energy as efficiently. And but if we actually work to improve our soil health, and if we as we start to let these plants recover, so the more time they have a chance to fully recover before they graze again, they get healthier and healthier, which basically that means they’ll get deeper and deeper roots, they’ve got more access to the nutrients within the soil. It improves all the soil health, so they’ll get more biological activity within the soil itself as well. And that will actually make them more resilient to all of those stresses. And it also makes the nutritional profile much more stable, so you don’t get these same fluctuations in non-structural carbohydrates. Throughout the season as well. So we can have healthier plants, healthier soil and it means that it’s much more nutritionally stable for our horses as well. So it’s actually much better quality forage for our horses than, you know, if we’re just constantly grazing it all the time.
So we’ve talked a little bit about how sort of how we manage how we manage the fields kind of in a not day to day but like weekly kind of rotation periods. But what about kind of like over the over a long space of the year? Like obviously traditionally you’ve maybe taught like put the fertilizers on at certain times of year, harrow this time of year, things like that. How how do you feel like maybe that’s that’s changing or that’s changed with the more we know about biodiversity or soil health and how we can improve that and maybe what you’d advise horse owners to kind of think about as a rule for you know how to manage your paddock over the year or perhaps it’s not that simple, perhaps it is very individual. How do you how do you use So you manage that.
Yeah, so I would always say I like to say that I’m quite lazy when it comes to land management. I like to use my horses to do all the work for me as much as possible. And the thing is, all the machinery that we have, all the chemicals that we applied, they’re all mimicking something that our animals can do. So if you’re rolling, if you’re harrowing, if you’re ploughing, if you’re doing anything like that, it’s all mimicking something that our animals would do in nature anyway. So I’d prefer to look at okay, well, what is that machinery trying to replicate? What is what outcome are we trying to achieve? And can we use the animals to do that instead, or do we still need to use that machinery? So that’s still going to depend a little bit on what horses that you have, what the health is. So can they safely graze? Can you graze at that time of year with and you know depending on what state your land is? Because if it if it’s really wet in a complete bog, well you probably don’t want to be going out with machinery anyway, but you also might not be able to raise. But it’s trying to instead of having sort of a set calendar that, it’s this day I need to go out and I need to harrow, or they’ve come off the field, so I need to go and put the fertiliser on. It’s looking at what the weather is doing, trying to think about well, what outcomes are we actually trying to achieve and is that needed, or can we use the animals to do it differently in a way that saves us a lot of money, it’s probably a lot easier to do, it will save us time as well. So yeah, there’s been a lot of times when we’ve been I’ve just been sat with my husband having a drink watching our neighbours sort of out with the machinery all the time. I thought it’s yeah, it’s it’s not always necessary. So we like to micromanage and we do a lot more than we necessarily need to. But our animals can do a lot of that work for us it’s a land and manage them appropriately. I think I’m I’m very on board with that approach of I wouldn’t say lazy, but just you know, clever management to ensure you don’t have to do too much. And obviously we’ve talked a little bit about managing horses on small areas. But I also think probably something which we can’t talk up now because we certainly would wish we had a bit of it, but is probably mud. Which horse owners absolutely adore is the mud. And I hate to bring it up at this time of year when we’re all boiling hot. But I’m sure it is coming at some point through the winter. So do you have any sort of tips on how to I mean what’s your views is are are we gonna completely ruin our paddocks if we turn out in the winter? You know, it’s a big debate, isn’t it, f forever. Do we turn out and, you know ruin it a little bit or ruin a paddock and go to another one. You know, what what’s kind of your views or or advice on how to manage the mud through the winter?
Again, it’s all finding that balance. A little bit of mud and a little bit of poaching isn’t bad. And so a little bit of disturbance to the soil can actually do the world of good. But we don’t want to overdo it. So we’re signed on that level that actually works. And but a lot of the time I would say the problems that you have with mud are the same problems that you’ve got now with the drought. And it all comes down to our water management. So we seem to have this tendency of we want to get rid of water as quick as possible. And so we put in hard engineering, we put in drainage channels, and we try to just pass that off to our neighbours essentially. And but I like to think of water is one of the free resources that we’re given and it’s actually going to become so much more valuable. As you know, now we’ve got a lot of hosepipe bans, we’re in the middle of a drought, everything is really struggling absolutely desperate for water. But if we can manage our land in a way, so we actually slow the water down in winter and we can store it on our land, if we improve our soil health, so if the soil actually acts as a sponge and it stores it for us, then we’ve actually got that water available throughout that drought. So that then helps us to extend that grazing season, we have better quality forage, we will have higher hay yields. And it means that yeah, we’re actually using a resource that’s completely free. Again, it’s just like you said, that sort of clever management, thinking about how does water move through the landscape. And instead of seeing it as a challenge or problem that we need to solve, actually looking at it as an opportunity. So okay, well, how can I use this? How can I make this work for me? And instead of fighting against nature, because honestly, we’re never gonna win with that. It’s trying to work with it. So it actually does the job for us. It makes our lives so much easier. And yeah, it means we get better forage at the end of the day, or without us standing knee-deep in mud. And yeah, we still have we still have grazing at the end of the summer.
So how would we go about improving our soil health to try and better some of these topics that we’ve talked about?
So the easiest thing and the best way to get started is what we’ve already said, and that’s sort of preventing overgrazing. So actually rotating your horses and letting your pasture recover is the biggest thing that you can do to actually kickstart and kickstart that. So as as we get more roots in the soil, we increase the biological activity there as well. And all that means that opens up the soil, we get more aggregates, water can infiltrate down. And the plants have more access to nutrients which are lower down within the soil. So they’re all released and they’ve got that then means we’ve got more nutritionally balanced grass as well, so whether they’re grazing it directly or whether we’re cutting it for hay. So there are mechanical and there are like there are mechanical interventions that you can do and like subsoiling and aerating. Everything like that. There are different soil amendments that you can use as well, which all might help. But yeah, if you haven’t got machinery available, if you don’t want to spend loads of money on spraying everything, all of these different things on your lands, which I’d say don’t do that without a soil test anyway, just by rotationally grazing, which all you need for that really is a bit of electric fence, which most of us have on hand anyway, then we can actually kick start that process. And once we get started, so I always like to say we’ve kind of been lied to when we talk about sustainability, because sustainability doesn’t actually exist. We’re either moving upwards or we’re moving downwards. So you can think of it like a style. So it only takes one step in one direction or the other, and we can start building on those benefits or those disbenefits. So if we start overgrazing, then we introduce feeds, we introduce We have compaction, we end up with mud, we end up with water running off, we end up with flooding, we end up with a drought, and it gets worse and worse year on year. If we actually take a step in the right direction, just by letting things rest and recover, then we can build up all those benefits on top of that. So we can have healthier plants, we can have better water management, we can have a longer grazing season, have healthier horses, we can, you know, we can build up like the opportunities for it. Of quite unless and it just takes a little shift in how we view things. I think that’s that’s really encouraging to hear that you know the idea of improving your soil health it sounds quite quite a daunting sort of experience you think my gosh I don’t know anything about soil but like like you say like simple management things that we can put in sort of day to day, week to week. Can make a huge difference in how our how our land fares through the whole year, which I think is really encouraging. If you say, you did talk about actually taking a sample, is that something that you do? Is it is it something that you can do yourself and send off, or how does that kind of procedure work, or when would you recommend that specific thing if you’re really struggling, I assume?
Yeah. So I’d say a lot of the time we can tell what might be going on in the system by just looking at by going out and observing. So looking at what plants are growing, what are struggling. Have you got an accumulation of one species growing in one patch? That might be an indication that there’s something going on in that area. So we can have a look, okay, well what does that plant need? What might it be bringing up or what what might it be telling us? And especially when we look at things in combination, we can start to build up a real good picture of what might be going on. And so we can start and do some interventions based on that anyway. If we’re still really struggling, then yes, we can take soil samples. It needs to be done in normal weather conditions, ideally, so not in the middle of a drought or flood. I don’t do the analysis myself, so we can send them off to a lab. So it is something that people can do themselves. I would recommend using the independent agricultural lab as opposed to There’s quite few feed companies that are offering analysis now. And a lot of the time you’ll get your your report back with a lot of advice and recommendations for a lot of their products. So I do prefer to use someone who’s completely independent because you don’t have to wade through all of that and it’s a bit easier to just see the picture and see what’s going on. But yeah, we can definitely we can definitely do soil testing, we can definitely do forage analysis as well. So forage analysis can be really useful. To actually understand what our horses are getting and if they’re getting a balanced diet or not. But the same thing again, I would recommend using an independent agricultural laboratory. It tends to be a lot cheaper as well, which is always a benefit. But one thing that I like to have a look at as well is what biology have we got in the soil? When we talk about water and using that as a free resource, there’s some studies have shown that a one percent increase in soil organic matter, so that’s the roots and the biological activity within the soil, can increase the water storage capacity in the top six inches by 20,000 gallons per acre, which is a huge amount of water if you think about you know how much land we have. If you think about the impacts that would have for at the moment, during a drought. Or during winter when our fields are really muddy and flooding, if that’s so can actually absorb an extra twenty thousand gallons and getting that one percent increase isn’t that difficult to do. Obviously it depends a bit on what soil type is on. But yeah, anything’s moving in that direction, you’re gonna see massive benefits from it.
Yeah. I think that’s you know that that’s what we’re really finding out now is I think even for as a horse owner you kind of realise, gosh, we don’t know anything about well, I d I feel like I don’t know anything about my my field. But like you say, we get to this time of year and we went a drought or whatever and we think, Well, what do we do now? We’re kind of in a bit of a like, but I don’t know what else we were meant to do. So it’s it’s really encouraging to hear that actually it’s not some huge, big great change we need to make. Actually we can do it in in small increments and it’s it’s it’s it’s like a relatively simple process to make quite a big change, which I think is could be really important. We’re
we’re firefighting a lot of the time. So like you said, at the moment, I’ve got a drought, I don’t know what to do. I need to go buy some more hay. What do I do to, you know, be able to feed my horses out during winter? I’ve got mud, what do I do to be able to manage this mud? And we s like to put everything in silos and we don’t necessarily connect those two things. So I like to encourage people to let’s move towards more proactive management. So yes, we can be adaptive when the weather throws something crazy at us, but we’ve actually got an overall plan. We know what we’re doing, we know where we’re going and we can make decisions against that. And it makes it much less stressful as well when would we get those extreme weather events.
Yeah, definitely. So with that that those management changes On top of those, would you would you still be recommending kind of any fertilising at all to help with the help with the grass growth or would it literally be sort of like or maybe adding more species or would that be very dependent on probably the individual pasture, but like kind of as a as a rule? In my head you’re always thinking traditionally, well to make the grass be a bit better for next year, we’ll probably get the farm to fertilize the fields or things like that. But is that kind of perhaps if we’d made those management changes, is that kind of an unnecessary expense or or I mean perhaps I may have understood wrong, please
Don’t worry, no. So yeah, this is one of those very frustrating answers that it depends. So it depends on what what is your starting point and where do you want to get to as well. So if you’ve been fertilizing for the past say 20 years and you’ve got a field which is pretty much agricultural cultivars, then those those grasses, those plants that you’ve got in your fields that they want that fertilizer. So you can think of them almost like a bit of a drug addict addict. They’re not going to grow well without it. So we kind of need to wean them off it. So we need to teach them that, you know, that you can actually start to interact with the environment around them. So if you think the way the plants normally get the nutrients, it’s by interacting with the biology in the soil. So they’ll put the roots down and you’ve got loads of different microorganisms and like fungi and bacteria as well that will talk to the different plants and it’ll give them the nutrients that they need. They can put those roots down and they can search for those nutrients and they can extract them from the soil. When we put an agricultural cultivar down and we fertilize them, then we kind of break that chain. So that plant doesn’t know how to talk to its surrounded environment. So we end up with soil that doesn’t have a lot of biological activity and we end up with plants that don’t know how to talk to that biology if it was there anyway. So we kind of need to make this sort of transition to a a healthier environment where those plants can actually talk to the ecosystem around it, where it works as a complete and you know it completes that nutrient cycle and everything works seamlessly together. And so yeah, it depends at what stage in that process that you are in terms of whether you use those fertilizers or not. Fertilizers also tend to be salt-based, so they can actually interrupt those biological conversations as well. And so that is another issue that is Yes, that we don’t often think about. So I think it’s quite obvious when you go out and you apply herbicides that okay, that’s damaging some things in the environment because we’re we’re actively going killing things off. But fertiliser can act in the same way as well. When it comes to reseeding, it’s really good to have a look at what diversity you’ve got in your pasture and to start with. I’d say a lot of the time the species that we want are actually already in the seed bank. Unless you’ve gone on it’s an arable field and it’s been completely decimated for years on end, usually we still have a really good seed bank in that soil and those seeds a lot of the time can remain viable for decades. They’re just waiting for the right environmental conditions to actually express themselves. So a lot of the time if we give them the right conditions, then we can get more diversity in there. Obviously, if you want to speed these things up, we can use seed mixes. I’m always very careful about what seed mixes I recommend. So a lot of even equine-specific ones, they are still agricultural seed mixes that are made to be used with all these different chemicals and all these fertilizers. And the seeds that are grown essentially kind of grown in a lab, it’s not quite that sterile, but they’re not they’re not wild species. They don’t have the ability to sexually reproduce a lot of the time, which means that they can’t adapt to the environment. And they can’t learn how to interact with the biology around them. So that often means that, you know, after a few years, all those species will completely disappear. But if we use a species from, say, a conservation grade mix, the species that are taken from the wild, they have that ability to adapt to the environment. So they’ll adapt to your local conditions and they’ll persist for a lot longer. So they’re more expensive initially, but it means that we don’t have to spend that money every five years or however however that’s maybe. Something else that can be a lot cheaper and work really effectively as well is to actually use green hay. So if you’ve got say like a local wildlife trust, a local nature reserve and they’re cutting for hay, if they’ve got really good species diversity in their blossoms, you can ask them for some of that hay and you can spread them on the on your land. And that almost it works like a bit of a mulch but all the seed will drop out of that hay. Into your soils that if you’ve got it from a local site it’s already locally adapted to your conditions and that can really help with the species diversity in there as well and it’s all of local provenance as well so it’s going to be suitable for your lands most likely.
Yeah. So it’s important to sort of take away from that that to do to do thing you if you’re gonna do it, kind of do it do it right and take a take a look at your like overall surroundings or get advice from someone like you and think about what what would actually survive best here rather than perhaps throwing money at a lots of different things, investing in a something that would change your paddock for the better, perhaps starting off a bit more expensive but maybe would would help more long term and actually would be able to survive in your condition. Yeah, we like to
Well, we like to compare ourselves to other people on social media, I think, and we like quick fixes a lot of the time, but unfortunately there isn’t always a quick fix and the things that are actually longer to establish will will be much more beneficial. So it’s it is one of those that whether when you use machinery, whether you use chemicals, whether we use different amendments, whether you know you use seed mixes, all of these questions. It all kind of depends on well what is your starting point and where do you want to end up? What are your horses, what are your horses’ needs. So, you know, a horse that is going out competing or starting to polo yards recently, those horses are in really high levels of work. They’ve got very different requirements to you know, native cobs or horses like that that maybe go out for a hack once a week. You know, they have different sort of biological requirements, they have different individual requirements as well, which we need to take into account when we’re looking at the management system. So it’s it’s being able to sit down and have like okay well where am I at the moment? Where would I like to get to? And trying to then fill in those steps in between and just taking that one first step in the right direction and you can start building on that when you get those successes. Well
There’s one kind of last thing that’s sort of on my mind from what horse owners kind of struggle with, I think, a lot is probably dreaded weeds. How how how do you think we best approach weeds? Mainly ragwort is the bane of my existence. Not sure about anyone else, but that is definitely something that pops up every year, seemingly regardless of what we do, whether we spray, whether we pick it out, whether we almost anything, it will crop up somewhere. So any advice on weeds and how we manage those would be greatly appreciated. Yeah. So again my my question would be, well, why is that weed there? What is it telling me about my lands and what is it showing me? And once we understand why they’re there, we can look at what is the solution. So the species really just turn up for hell of it. They’re normally there because the conditions are right for it. So if you’ve got say something like docks and dandelions and things like that, they like really compacted ground. So they’ve got really long taproots. So what they actually do is they put those long tap roots down into the soil and they bring those nutrients up from the subsoil and to the top soil, which actually means that other species can take advantage of those nutrients and they can self-grow. So if we give it long enough, then actually the docks will fade away because the environment isn’t suitable for them anymore. They basically outcompeted themselves and other species will take their their place. With things like ragwort, again, that’s and they tend to like really disturbed areas. So when we’re overgrazing and when we’ve got a lot of compacted lands and compacted soils, that’s where species like ragwort yeah become really abundant. So actually if we change our managements, it’s it’s looking at what is what symptom is it showing me. How do we fix the underlying cause rather than just treat the individual species? Obviously if we’ve got dangerous species like ragwort, we do want to go and pull it, we need to control it because we don’t want our horses in there and yeah, dealing with any toxicity issues like that. But it’s trying to solve that underlying issue as well. So yeah, if it’s compacted land, why is it compacted? How can I change my management to help increase that long term?
And with the kind of like the the doc plant like you were talking about, is that like a change that would happen like relatively quickly or is that a change that would happen over a a long like a year, like do you see what I mean? Like if you left it in there for a s for a year, would perhaps the next year there’d be a bit less? How how do you tend to see that kind of change of of the effect of what that plant does?
So it depends what else is going on at the same time. So if it’s still in there and we’ve not changed any of our management, the chances are it’s not really going to go away. But if we pair it with management changes, then it can come around quite quickly. So as a good example that we put a sacrificial sort of traffic area across the centre of one of our fields and that got completely trampled, really poached, really compacted. The first year we’ve got loads of docks and loads of like creeping thistle and things like that coming through. And this year we’re getting loads of other sort of pioneer species. So we’re getting loads of like oxeye daisy and yarrow and things like that coming through. And it’ll be yeah, as we go through year on year, that species profile is going to change. So nature is really dynamic. So we need to not look at it one year and go, my god, I’ve got this massive weed issue and need to go and kill everything off. It’s You know, that it might just be a temporary thing. But again, it’s trying to understand what’s your underlying conditions. We can support it by if we do some soil testing, so actually taking a soil sample and sending it off to the lab. But one of the easiest ways to actually see the quality of your soil as well is most people have a space, go out and just dig a hole, so about 30 centimetres squared and have a look at your soil. So a lot of the time you’ll find You might have nice topsoil, but that might not be that deep. And then you’ve got this sort of compaction pan when nothing can get through. And so it’s looking at how deep are our plant roots. Do we have a lot of soil and aggregates? Do we have a lot of earthworms and things like that? And you can then go and do the same sort of under a hedge or a road verge or something like that. So they tend to be areas that are less disturbed by our sort of management. And you can compare what it looks like there because that’s what our fields should look like. And if they don’t look the same, then we need to think, okay, well, why don’t they look the same? What is going on with my management that is impacting this soil so much? And then we can, yeah, start to build up a management plan that actually helps us get back to where we should be. Yeah.
So kind of to to start to kind of like round off, what would you say would be sort of your top your top management tips or takeaways that you could sort of like as a general rule give to horse owners just to get them started on sort of sorting their their their land management pasture out a bit.
The biggest and easiest thing that people can do is just let a bit of your land recover. So even if you don’t go for a full rotational grazing sort of system just yet, if you that seems a bit too daunting at the moment, if you can try it with one field or one corner of the field. So let your horses in for a few days or maybe a week, they can graze that off and then move them off and let that fully recover. And if you start doing that, you can start to see the differences and the changes within that area, hopefully. So that’s yeah, absolutely the easiest place to start. And I think, yeah, just going out and observing your land and think about what is actually going on. Instead of seeing things as a problem, try to see then, well, what is this telling me and how how can I use it to my advantage? What’s the opportunity here?
Yeah. And I think it’s super interesting what you’ve been saying about how, you know, considering the whole the whole reason why things are happening. You know, like like you said earlier, the firefighting, we have like a big panic approach of there’s a weed or there’s there’s no grass or my fields flooded. But I really like how you kind of are talking about how we can make such small changes, but actually they have a lot of difference in how we can really easily and like not fairly inexpensively manage how things happen and I think a lot of horse owners will really benefit from those inexpensive changes.
Yeah, so I think we often forget that nature knows how to do its thing. It wants to heal itself, it wants to get better. But a lot of the time we come in and we try to micromanage things and we interrupt that system. So nature’s really complex and we pretend that we understand it all but it’s really challenging to understand all the different variables that are going on. And so actually by letting it take control of learning how we can actually work with nature and thinking about what our horses actually need as an animal and so where they’ve evolved and what they’ve evolved to do and to eat and just trying to pair those things together. We can come up with much more resilient systems that support our horses but yeah, also support our pockets as well a lot of the time.
That’s that’s brilliant. Thank you so much, Laura. I think that’s a that’s a nice sort of closing message for everyone to sort of remember. Yeah, and thank you so much. There’ll be lots more of Laura’s work going up on our animal web page, so look out for her her wise words of wisdom for any land management problems that we may be experiencing, which I’m sure we definitely all will be grasping for more information for on those topics.
