As we enter autumn, many of us are looking at the impact of last season’s grazing, the bare patches left behind, the struggling areas, and the places where weeds really seem to have taken hold. Autumn can be a great time for overseeding, as can spring.
Before you reach for the expensive commercial seed mix, it’s worth pausing and asking: Do you really need to buy it? First, ask why. Before we choose a seed mix, we need to understand why we’re overseeding in the first place.
What are we trying to achieve?
- Are we trying to repair bare patches?
- Increase productivity?
- Introduce more diversity?
- Improve drought resilience?
- Extend the grazing season?
- Or are we simply looking at a field that doesn’t look the way we think it should?
These are very different things. And the answer to what you should sow depends on where you’re starting, what you want to achieve, and who you’re managing the land for.
What does your horse need?
It’s easy to talk about creating the “perfect horse pasture”, but there is no single type of horse, and therefore no single type of pasture that will be perfect for every horse. A racehorse in hard work has very different energy and nutritional requirements from a cob who is hacked out a couple of times a week. And even within those broad categories, every horse is an individual. Age, workload, body condition, metabolic health and individual nutritional requirements all need to be considered. For one horse, you may need to provide more energy-dense forage.
For another, the priority may be providing a lower-energy, higher-fibre grazing environment while still supporting good welfare, movement, and natural feeding behaviour. And for some horses, the challenge isn’t simply the nutritional value of the pasture. It may be the space available, how the surrounding land is managed, and what other forage and browse they have access to.
So rather than asking: “What is the best seed mix for horses?” perhaps we should be asking: “What does my horse need, and what can my land provide?”
What if the answer is already in the ground?
We often underestimate nature’s ability to respond and recover. We’re quick to intervene, to add things, remove things, suppress things and try to make the land look the way we think it should. But what if some of the species that are right for your paddock are already there? What if they’re simply waiting for the right environmental conditions? This isn’t wishful thinking.
Soils can contain a seed bank, seeds that remain dormant until conditions become suitable for germination and establishment. What is present depends on the land’s history, previous management, and the species that have been able to reach and persist there.
So before we decide that our field is missing something, it can be worth asking: What is already here? And perhaps more importantly: Why isn’t it expressing itself?
If we continually intervene, through chemical applications, repeated disturbance, adding and removing species, we can prevent the system from responding naturally to changing conditions. Sometimes the answer isn’t to add more. Sometimes it’s to change the conditions.
What about weeds?
If you want to eradicate weeds, start by asking: Why are they there? Weeds don’t appear in a vacuum. Their presence can tell us something about the conditions on our land and the way we’re managing it. So if a particular species has become dominant, simply spreading a grass seed mix on top won’t necessarily solve the problem. We need to understand the conditions that allowed it to thrive in the first place. Otherwise, we’re treating the symptom rather than changing the system.
What about bare patches?
Bare patches are another common reason for overseeding. And sometimes they are unavoidable. Gateways, water troughs and other high-traffic areas are always going to experience more pressure than the rest of a field. But before spending money on an expensive seed mix, consider simpler ways to address the problem.
- Could you use old hay as mulch?
- Could you use green hay from a suitable area of your own land?
- Could you source green hay from a local donor site?
In some situations, you can even use your horses to help tread seed into the ground for you. Their natural impact on the land becomes part of the process. That’s a very different approach from simply buying a bag of seed and expecting it to solve the problem.
What if you want more diversity?
Perhaps you’re thinking about introducing new species for drought resilience. Or perhaps you’d like to increase plant diversity for your horses. Again, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But before you choose the seed, think about where it has come from.
- Is it suited to your conditions?
- Does it suit your soil?
- Your climate?
- Your management?
- Will it establish and persist?
- Or are you likely to get a flush of one species that looks fantastic for a year or two, only for it to disappear because the conditions or management aren’t right for it?
If that happens, you could find yourself overseeding a few years again down the line. The question isn’t simply:
“What seed should I buy?” It’s: “What can this land actually support?”
I’m not a fan of commercial seed mixes. I’ll be honest: I’m not a fan of the way commercial seed mixes are marketed to horse owners. There are a huge number of products on the market presented as “horse pasture” or “horse-safe” mixes, often accompanied by impressive claims about what they’ll do for your horses and your land. But many of these mixes are still fundamentally based around agricultural cultivars, designed for productivity livestock. And adding the word “horse” to the front of a seed mix doesn’t automatically make it ecologically appropriate for your land.
I’ve spoken to seed manufacturers about this, and I’ve often found that the understanding of what horses actually need from their pasture can be surprisingly limited, sometimes reduced to avoiding ryegrass and adding a few more herbs. Compare some of these mixes with genuinely diverse pasture systems, and the difference can be quite striking. That’s not to say all commercial seed is bad, or that you should never use it. There are situations where introduced seed is exactly the right tool, and I do like some products out there. But we need to look beyond the marketing. Where are we now, and where do we want to get to? If we do need to overseed, or we simply want to introduce more diversity.
I always start with two questions: Where are we now? and Where do we want to get to? But there are more questions that need to sit within those:
What does the horse need?
- Are we trying to increase productivity?
- Create a particular type of pasture?
- Introduce more legumes?
- Increase diversity?
- Improve resilience?
- Extend the grazing season?
- Provide forage that is appropriate for the horses using the land?
Different outcomes require different approaches. And this is where we can also fall into the trap of talking about “safe” species and “bad” species.
Take ryegrass, for example. We often hear “no ryegrass” when talking about horse pasture, while other grasses are considered acceptable. But the characteristics of a plant don’t exist independently of the system it’s growing in. Sugar levels can vary with species, but also with environmental conditions, growth stage and management.
So simply choosing a seed mix based on a list of supposedly “safe” and “unsafe” species doesn’t necessarily give you a safer pasture.
Context matters.
So what should you overseed with? Sometimes, the answer really is: Nothing. Yet. Before buying seed, spend some time looking at your land.
- What species are already there?
- What is thriving?
- What is struggling?
- Where are the bare patches?
- Where are the weeds?
- What does the soil look like?
- What has your management encouraged?
- And what might change if you changed the conditions?
Then look at the horse.
- What do they actually need from their grazing environment?
- What are their nutritional requirements?
- How much forage do they need?
- How do they use the land?
- What are their welfare needs?
- And how can the land provide what they need without creating problems elsewhere in the system?
We’re not simply choosing a seed mix. We’re designing a system.
The seed is just one potential tool within that system. Look locally. If you do want to increase diversity, I’d strongly recommend visiting local grassland sites. Look at local nature reserves and other areas of diverse grassland.
See what’s actually growing in your local landscape.
- What species occur together?
- What sort of soils are they growing on?
- What does the structure of the vegetation look like?
This can give you a much better indication of what is locally appropriate than a generic seed mix marketed as “the gold standard for horse pasture.” And, depending on the site and permissions involved, you may even be able to source green hay from a suitable local donor site. That gives you something a commercial mix can’t always provide: seed from plants already adapted to your local conditions.
So before you ask: “What should I overseed my land with?” Perhaps the better questions are: What am I trying to achieve?
- What do I already have?
- What does my horse need?
- What can my land provide?
- Do I actually need to add anything at all?
Sometimes the most resilient pasture isn’t the one with the most species we’ve bought and introduced. Sometimes it’s the one where we’ve created the conditions for the species already suited to that place to thrive. And sometimes the right answer really is to introduce something new.
The important thing is that we understand why we’re doing it, what we’re introducing, and how it fits into the wider system.
