Pasture Diversity

Happy Spring! It's really kicking off now at Pine Hill with lots of lovely grass and flowers all over the place. We have been blessed with some fantastic rain over the past three or four months and this has really kicked off our growing season well.

We have some pretty gnarly weather this time of year with some amazing storms (like today with 80km/hr winds and hail and thunder!) that bring down trees and have Charles out with the SES all over Beechworth clearing fallen trees from roads. But this year we have already had two very hot days (over 35 degrees Celsius) which makes us very nervous for the summer ahead.

This post is going to cover pasture diversity, specifically looking at the benefits diverse grasses, herbs and plants bring to your pastures. As we grow pasture for horses, we have tried a few different things to date when it comes to the best pastures for horses, and there are some interesting things we have learned along the way! I will do my best to share our knowledge so far, but am also really keen to hear from anyone else out there with experience and knowledge to share.

There are a few basic pieces of information that ground our approach to 'grass farming' for horses. The first is that most grasses traditionally grown for horses are in fact far too sugar-rich and will make horses sick. Laminitis, basically the inflammation of the soft tissue under the hoof that can be fatal if chronic and severe enough, is linked to a high-sugar diet in horses. Grasses commonly grown in temperate Australia for cattle, such as rye, clover, paspalum and fescue are not great for horses and cause all sorts of issues. Other grasses like kikuyu can cause major issues like 'big head' which is literally overlarge heads in growing horses.

This paddock was just flat weed when we moved in. The pines at the top of the hill really acidify the soil so we're pretty happy the grasses have started to take off here.

The grass with the bulb on the end is actually a wildflower rather than a grass. But it is the only thing that grows in winter and the cockatoos love digging them up and eating them (clearly what happened here!)

A clear mix of a hardy buffalo type grass with several native grasses growing in the background. The bare patches are probably from weed spraying in the months prior.

 Most pony owners know not to buy clover and rye hay, for example, as the sugar content is just too high for it to be safe. But there is more to pasture management than just making sure you aren't sowing rye and fescue. There are a number of issues to consider when looking to develop a good horse pasture:

• Variety is incredibly important to soil health, horse health, sub-surface water and the soil microbiome. Monoculture is not the way to go. Some regrarians recommend about 50 varieties of grass, herb and plant in your pasture at any one time. We certainly work to this rule, as you can see from the photos above, where it is possible to see a number of grasses and plants growing in our paddocks.
• Get your soil tested so you know what to encourage or sew to help your soil out. For example, clover and lucerne will fix nitrogen in your soil. Most temperate native grasses will grow when the soil is acidic and will help take up nutrients into your soil, providing food for microbes and worms to establish.
• We initially wanted to focus on native grasses only but found they just recover too slowly to allow 'commercial' stocking rates on the land. Basically, on a wholly native pasture, we could only really have 5 or 6 horses on 90 acres without hard feeding the whole time. We adopted the mixed pasture approach we have now and it seems to be working much better.
• Your rainfall will greatly affect your biodiversity. Some grasses just don't cope without consistency rainfall while some go gangbusters.
• Trees encourage grass. This is perhaps counter-intuitive, but the more trees you plant, the more and lusher grass you will grow. This is for a couple of reasons, including the 'second' watering the grass gets from leaves showering rain down after the rain has stopped, shade given by trees from the hot Australian sun and the frost, but mostly from the change in soil and water that occurs under and around trees. We are aiming for a park-like environment with a lot of trees throughout the paddocks and a lot of grass underneath.

We've taken a bit more of a relaxed attitude to weeds, too. The consensus among regrarians now is that weeds can be as much of a good thing as a bad thing. We are still in a spraying cycle (we use MCPA - a broad-leaf selective herbicide) but we are in a much better position than we were last spring, for example, as the soil pH has greatly improved, our soil health is far better, and we are really growing a lot of good plants in comparison to not so good.

We used a combination of NPK (nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium) - and now we're getting into hotter months we use a 'Sticker' additive that is an organic oil compound that melts the shells of little bugs like red legged earth mite and reduces grasshopper infestations) - provided by Goode's Organics in combination with the MCPA. This provides the growing grasses with a boost while killing off the undesirable plants like stork's bill (also called false radish), flat weed and cape weed. Once we aren't spraying for weeds we will add 'CalMag', Goode's calcium and magnesium liquid soil conditioner and spray that on every 6-8 weeks as we go through the summer. We can't spray the CalMag with the MCPA as the particles get too thick and they'll clog up the sprayer.

When we first decided to use a liquid fertiliser/foliant, we were a little concerned about the effect of fertiliser on the native grasses we were trying to encourage. We had read some material that cautioned not to fertilise native grasses as it would basically kill them off. These are, after all, plants that had evolved in pretty hot, dry and nutrient-light environments, so fertilising them or moving the pH too much into the alkaline was thought to be detrimental.

What we found, though, was that native grasses seem to do quite well using this level of soil and foliant conditioning. We have seen our Wallaby, Weeping and Kangaroo grass really take off, not to mention the Hairy Panic (yes that's actually a grass!), Native Millet and a range of others. The photos all show a strong mix of native with introduced grasses and plants, and this has occurred over just three years. We've only been spraying with Goode's products for less than a year.

A very healthy paddock after a couple of sprays with the NPK/MCPA mix and some good rain.

Some lessons we have learned are that the best results come when the pasture is given lots of time to recover from grazing, and that weed control is a real kickstart for a bunch of grasses and herbs to establish. Not weed eradication, mind you, but weed control. Most weeds can be out-competed by a range of healthy grasses and it's important not to allow bare earth to sit bare without grass seeds on it for long. Where there is bare earth, a plant will grow, and it's usually not the one you want! We've tried mulching with old hay (not rye/clover!) and a manure/hay/ashes mix that I spread twice a year made of horse and chook manure from our chook shed, lucerne hay I sweep out of the float, ashes from the fire over winter and anything else I think will go ok. I put a bunch of used recycled paper cat litter in there over winter and it seems very popular with the worms! These things that cover the bare earth create a really great environment for grass/plant seeds to establish.

Creating more paddocks has also been a big help as it gives whole sections the rest when before the most tasty grasses and plants would have been over-eaten while other grasses were ignored. This effectively gives you an abundance of all the plants you don't want! By locking up and resting paddocks, you give all the plants the time to grow well.

There will be more on this topic over the years as we go forward. We are learning so much about how to manage pasture for horses in the temperate Australian climate. We have stopped harrowing a lot, for example, despite the Equicentral approach advocating for a constant cycle of harrowing and slashing. The dung beetles do a good job, but we also try to move horses off paddocks before there's too much manure to worry about. It's maybe not ideal, but it saves us the petrol and time of harrowing, plus we leave the top-most layer of grass and soil alone. We found harrowing was pretty damaging to that level of the pasture.

As I said at the start, comments, questions and suggestions are very welcome!

Native grasses starting to compete with a herb.

Sun Dew - a carnivorous native plant that has sprung up in all the damp places.

Another mix of plants, some weeds (flat weed in the foreground) and some bare patches. This paddock is close to the house and has been used over winter so is showing signs of stress.

Dung Beetles - a beginner's guide

Happy Spring Time! I can't believe how long it's been since I wrote another instalment. Apologies - spring is a busy time as I get the veggie garden sorted and ready for all the planting and try to get on top of weed spraying and seeding bare paddocks. Let alone the handling of the lone weanling ready for his first trip in the float to the vet for the snip. Poor little guy handled it like a trooper!

So, dung beetles. If those two words don't fill you with excitement and joy now, I hope by the end of this post they will! I absolutely love these little (and not so little!) beetles and I can see the change to the paddocks even in the two years we've been actively managing for them.

Dung beetles are a broad classification of a family of beetle introduced to Australia, mainly from Africa. They only eat the dung of ungulates (mammals with hooves), though one or two species have been shown to get involved in native animal dung. Most adult dung beetle species feed on the liquid in manure (poo juice!) and use the fibrous material in the manure to make 'brood balls' which they bury in the soil, some as deep as 30cm.

One of the most common beetles at Pine Hill, O. Binodis

The dung beetles in the north, hotter and more tropical regions differ markedly from the dung beetles I'll be discussing here. The tropical beetles have long front legs that they use to make dung balls ('ball rollers') while the beetles we see down here at Pine Hill are 'tunnellers' and don't have the long appendages.

We are just about to get into dung beetle season, and it can't come quick enough! Currently, we have about 5 species on our farm, with the odd blow in of 2 other species trapped on occasion. They are all spring to autumn beetles, meaning they are only active in the warmer months, though we hope a winter beetle will be released and available for us soon so we have all year round activity.

Dung Beetles On the Farm
Here's how the beetles work on our farm (and yours too, if you make the effort to manage for them):

1. The beetles are immediately attracted to fresh manure and fly from everywhere to land on it and start processing the pile. 
2. They will start drinking the poo juice (yum yum!) and digging the fibrous material down into the earth, usually between 10cm and 30cm deep depending on the species.
3. The average horse poo pile is reduced to a flat, completely processed dry pancake in under an hour. No need to harrow.
4. Without the liquid in the manure, flies do not lay maggots in the poo and even if they do the maggots don't survive. We have NO flies in summer - no need for fly masks for horses or hoomans alike. I shit you not. 😂
5. As the manure is completely processed in super-quick time, any parasites or internal eggs shed in the manure die. 
6. The beetles essentially condition the soil for months, digging manure in to the soil, adding organic matter to the earth and helping the earth worms and soil microbiome. 
7. Did I mention no harrowing?

How To Manage Horses For Dung Beetles

There is one golden rule: do not use chemical wormers except the one horse wormer that appears to have no effect on the beetles and that's Strategy T. This is the wormer we use in spring, if needed, but it is preferable to use Fecal Egg Counting to get an accurate picture of your horses' worm burden.

Other management techniques that will help reduce the likelihood your horses will even have a parasite burden include:

1. Frequent paddock rotation. Always have a paddock or area of land resting that you can move your horses onto. 'Set stocking', or keeping your animals on the same land with no rest, is a risk factor.
2. New horses must be wormed prior to joining the herd, or better yet coming onto the property. Even better, get the new horse's FEC done so you can avoid worming if it's not needed.
3. If your horse is in a little paddock and you have no choice but set stocking, pick up the manure and compost it once a week. To be honest, this kind of management is far from ideal but resting the paddock as often as possible is really important. Removing the manure from the paddock also removes all the beneficial soil conditioning it offers. If you can remove the horse for a month and harrow in all the poo every few months, that is far better.

So, hopefully I've convinced you to give dung beetles a go. They are just the most amazing little critters and I can't WAIT for them to arrive this year! It's pretty easy to encourage them onto your property by just not killing them off with wormers. We did nothing at all to get them back onto our

A big beetle and very welcome here at Pine Hill, G. Spiniger

place, they just started arriving two summers ago and we've never looked back! Now we're part of the Dung Beetle Monitoring program run by Landcare and will hopefully play a small role in the big research program being run by Charles Sturt University. We're true Dung Beetle Fans!

If you're keen, please check out this website: http://www.dungbeetle.com.au 

Rehabilitating paddocks Part 1

Welcome to the first post looking at how we are going about regenerating our paddocks. This is a long-running project that will likely take several years more to achieve our desired outcome, so this will be the first post of several over time.

When we bought Pine Hill in 2016, the property had been largely neglected. There were few fences and the entire property was infested with flatweed (also known as false dandelion or cat's ear). This weed is a neurotoxin for horses and is a major cause of 'stringhalt', a sometimes irreversible neurological disorder characterised by exaggerated raising of the hindlegs. Obviously, not ideal for a horse property!

Other than the flatweed, the major issue was the lack of appropriate pasture. Either the grasses growing were unpalatable for horses, too high in sugar (think rye and clover) or just missing in action. As can be seen from the photos below, there were large patches of bare earth, a heavy infestation of flatweed (and later, capeweed and false radish), tufts of native grass and few trees.

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About 50cm x 50cm patch showing good grass but a flatweed plant with dried stalks in the bottom centre. This is typical of late winter/early spring time.

This is of the highest part of the property, looking across the fence into what is about to become a completely fenced off area subject to a grant to rehabilitate the creek.

Day-old 'Chopper' the young stallion but you can see the difference between the overgrazed paddock where the horses are and the entirely native/unimproved pasture in the foreground.

 The photos shown were largely taken in late winter/early spring and show a lot of greenness and saturated ground. The winter we moved in was one of the wettest on record (it rained every single day for three solid months!) but even so, the grass growth was minimal and not nutritionally significant.

The best paddock 'Kelly' supporting the majority of the horses at this time

 We made the decision to get the soil tested to give us a baseline and decide what to do and what needed to be put down on the property. The soil test was informative - the pH was not as low as we were warned it would be - at 5.1 it was certainly acidic but, considering the amount of pine trees and the degraded paddocks, we thought it would be in the 4s! On the back of that test, we decided to put down lime and dolomite in the amounts suggested by the soil testing company (SWEP, for Australian property owners who are interested). Lime takes about 6-12 months to really start making a difference, though, so it would be a long wait before we saw any improvement!

A typical 50cm x 50cm patch showing flatweed 

Coming into spring, we made the decision to start spraying for flatweed. While soil pH is a huge factor in what plants grow well where, we decided that flatweed, being toxic to horses, needed to be eradicated as quickly as possible. One horse had already shown signs of stringhalt so the situation had become more urgent.

This was a fraught decision as we were becoming very aware of how much water runs through, under and over this property. We live on a big hill and all the water passing through our place ends up in beautiful creeks. We wanted to use as few chemicals as possible. The property has a number of soaks (areas where sub-surface water is very close to the surface) and two watercourses that ran when there was significant rain, as well as three dams and an abundance of waterbirds.

Because of this, we decided to use the lease toxic herbicide we could and settle on MCPA. This is a broad-leaf selective herbicide that (currently!) is considered relatively safe. Even so, we have applied it only once on any area at this stage and have sprayed in sections, rather than doing the whole property at once to minimise saturation with the chemical.

The spraying program has been remarkably effective and there is a significant reduction in flatweed in sprayed areas. We will need to re-spray this spring to really get on top of the flatweed, but it's been a successful approach on the whole, and the spray does not seem to have affected frog and dung beetle populations (more on those later!).

In addition to the spraying, we set about planting trees. You can see from the photos that there were very few large trees (about five!) on the entire property and most paddocks had zero large trees in them. We sourced 50 trees, as well as trees from Landcare (about a dozen per year) and we planted them in various areas with limited success.

The trees planted in the higher sections of the property all died during the summer (even when watered in some cases). Very few trees have survived a full year, though interestingly one paddock has five growing young trees while another has none. However, a change in planting technique is hopefully changing the game and there may be a better rate of survival from now on! We now use the 'deep planting' technique where tubestock are essentially buried as deep as possible with only the tip of the plant emerging from the ground. It goes against all reason but it seems to be working!

On to dung beetles. There will be a whole post on dung beetles next week, so I will keep discussion of dung beetles here very brief. We were introduced to dung beetles as a seriously important tool in our property management last year and Nadia did a short information session in the height of summer at the end of 2018. She came back completely sold on the importance of dung beetles and Pine Hill is now a 'Dung Beetle Monitoring Site' for the Landcare project, conducting fortnightly counts of dung beetles on the property.

We realised early on that the soil lacked organic matter and there were no earth worms in the soil that we disturbed while planting trees. Once again, composting manure and other organic matter such as grass clippings and ash from the fire will be covered in depth in another future post, but we decided to look for a soil conditioner/fertiliser we could spread ourselves that was organic/biodynamic. The manure mixture we made was very small scale and simply inadequate for the size of our property.

We settled on Goode's Organics and started spraying the 'NPK' (ie nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium) and 'CalMag' (ie calcium and magnesium) onto paddocks every 8 weeks or so. We are able to use NPK with MCPA, which is very useful in providing a boost to 'good' plants while killing off weeds. We also wanted to try Goode's' 'sticker', an additive that targets insects by melting exoskeletons, particularly in red mite which attack grass roots and are incredibly difficult to get rid of. We think there's been a clear result using these kinds of products and will be keeping tabs on those results into the future.

Our last approach to paddock improvement was with regard to livestock management. We implemented a rotational grazing schedule that used the Myers' method of 'loafing areas'. In this model, a single, central large area is created with a water source and paddocks are fenced around this area. There is a single herd of horses that moves from a paddock to the loafing area to drink and stand around, and they are easily moved from one paddock to another simply by opening gates. More on this in another post!

We use the 'sacrifice' approach in winter and summer at the moment, meaning one paddock is essentially trashed over winter while we rest the others. We began this winter with three sacrifice paddocks, one for each herd, but as we started to run short of round bales of hay, and with hay prices climbing and climbing due to the drought in NSW, we abandoned this approach in two of the three herd areas. The photos below show the remaining sacrifice paddock and the three horses in it with their precious bale! You can see how trashed it is, but it is the worst one anyway in terms of weed and  lack of trees, so this will be intensively rehabilitated come spring time.

The photos below are of the paddocks this winter.

A clod of earth dug to plant this winter's trees. You can see the colour and organic matter.

The hole with a big fat earth worm just visible on the left of the hole.

The sacrifice paddock. Lucerne hay in the mornings, hard feed in the evenings and a round bale 24/7. And mud

About 1m x 1m patch

The approaches we are using are largely trial and error. We are not sure what the best pH is for the soil when we are aiming to grow a mix of native and introduced grasses. The soil test we did in autumn showed a pH of 5.8-6.1 so that's a big improvement. We have decided to just proceed with organic matter for a while and see how that goes - we are very keen to encourage native grasses (yes, that's another post for another time!) and there are no guides out there for how to grow a native/low sugar grass mix for horses.

Stay tuned for another post next week looking at dung beetles. Thanks for reading!

Same paddock - sacrifice seen over the fence on the right. 

The rested paddock next to the sacrificed one.

Welcome to the show!

Greetings!

Welcome to the blog by an Australian couple who want to breed, keep, train and grow horses in harmony with the Australian environment - and who want to share our successes and failures with anyone who is interested! We are Charles and Nadia, residents and owners of Pine Hill, a 93 acre property in beautiful north east Victoria, where we have a little Australian Stock Horse Stud of the same name, and live with our two kids.

This is pretty much what our place looked like when we moved in nearly three years ago. It is located entirely on a big hill with plenty of granite rock and two little watercourses, both of which only flow when it rains fairly heavily.

It looks nice and green but most of that green is flatweed (also known as false dandelion or cat's ear), which is a weed toxic to horses and causes neurological problems and liver damage. Not good for a horse stud!

There were only a couple of fences on the property, some in excellent condition, some not so much. There are three dams - we call them 'Top', 'Middle' and 'Bottom', somewhat unimaginatively, and of the three, Middle dam is the best for water quality and storage capacity, followed by Top dam and Bottom dam. We will come to Bottom dam later!

The previous owners had not done much to the property in the thiry-odd years they lived here, other than build the house. Even the shed and shearing shed pre-dated the house! The land was overgrazed by goats and cattle, and there was barely a tree on the place. There were two paddocks that looked pretty good and had been 'improved' at some stage (meaning some kind of fertiliser had been applied) and the neighbour had grazed his cattle on those paddocks at various times to help keep the grass down.

We came to this property from one about a quarter of the size on the outskirts of Canberra where we had tried a couple of the techniques and property planning approaches we will discuss in this blog, but the land is much drier in Canberra and far more unforgiving! The rainfall in this part of the world is almost a third more per annum (climate change notwithstanding) and the winters are far less harsh than the Canberra region. Summer here is hot - last summer we had nearly 4 weeks straight of 35+ Celcius without a break which was record-breaking, but that is to be the new normal, and this region is the last to be really negatively affected by climate change; one of the reasons we moved here.

We decided to breed Australian Stock Horses a few months after moving here, mainly because of the versatility of the breed, and the general athleticism and temperament of the horse. We acquired a two-year-old colt from Pipersrun Stock Horses up near Dubbo in 2017, and decided to keep our first born colt (2016 drop) entire after seeing how stunning and quiet he was an a yearling. These two, Pipersrun Captain Thunderbolt (Jack) and Pinehill Cool Constable (Chopper), became our foundations sires.

Jack as a 3 year-old

Jack as a 3 year-old

We also decided to keep our band of mares very small as we want to limit the number of horses the property supports and this gives us a buffer if we don't sell youngstock every year. We now have four mares - two thoroughbred and two Heritage ASH mares - and plan to have two in foal per year. This cycle of breeding every second year seems optimal, as it gives the mares time to replenish their body weight and calcium and other minerals before the next foal.

This blog is also a place where Nadia in particular (the horse person of the couple!) will talk about ethical horse management and training. Nadia has trained with the Australian Equine Behaviour Centre founders Dr Andrew and Mrs Manuela Mclean for her entire riding life (since the age of 8, we believe!) and has benefited enormously from their relentless pursuit of better and more ethical training approaches to horses. There is also a growing body of research looking at the best ways to house, manage, feed, train, breed and grow horses, and this will form part of this blog too. You'll be getting a warts and all blog as we talk about what has and hasn't worked, and all the lessons we've learned along the way!

Our overarching mission has been to rehabilitate our property, but also to find the best and most effective methods to farm our horses in harmony with the Australian environment. We have found a real lack of material out there talking about regrarian/sustainable/environmentally friendly farming for horse people. There's a lot about cows and sheep but nothing much about horses - who we all know are completely different in many ways. Behaviourally, nutritionally and emotionally, horses are just not like other livestock. We also use them and interact with them on a daily basis so just sticking them out in a paddock isn't going to work.

So, come along for the ride and join in on the comments below. Ask questions, share wisdom and give feedback as we go. We aim to post every week on a different topic, project or problem we're having. Stay tuned!