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!