Rotational Grazing can be a scary concept for horse owners. Most people have an image of horses on the wide-open pastures and see rotational grazing paddocks as confinement. Even though the horses are in smaller pens in a rotational grazing model, they still have plenty of room to run around and enjoy themselves.
Horses require 2-4 acres per horse for grazing. Pasture space is often the limiting factor for farms that have grazing animals. There are 559,000 acres of land used for horse-related purposes which include riding fields/courses, arenas, trails, and pastures in North Carolina, and more than 306,000 horses. This means there are 1.8 acres per horse in NC and not all of those acres are used as pasture. We can estimate that only 75% of the 559,000 acres are used to house horses. That leaves 419,000 acres for 306,000 horses or 1.3 acres per horse. In Short horses in NC on average have 2- 4 times less land than they need for grazing. Most horse farms use continuous grazing, meaning that horses are allowed to graze the pastures all day or feed hay on dry lots. This leaves no time for the pasture to rest and regrow which leads to poor pasture quality and soil health. The benefits of rotational grazing include better soil health, pasture quality, decreased hay needs throughout the year, and lower parasite numbers.
How can horse and pasture owners combat this? Grazing Carousels. This involves sub-dividing your pastures either with a permanent fence or temporarily using polywire and step-in posts. Using a temporary setup allows flexibility to increase paddock sizes depending on forage levels and the number of horses grazing at a given time.
It is ideal to not let horses graze the pasture until the forages have reached an appropriate grazing height, between 5 and 8 inches tall for cool-season grasses such as fescue and 3 to 5 inches for warm-season grasses such as Bermuda. The goal is to keep the grass in the grazing “sweet spot.” it is important to monitor the forage height and to move the horses off of a paddock before it is grazed below 3 inches. In addition to preventing pasture-associated laminitis, it allows maximum regrowth by reducing stress on the plant, which slows growth. This also prevents the plant from going to seed when it reaches its mature height which stops the growth.
Paddock sizes should be created based on the number of horses The weather, soil fertility, and pasture conditions determine how long a paddock can be grazed. Horses shouldn’t be in one paddock for more than 7 days, and should ideally be moved every 1-2 days. This may sound like a lot of extra work, however, taking down and putting up temporary fences can be quick. Depending on the size of the paddock, the step-in post and polywire can be put up in as little as 5-15 minutes. This is often less time than it takes to feed hay!
In addition to the soil and forage benefits, rotational grazing can aid in parasite prevention. Overgrazing can lead to increased intestinal parasite load because when grazing low stubbly grass horses are more likely to ingest them. Grazing on taller grasses can help prevent this, which makes rotational grazing a great additional management strategy for high shedding horses.
Rotational grazing can help improve soil health. Better soil leads to more grass and more grass leads to less hay. Using less hay will decrease the amount of input required for horse ownership. For more information about rotational grazing for horses and pasture plans take a look at this link from Penn State Extension: https://extension.psu.edu/how-to-make-rotational-grazing-work-on-your-horse-farm
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