I was certified as an Extention Livestock Advisor by Washington State University and our job was to help the County Extension Agents deal with the folks who were living on small acreages in Western Washington. My specialty was Beef Cattle and Pasture Management.
Most of the problems that I saw with horse people were pasture management problems. They assumed that their 4 acres of pasture was an inexahustable source of fresh grass for their horse stocked at anywhere from 1-2 horse per acre continuously. As a result the "pasture" soon became unproductive weed patches that would not sustain one horse and they were mud bogs all winter.
Most of these horses were not worked regularly so they didn"t need to be continuously on pasture. If they were turned out to graze for an hour a day, it would have been better for them and easier on the pasture. Once we convinced them that they need to reduce their stocking rates and limit grazing, if they hadn"t totally destroyed the pasture, they would see almost immediate recovery. Other"s had to reseed the ground. Some didn"t believe what we were telling them and they had unproductive mud bogs.
I now live in Western Montana and though it"s not as bad I still see the same problems. To many critters for too long of time grazing. Animal dispositions not withstanding, you can run cows and horses together. However you need to consider stocking rates and duration of grazing no matter what grazers you run on pasture. You need to try to rotate pastures to give the grass a break(~28 days in spring,~40 days in summer) to regrow or these animals will literally graze it to death. During the late fall and winter, you"ll need supplemental feed because the grass goes dormant and won"t sustain animals. Patures should be harrowed in the spring to breakdown the chips and spread them around. Out here in the West, where livestock are on open range, the stocking rates are low (25 cows per 640 acres)so there isn"t all the pasture work to do, nor is there the severe impact of animals on the pasture.
The point of this discussion is that if you want to raise cattle and horses and have healthy pastures, you need to balance the numbers to maintain the proper stocking rates for each species and you need to maange the grazing duration appropriately. You need to consider rotational grazing or even manaaged intensive grazing(MIG). You need to learn to "read the grass" to evaluate the pasture condition and when appropriate, move the stock to fresh grass. You can"t sustainably pasture a big bunch of critters on a small piece of ground continuously. You"ll just ruin it and you"ll have troblems with your stock"s health and body condition. The vast majority of the stockman here in the West are superb grass managers and it"s almost intuitive to them. They have to be good grass managers or their carrying capacity will be drastically reduced along with their income. The vast majority of people who move out to the country do not have livestock backgrounds and so they need to learn how to manage their pastures. The information is avalable from their County Extension Agents and by searching the web for the land grant colleges that have ag schools.
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