Despite a particularly wet October, November has been fairly mild and mercifully dry! However, it’s only a matter of time before the proper winter weather hits us, and for many of us, we’ll be faced with the challenge of transitioning our horses into new fields. I’m incredibly lucky to have access to 9 acres of grazing, which is portioned up into 3 paddocks, so we can rotate quite well through the seasons. This means my yard owner can typically make a decent crop of hay in the summer, and we rarely run out of grass year-round. In fact, in summer we have too much grass, which is why I set up my grass track system.
I’ve been slowly strip grazing the centre of my track since about September. This has allowed me to control their grass (and calorie) intake really well throughout Autumn, but I have now systematically used up all the grass in the back field. While new grass has been growing (and growing quite strongly), it’s quite short grass, and they are having to graze a bit harder to get the forage they require. Not only that, but it’s getting pretty muddy, and the field really needs a rest now.
The front field has been rested since they came off it in April, so it’s abundant and particularly mature, fiber-rich long grass. It would be easy to simply ‘chuck them out there’ onto the new field—they’d be very happy gorging through the excessive grass—until the evening when they would undoubtedly all show signs of colic from bloating on it all!
Horses' digestive systems are not all that adaptable, so transitions are really important. In an ideal world, forage and feed should be adjusted over a 21-day period. I know, how impractical! In most yard settings it's simply not feasible to make this transition over such a long period of time, but even if you can spread it out over a week - that will help!
A gradual transition to a new grazing area allows their digestive system to adjust to the change in diet. Here are my top tips for introducing a new field:
