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As you are driving out of Twin Bridges on Hwy 41 South towards Dillon, just past the old children's home, there is a triangular piece of property on the right hand side of the road with several head of horses and a pretty white electric fence. This is the property of my partner, Pete Novich, and this is where we keep our six head of horses. Unlike many horses I witness around the state, our horses actively get used 6 - 7 months out of the year (The other 4-5 months they may get used for hunting, the occasional roping and gathering of cattle, but since Pete snowmobiles and because of my tolerance to the cold, I should be in Arizona for the winter, the horses get a break), they are fed, watered, petted and fussed over on a daily basis. Our horses are pretty much our kids. Therefore, taking care of the land they reside on is paramount. This particular 13 acres is primarily riparian, subby, swamp ground with a few gravel bars thrown in. The bad news is that we sometimes have an acre or more of it underwater, but the good news is that we have a better source of water than most people to keep the pastures irrigated.
About five years ago, I attended a course for small pasture management produced by Jennifer Mohler jenmohler@huges.net (406-388-5668) and it has completely changed how we manage our acreage to keep the critters happy and protect the resources. In relation to noxious weeds, we are surrounded by whitetop, leafy spurge, houndstongue, knapweed, tall buttercup and Canada thistle. In addition to that, we have non-noxious weeds, but irritating plants just as well, such as wild licorice and wild iris. When the property was purchased several years back, it had all of the above listed weeds present.
So what have we done to ensure such viable pastures for our horses? Well, first and foremost, we dry lot our horses. Many people believe this is cruel to your horses, but it is a critical and necessary component to managing your pastures. Starting in April, depending on the weather, we keep the horses in the corrals 24 hours a day. Do they get bored? Yes, and I've never seen such destructive creatures as these animals can be. If there is a loose wire, they'll find it; if there is wood to chew, they'll chew it. The plastic water tanks show extensive chew marks and heaven forbid you let the water level get too low and they can get to the heater or drag the waterer 10 feet away from another pen! But they survive. The other key to this component is that we make sure our horses get exercise. They either get turned out briefly to run and play, or we ride them. It isn't fair to your horse to keep them locked in a small enclosure for weeks and months on end without providing them some way to exercise. When the grass is up and ready to graze, we divide our three pastures with electric fence into about 1 acre parcels. In addition to that, we turn the horses out for two hours in the morning, dry lot them all day and turn them out again for two hours in the evening. Is this a pain? Heck yes, but our pastures have time to regenerate and they are not grazed to the dirt. Horses only need four to six hours of grazing time per day on good forage, but horses will eat all day if allowed.
Being the director of a state-wide weed organization, of course I spray my weeds. We are still fighting some of the non-natives (that wild licorice is bad stuff!) but by and large, we have not seen any renewed infestations of the noxious invaders, even though we are still surrounded by them; we are now in a highly managed state. Often people will say to Pete or me how nice our property looks and several local ranchers watch what we do with weed management as a sort of test plot for them to emulate. I wish more horse owners would understand that by overgrazing, you are reducing your property value, esthetically your land looks awful, and you are potentially doing great harm to your horses either through the higher occurrence of sand colic and colic, or by forcing them to eat noxious plants that could poison and yes, even kill them. To me, the satisfaction of not only having a healthy looking pasture, with knee high grass in August, but also having healthy, happy horses is worth the time and the effort it takes. I highly recommend taking a class from Jennifer Mohler if you are a horse owner and you care about your horse's health and how your property looks.
Submitted by Becky Kington
We are always looking for success stories. Would you like to tell us yours? If so please email your story to becky.kington@mtweed.org
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