Maintaining Great Pasture

Finally it’s spring and chances are your horses are either standing or rolling around in the mud.  Having wet pastures are an inevitable part of spring, but muddy pastures are not.  If you want to maintain great looking pastures as well as good forage for your horses you’ll need to institute a pasture resting program.  Proper care -- resting and rotating -- of your pastures should be a maintenance priority for your farm.

Creating a Sacrifice Area

This is probably the single most important thing you can do to help maintain your pastures.  When it has been a wet winter or if winter snows are melting and the ground is thawing, your pastures are soggy.  Turning your horses out on these fields will lead to the fields being torn up and turned into a muddy mess.  Once you have created mud and torn up the turf, you have very little chance in getting grass to grow back and you may have invited some serious erosion problems. 

A sacrifice area is an area of pasture that is designated for turn out when the ground is wet.  This paddock area (if it has grass now will not have grass for very long) by design will have a dirt surface or an engineered surface created out of blue stone.  Horses are turned out in the sacrifice area until the ground in the other pastures has dried enough to sustain horse traffic.

The location of your sacrifice area should be convenient to the barn and hidden from view as much as possible or screened with landscaping because it will not be very attractive.

Dividing Pasture

The second most important factor to maintaining great looking pastures is to split your pastures from one large one into three to four smaller ones.  Rotating and resting your fields will go a long way to helping the grass to regenerate.  In good growing conditions, fields can regenerate in two to three weeks time.

Mowing

Most people think there is no need to mow fields because the horses do the mowing.  This is an often misunderstood concept.  Your best defense against weeds is consistent mowing.  Your pastures should be mowed several times throughout the growing season to a height of six to eight inches (six inches being better).  Mowing will reduce the weeds and improve the grass stand.

Herbicides, Seeding & Fertilizing, Liming

Often it will take an aggressive act to eradicate the weeds and spraying a broad leaf herbicide may be your best bet.  Talk with your local farm extension or state university, sometimes they will offer guidance and assistance free of charge.  Soil samples should be taken and analyzed before applying fertilizer, and/or lime.  You will want to get your soils in balance before you do any seeding.