Managing grass! Beginner - please help!

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Scummycat

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Can anyone out there help me with managing my paddocks? I'm relatively new to having them at home and am struggling with too much grass but there seems to be 2 schools of thought. Some say keep them on v short grass/starvation paddock to lose weight but others say that this means they only eat the most sugary shoots as they just appear and doesn't help weight or behaviour. Should I therefore keep the paddocks longer - approx 3 inches/10cm - so they eat the more fibrous grass but get more volume? Any ideas, what does everyone else do?
 
A lot depends on how much land you have, how many horses you have on it, your soil type and thus drainage and the needs of the horses grazing it.

I personally prefer horses to have to work for their food a little. Yes grass may well be more fibrous the longer it is, however because they are consuming so much more per bite, the sugar intake is thus astronomically higher than shorter sparser grass. I wouldn't however let it get down to virtually bare soil. thats no good for the horses or the grass. Maybe dividing up and rotating freqently is a good move ?

If I had my own land I would either strip graze, alowing them a small amount of fresh grass every few days or look at using a track system to get them moving and grazing more naturally.
 
Thanks CBFan. I'm very fortunate to have too much grass. We keep 1 large field approx 8 acres for hay and have 4 other paddocks of approx 1/1.5 acres each. I have 3 horses turned out in a 2 and a single so alternate the 2 lots of 2 paddocks to keep resting 2 at a time if that makes sense. The ground is quite clay like. 2 of the paddocks are long standing grassland which has been managed largely for sheep grazing before we bought it, and the other 2 are a bit poorer having previously been used as a BMX track for the previous owners children. It sounds as though the way forward is either a strip or a track to restrict eating and mowing it shorter aswell. My OH will be delighted -there goes his weekend!!!
 
A lot depends on your horses.

In a similar situation we have found it works well to have the poor doer (skinny TB type) to graze a field first, then they move onto fresh field and the good doers get the grazed field. Any Laminitics then get it for the third rotation and you have one field being rested ready for the TB.

If you don't have a poor doer to 'mow' the paddock then strip grazing (as CBFan says) is a good way to go, or you could replace the poor doer with a few sheep.
 
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