Summer-do you poo pick or harrow?

we poo pick the small paddocks and harrow the bigger ones. During the winter we poo pick unless it is dry enough to harrow.
 
how often do you harrow?

I have to do this and absolutely struggle with keeping up with poo picking for 6 horses.

My dairy farmer cousin recomended it as he said it was what he did with his cows, and better for soil.

I do ensure they are wormed regularly.
 
We poo pick daily, this keeps on top of the problem & paddocks are nice & clean. Our worm counts always come back clear so we don't pump wormers into the horses.

I believe that harrowing in this country rarely sorts out the poo/worm issue. If we had an entire summer like Sunday, 30 deg and more then harrowing & letting the sun kill off any eggs/worms in the scattered poo would be great but we don't & therefore harrowing is not a very good answer.
 
I agree that harrowing is probably a waste of time apart from making the field visually better. Unless you are doing it more than once a week in hot, dry weather, then all you are doing is spreading the eggs/larvae around, making it even more likely that your horses will ingest them. Might be better if you can move the horses off the land for long periods of time, in which case you will need lots of 'clean' fields available for adequate rotation. Most people/livery yards aren't that well off for grazing land so regular poo-picking is the most efficient method. IMO always best to try and keep on top of it daily as there is nothing worse than trying to blitz a weeks worth of poo!
 
Poo pick almost every day - I hate to see fields covered in poo - but then I think it depends on how big your fields are as well.....
 
pastie2 said:
I dont think that I have ever poo picked a field in my life. Spend enough time mucking out a stable. Horse is out with dairy cows and sheep, wormed, healthy and happy. Life is far too short to poo pick! summer is meant to be an easier time.
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I Dont know of any farmers that poo pick,ones that have horses,chain harrow maybe.
 
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poo pick twice a day in the summer and once in the winter. Easy for me though as only one horse per paddock which are about 2 acres each.
 
We harrow a few times a week. One field needs doing all the time as our two fat cobs poo for england! haha. Harrowing saves the yard alot of time and all our horses are wormed and healthy :)
 
horserugsnot4u said:
Might be better if you can move the horses off the land for long periods of time, in which case you will need lots of 'clean' fields available for adequate rotation. Most people/livery yards aren't that well off for grazing land so regular poo-picking is the most efficient method.
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That's where I'm lucky, our fields are never horse sick as we have plenty and not many horses.

We currently have three shut up for hay and one resting, one with sheep on and one with cattle, the rest have one to three horses in them.
 
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i recently moved mine to my OH's non-horsey parents paddocks.... they stood staring at me, transfixed, utterly amazed, as i poopicked (more than 7 months preggers, i might add....)

they keep telling me to leave it where it is, it's only poo... at which point i show them the photo on my mobile of a couple of bots i'd found in my new pony (who i'd just wormed)'s poo, and explain my reasons for poopicking. they still think i'm crazy!

if i could harrow i would in the hot weather and switch them onto a clean paddock, but i lack the equipment. so for now i will just keep poopicking daily.
 
We poo pick religiously, once a day always, sometimes twice a day. It's quite easy for us though as the horses are on Paddock Paradise tracks.
 
jeeve said:
how often do you harrow?

I have to do this and absolutely struggle with keeping up with poo picking for 6 horses.

My dairy farmer cousin recomended it as he said it was what he did with his cows, and better for soil.

I do ensure they are wormed regularly.
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On the farm were we are ex dairy, he does this once a week for us, we always did poo pick and then he suggested that he could do this for us.
 
I've always been told that harrowing just spreads the worms, whereas if you leave poos in a poo area horses won't eat them anyway.
Having said that I poo pick the field I can see from the house and harrow the others, which are rested all winter as the horses go on the hay fields for 6 months.
 
In the UK, unless you can leave the field for months on end ungrazed and preferably grazed by sheep or cattle in rotation with the horses to break the worm life cycle, then in our normally temperate conditions harrowing does little for worm reduction. It makes the field look nicer and avoids horse sick patches' but increases the risk of worm ingestion. Our weather rarely (this week down south excluded!) gets hot enough to kill the worms

Worming regularly on a fixed programme is an answer but with the levels of resistance increasing, unless we get away from that approach there will in time be no effective wormers left, it must move to a targetted approach for it to retain its efficacy, with worm counts for normal worms and blood tests for tape worm, just with a wormer for encysted redworm in the early winter.

The only time I dont poo pick is when it is under 4 feet of snow in the winter up here in the Cairngorms! It's a bore but to me, it's part of responsible horse ownership, we dont mind spending time feeding and watering them and this is just another element of their care.
 
I poo-pick twice a day in summer when mine are out 24/7 - it helps with flies as well as worms and grass quality. It's once a week in winter, with the occasional spell missed for snow/extreme mud (caught up as soon as possible).

The only time we harrow is in spring, just before we roll. And even then I rush out to poo-pick before it gets scattered!

We do have a few sheep with free access to all paddocks - that helps.
 
Depends on the size of field and how many horses etc.

I poo pick mine daily, and my boys have individual paddocks, slightly shy of 1 acre each. I now worm count instead of using chemical wormers.

When I lived on the farm I had between 4 and 6 horses on 22 acres (split into 3 fields), and we harrowed, and wormed them every 4 months.
 
Last yard I was at had two largish fields, a summer and winter one. The only poo-picking that happened was when a local guy came to make a muck heap to make fetilizer for his small-holding (once a year!!!) I was there 2 years and was always concerned about the worm situation, especially as the owner didn't seem organised about worming (and she owned the other 5 ponies that mine was put with) her ponies were very naughty to worm, and she only attempted it about twice a year.
When I did move yards, first thing they did was worm count my horse, and I was surprised that he came back as a low count. Not quite as low as the others at the new yard, but much better than I was expecting.
Where we are now we have smaller paddocks, and they are poo-picked every day or two. I haven't wormed (other than for tapeworm) since I arrived, and counts always come back as very low.
 
Poo pick. Harrowing does nothing to aid worm control in the UK as we do not get the right temperature levels to kill off any worm problems.
 
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