What constitutes 'overgrazing' - following on from Poo Picking thread!

[canteron]

Have been reading the poo picking thread with interest as I have a loan horse coming back unexpectedly, which means I will now have 3 big horses and 2 small ones on 5.5 acres.

They are all out 24/7. I can manage to poo pick for 2 big horses and 2 small ones, but having an extra one to ride and poo pick for is going to physically be too much.

So I have decided to poo pick 3 acres - but not the 2 acres that I won't use over the summer months, so that can be harrowed and rested.

But what constitues Overgrazing in your opinion and how much land should you ideally allow per horse?

 

[Honey08]

This type of question comes up a lot on here.

It depends a lot on the type of grass and soil. Some fields will not stand much at all, some do really well.

 

[Tickles]

I'm not a grazing expert so won't comment on that... but could you get a sharer to poo-pick for rides in help you out?

 

[Pearlsasinger]

This type of question comes up a lot on here.

It depends a lot on the type of grass and soil. Some fields will not stand much at all, some do really well.

^^^^^
This.

The rule of thumb always used to be ' 2 acres for the first horse and 1 acre for each horse, thereafter'.
IME good land management is the key. If you don't allow your fields to get bald/poached, they will be fine.
Supplementary feeding usually means that you can accommodate more horses/ponies, especially if you bring them in at night. We find that the land stays in better order if we don't put forage out but let them pick at the grass during the day, it keeps them moving, rather than encouraging them to stand at hay piles, poaching the land and thus encouraging weeds.

 

[Cocorules]

I rotate my fields and for me very broadly overgrazing would be when the grass in a rested field, had not recovered properly by the time it had to come back into use or the horses were having to stay in a field that did not have enough grazing (and decent grass length) because the rested field still had not recovered. The result of overgrazing is more bare patches, more weeds and less diversity in the kind of grasses you want.

How much ground you need for your horses depends on the type of ground, how well drained it is and how well it is looked after.

Even though my own land is not by my definition overgrazed I would need a lot more land before I stopped poo picking. I think that if you have more land a smaller percentage of it would be used as a latrine so a greater percentage would be left for actually grazing on.

That said I am not sure I would stop poo picking even with more land - with the climate being so much warmer now I am concerned about the greater risk of disease, especially after the atypical equine myopathy cases recently. We still have flies alive now in our field, though I am in a particularly fly ridden area of the south of England!