Horse Track System (paddock paradise and equicentral)

We practice a horse-keeping style that tries to keep with the horse's natural environment. For us, this means we leave the horses turned out 24/7 with other horses and a constant supply of low-starch forage to eat. Horses originally evolved as more of a desert animal, and wild horses thriving in the Great American Basin eat sparse grass, and graze richer grasses when they are tall and healthy, not when they are stubby and overgrazed and they cover a lot of ground moving from food sources to water sources. This means the plants they consume are lower in starches, which contributes to good gut health, a shining coat, and healthy, functional hooves.

We provide our horses with round bales of low starch and sugar hay (we get our hay tested annually when we purchase it), and have them on a "paddock paradise" system that keeps them on a track around our primary pasture. This encourages them to move around a lot more than keeping them in a traditional pasture does.

Keeping the horses on a track also allows our pasture grass to grow up to a healthy height that we can safely graze the horses without loading their systems with starchy sugars, combining an "equicentral" style system with a paddock paradise. This means when the grass can handle it, we put the horses on small sections of the pasture in the morning when starches are at their lowest after using them up overnight for energy stores, and then we pull the horses off the grass before the sun has allowed the grass to generate and store more sugars. This intensive and rotational grazing system also contributes to soil and grass health as well, since the pastures never end up overgrazed and stressed, or trampled and compacted.

This arrangement keeps our horses healthy and happy and allows us to better utilize our land and space. In the winter when the grass is dormant, the horses remain on the track until the grass is grown up again in the late spring. We feed our round bales in areas where we want to build soil and encourage grass to grow, so we alternate between feeding round bales in our woods and feeding them in areas that have compacted or clay-based soil to kickstart a new layer of healthy soil covering the ground from the hay and manure left behind when the usable parts of the bale have been consumed.

Utilizing our permaculture design training and common permaculture farming practices, we continue to listen and look for feedback to be able to adapt and change our plans as dictated by the needs of our land. We seed the pasture with a variety of seeds over time to further encourage grass growth in seasons we currently don't have a lot of growth. We feed round bales in places where we could use a boost in soil depth, moisture retention, added nutrients, or seed distribution. We look for areas of compaction around the track and move our horses around as needed to reduce damage to the land or vegetation. This means we are able to reap the benefits of their manure and the lef-behind hay where we need it, but also without many of the detriments of keeping large, hooved animals on a confined piece of land.