Gage County
1115 West Scott St.
Beatrice NE 68310
Phone: (402) 223-1384
FAX: (402) 223-1370

News Column

Paul C Hay, Extension Educator

Horse Pasture for Acreage Owners

Many times acreage owners have horses, ponies, or a few cattle. In Southeast Nebraska it takes four acres of pasture per cow, horse or a couple ponies for grazing season. This would increase to ten acres in areas of Northwest Nebraska. We have a five month grazing season from May 1 - September 30 for cool season grasses or June 1 - October 31 for warm season pastures. If you have more horse than pasture you will end up with weeds and little grass. Horses are hard on pasture for several reasons. There hoof action is hard on grass. Horses nip grass off with their teeth, allowing them to cut it closer to the ground than other grazing animals. Horses then work fences quite hard, both leaning into them and cribbing them (chewing on wood boards). Horses are quite picky eaters and will return again and again to young tender regrowth until they have killed it while practically ignoring other parts of the pasture.

Let's say that the acreage owners has eight acres to use for pasture and two horses to graze. My suggestion would be to fence off a one-half acre lot area to keep for exercise, hay feeding, grain bunk, and water access. This will be a sacrifice area and will likely have little grass production because of constant access. The other seven-plus acres would be cross fenced into at least two and better four areas or paddocks. If there were four then it might be good to seed two to cool season grass and two to warm season grass. We would start spring grazing in one cool season pasture, switch to the other in a couple of weeks, then back and forth until the warm season pastures are ready to go in late June or early July. We would then start a rotation between them every couple of weeks until we could go back to the cool season pasture in September if we get some rain. Using some hay during drier periods of weather could provide relief for the pastures.

Cool season pastures in Eastern Nebraska would be seeded to smooth bromegrass with mixtures of orchardgrass and timothy. In Western Nebraska cool season grasses like western wheatgrass and crested wheatgrass can be used in bottoms. Cool season pastures benefit greatly from applications of nitrogen fertilizer at 40-80 pounds per acre applied in March or early April and many times phosphorus fertilizer applied according to soil test needs. These pastures will also benefit from manure applications from stall areas and the dry lot feeding area.

Warm season grasses for Eastern Nebraska would include big bluestem, indiangrass, sideoats grama, switchgrass, little bluestem, prairie dropseed. These should not be grazed until after June 1 and any fertilizer applied should be less than 40 pounds of nitrogen per acre and done after May 15. In Western Nebraska grasses like blue grama, sideoats grama, hairy grama, and little bluestem would be the best choices. Legumes like red clover, alfalfa, hairy vetch, birdsfoot trefoil, and annual lespedeza's can add to grazing value. They also are somewhat hard to manage as they are badly damaged by many weed control choices and for cattle can pose some risk for bloat. Realistic plans for your pasture can reduce damages and provide feed and exercise for your grazing livestock.

View other Gage County News Columns & News Letters: http://gage.unl.edu/news/news.htm

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