Supporting healthy pastures isn’t just about pushing sward growth through fertiliser or overseeding. Pastures are living ecosystems . Soil structure, nutrient cycling, plant diversity, and grazing patterns all determine whether a paddock thrives or struggles. Many horse owners assume that maintaining a healthy paddock requires expensive machinery or a huge time investment. While tools can help, the first step is always observation and understanding . Know your land and your s

Every year, we spend a fortune caring for our horses. Some costs (land, forage, feed) are unavoidable. But there’s a way to reduce bills and  improve the very environment your horse relies on. The key lies beneath their feet: the soil. Horses evolved to thrive in biodiverse landscapes, feeding themselves from a mix of grasses, herbs, shrubs, and trees. Domestic horses often don’t live in these natural landscapes, or their pastures have been unintentionally degraded. Even with

What Wild Horses Teach Us About Nutrition and Pasture Health Salt is essential to horses. Sodium supports nerve function, muscle contraction, hydration, and temperature regulation. In domestic settings this often translates to buckets, blocks, and supplements ( Schryver et al., 2025 ;   Clegg & McBride, 1987 ). But wild and feral horses manage to meet their mineral needs without human input. The reason is not resilience or luck. It is access to functioning landscapes. How wil

When it comes to looking after horses and land, one size does not fit all. Are you the owner who frets about their horse every second of the day, or the one who says, “let horses be horses”? How to Sow Wildflowers in Horse Pasture | Hoof & Habitat Do you have a calm, sensible horse that was weaned gently and trusts humans, or the one who manages to injure himself with his own feet and eats first, asks questions later? Does your horse have medical conditions that need managing

Horses evolved to forage. Given the chance, they move, graze, explore, and interact with complex, ever-changing environments. Many modern paddocks are uniform, often dominated by perennial ryegrass, with little variety or stimulation for your horse. Limited How Biodiverse Paddocks Support Soil Health, Forage, Horse Happiness, Health and Wellbeingforage diversity can lead to digestive issues, metabolic problems, stress, and behavioural challenges, not to mention soil degradati

In the UK alone, equestrians are responsible for managing approximately 400,000 hectares of land (Root to Reef, July 2025). How can we manage this land to improve grazing, help pollinators, rare plants and animals, sequester carbon, rebalance our ecosystems and support the climate? We talk a lot about rewilding, but what is it really? Can we rewild horse pastures? And when it comes to it, are we really willing to? Would you turn your show garden into an allotment? Or have gue

We spend a lot of time standing in our fields, wondering how best to care for our horse pastures. When should we rotate grazing? How can we prevent over-grazing or poaching of the land? How can we reduce reliance on high sugar grasses? What should we do about those seemingly endless weeds?  Many guides recommend fertilisers and herbicides to boost grass yield and suppress unwanted plants. But while these might seem effective in the short term, they can actually harm biodivers

We’re told never to let horses near “toxic” plants such as deadly nightshade, ragwort, and foxglove. We feel like bad owners if we don’t pull every last bit of ragwort, and we judge others whose fields are full of it. But we rarely have the other half of the conversation: any plant can become toxic if consumed in excess, and many of us are unintentionally over-exposing our horses to daily, low-level toxicity simply by giving them no alternative forage. “The Dose Makes the Poi

At the end of September, I had the privilege of attending BETA International 2025. I was pleasantly surprised by the networking and collaboration opportunities I discovered. While many attendees were representing feed and supplement brands, several honest and open conversations emerged around the limitations of modern equine nutrition. Nearly everyone I spoke to, including nutritionists and feed advisors, agreed on a few key points: Horses need forage high in fibre, typically

Every spring and autumn, paddocks explode with green growth. For many horse owners, this brings not just joy but fear: Laminitis ....

Have you ever wondered if your horse eats more like a family living on fast food, a family with only lettuce, or a family with a...