Save Money. Support the Environment. Grow Your Horse’s Nutrition

Feb 2
3 min read

Updated: Feb 10

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 the best intentions, we can make pastures less nutritious, less resilient, and less biodiverse.

Let’s explore why that happens, and what you can do about it.

How We Accidentally Undermine Pastures

Fertilisers and Herbicides

These products don’t just “boost growth.” They:

Disrupt soil microbiomes
Alter soil pH
Lock up nutrients in inaccessible forms
Reduce plant diversity
Introduce microplastics (from coated slow-release fertilisers)

The result: a green-looking field that’s low in vitamins and minerals but high in sugar, with shallow roots and poor resilience.

Overgrazing

Overgrazing is one of the biggest hidden costs in horse keeping. It:

Stresses plants and reduces root depth
Increases sugar in grasses
Removes whole plant species
Compacts soil, reducing oxygen in soil and water drainage
Increases mud, poaching, and water runoff

When soil can’t absorb water, you get winter flooding and summer drought stress - a loss for horses and the environment.

Being “Too Tidy”

Horse owners love neat paddocks, but “tidy” often comes at the cost of resilience. Flattening land, removing shrubs, topping too often, or clearing organic matter removes microhabitats essential for:

Food and shelter for wildlife
Water regulation
Nutrient recycling
Overall pasture resilience

Untidiness isn’t chaos or a lack of managment. It’s life-support for your land.

Removing Organic Matter

Every leaf, topped grass, dead wood, or pile of manure removed from a paddock is a nutrient export. Those nutrients should cycle back into:

The soil
The plants
Your horse

Healthy paddocks work as self-sustaining systems. Keeping nutrients circulating reduces reliance on bagged feed and supplements.

Top Tip: Add composted manure, wood chip or shavings, leaves and mulched hay back into your pasture instead of using chemical fertilisers

Healthy Soil = Healthier Horses + Lower Feed Bills

Learn about how to support your pasture soil with our course.

Start with soil. When soil is biologically active, diverse, and allowed to recover from

overgrazing, your pasture becomes:

Richer in nutrients
More diverse
More resilient

This reduces the need for:

Hay
Bagged feed
Balancers and supplements

Domestic horses don’t need more feed, they need better land.

Wild horses naturally:

Traveled and foraged widely
Reproduced regularly
Ate shrubs, herbs, and tree bark
Selected plants for their medicinal compounds

Even with far more energy expenditure than most domestic horses today, they didn’t need “hard feed.” Today, 31–70% of horses are overweight, often due to overfeeding and under-foraging.

By restoring soil health and increasing pasture diversity with:

Wildflowers
Low-sugar grasses
Hedgerow species
Trees and shrubs
Microhabitats for biodiversity

…most horses can meet the bulk of their nutritional needs naturally.

How to Save Money AND Improve Horse Welfare

When your land is functioning naturally, it does the work for you.

If you want guidance on restoring grazing, improving resilience, or selecting horse-safe wildflowers and herbs, our courses and seed mixes are designed specifically for equestrian land.