# Rotating one acre pasture??



## Jan1975 (Sep 7, 2015)

I am guessing this varies by your area and how dense the grass is, but in the midwest where I am, I've always heard 1 acre per horse.


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## PaintHorseMares (Apr 19, 2008)

It does very much depend on what type of grass you have. Some grasses suffer more from foot traffic than grazing.
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## Woodhaven (Jan 21, 2014)

Our pasture here is pretty good and I have heard the one acre per horse but I did have a horse here with one acre and he did eat it all up by Aug so I ended up dividing it in half so I could rotate.


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## boots (Jan 16, 2012)

I would divide the acre. I would also put the horse up for most of the day. You are going to have to supplement with hay anyway.


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## Joel Reiter (Feb 9, 2015)

There a lot of different ways to manage pastures, and even if you figure out a system that works for you this year it might not work in a dry year. One acre is pretty marginal, and of traditional pasture animals horses seem to be the most destructive. They tend to hang out where the grass is most lush, and they tend to drop their manure where they hang out. Then they won't eat there any more and will start looking for other places to eat, and they will come back and leave more manure on what was once the best grass in the pasture. If you don't pick up the manure or kick it around or harrow it, the piles will kill the grass and weeds will spring up. After about three years your nice pasture looks like a poster for noxious weed control.

If you can contain their feed and water and shelter in an adjacent area, and make that your sacrifice area, you can regulate access to the grass according to its health. The whole thing gets even more complicated if your horse has any tendency to laminitis, which might require a grazing muzzle and restricted access based on what time of day the sugar content of the grass might be highest.

The three most important things to do are to have a sacrifice are, have some means of regular manure management, and to mow at least once a month to control weeds. After that you can experiment with devising a rotation plan. For maximum grass efficiency, that might be an intensive grazing model that restricts the horse to a very small patch moved daily. Unfortunately, that totally contradicts one of the other benefits of having the horse on pasture because it pretty much eliminates most useful exercise.

My two horses spend the summer on a very unproductive rough hilly treed 10-acre pasture. They can't hurt it and it can't hurt them and I don't have to do anything but keep the fence working. It isn't very picturesque, but it sure is easy.


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