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Equine forages and grassland management

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2018

J Bax  and
G P F Lane
J Bax
Affiliation:
Biotal Ltd, Collivaud House, Cardiff CF24 5PD, UK
G P F Lane
Affiliation:
The Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, Gloucestershire GL7 6JS, UK
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Extract

There are about 900,000 horses kept in the UK for leisure and a further 65,000 kept professionally (British Horse Society, 2003). Altogether about 800,000 ha are utilised for grazing and feeding horses, making the equine industry the second largest in the UK land based sector, after agriculture. The purpose of this paper is to review the present information on the management of grassland for horse grazing and for conserved forage, to identify some current issues and to postulate some areas for future research and development.

Maximizing the contribution made by grazing to the nutrition of the horse is a reasonable goal if economy is the main priority. Even if this is not the case, horses have a need to satisfy their natural instinct to graze. The deterioration of poorly managed grassland associated with equine enterprises is well documented (Odberg and Francis–Smith, 1976, and Judd et al., 2001). Horse grazing differs from grazing by cattle and sheep, in particular in the way that they select species and in the spatial pattern of their grazing.

Type
Research Article
Information
BSAP Occasional Publication , Volume 32: Emerging Equine Science , 2004 , pp. 133 - 141
Copyright
Copyright © British Society of Animal Production 2004

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