The Meadow Makers' Network Forum

This is how we use ponies to help manage our meadows. We have about 5 acres of meadows and have used 3 Dartmoor ponies a few years ago (we now use Shetland’s as the person we got the Dartmoor ponies from doesn’t have them anymore). We get them in at the beginning of January and have them taken off by late February. Even in really wet weather we haven’t had poaching issues and their hooves leave plenty of bare earth for wildflower seeds to grow. The ponies seem to eat pretty much anything and get the grass down really tight. We do pick up their dung - it’s good for the garden - although if you don’t pick it up I doubt it adds much fertility. I have noticed though that if you leave the dung, they tend to ignore the grass around it so you would get clumps of longer grass.

In case anyone hasn't found it: viewtopic.php?f=74&p=198#p198 = Grazing Animals Project a comprehensive guide to the use and effect of different grazing animals inc pony breeds

We took a mid Sept hay cut, to give all the August flowering species a chance to seed. We had Exmoor ponies from mid November to end February on 5 acres. The 4 ponies ate the Sept/Oct grass regrowth down very hard. By mid Jan, there was very little vegetation showing, and 2 ponies were moved on.

Lessons learned and observations:

1. The ponies ate down rough old cocksfoot tussocks, though they preferred any shorter sweeter grass. In January, they browsed scrub hard, and trod down the dead flower stem litter, and nettles, and molinia litter from the autumn. They did not eat any bramble, nettle stems, or dead grass litter or flower litter.

2. We will have 2 not 4 ponies next year so that the vegetation is not grazed down quite so hard in future and there will be more diversity of sward height - though it will not hurt for this one year as it has given plenty of new bare earth.

3. Fencing has to be really really robust - they will test it and will find the slightest weakness. This was because they wanted to eat the untouched grass on the other side, not because they were bored or escape artists. They are apt to put their head through any gap between 2 top rails/2 high tensile wires and strain forward to reach the greener grass on the other side.

4. Electric pony fencing is useless for these ponies - the ponies just put their heads down, and lift the tape up over their necks, insulated by thick manes, and walk through. They did not chew any rails.

5. Native ponies "do" really well. They "balloon" on the merest hint of good grass. Their owners will be most concerned that the ponies do not remain fat by spring as this is a precursor to laminitis, a really nasty painful foot disease caused by overweight plus spring grass. The owners were delighted to be offered winter, as opposed to summer, grazing. Winter grazing is in short supply.

6. Devon Wildlife Trust (Simon Berry) has been most helpful. Simon advised us to make sure the ponies were removed by March to allow the land to recover. This also suited the owners. Ponies will graze off any yellow rattle seedlings.

7. Make sure any precious scrub/hedgerow plants/trees are very well fenced off. In January, a holly was stripped bare, and they ate the branches (not the leaves), a young Scots pine was demolished despite what we had thought was sufficient protection. All the hedgerow branches within reach were eaten.

8. Similarly to David, we had minimal poaching. 3 of the 4 ponies were unshod, and they have dainty hooves. These were riding ponies on their annual break so they didn't charge around much at all. We were advised by DWT not to worry about poaching and the bare earth, as they would tread in the yellow rattle for us.

8. I did remove the dung from November to mid December, and after that the land was far too wet to take machinery on. In fact the small tractor and trailer made far more mess in the gateways than the ponies did. Removing dung from 4 ponies is hard and heavy work. Birds are scattering the remaining dung now, and we have considered lightly harrowing to spread it. However I sowed yellow rattle last autumn for the first time, and by the time the land will be dry enough to harrow, the rattle seeds which have survived waterlogging over this wet winter, if any, should have germinated, so I do not want to destroy the seedlings, and will do some light raking of the dung instead.

9. Ponies need checking every day. The Exmoors do not need extra feed or field shelters. They were very quiet and self contained, and an absolute joy to have around.

10. The ponies are owned by the Moorland Mousie Trust, at the Exmoor Pony Centre, who may have other ponies available. http://www.moorlandmousietrust.org.uk/

11. Update: I have been advised not to allow the ponies onto the wettest areas in winter, as the poaching encourages the sharp flowered rush to spread. On wet land, aftermath grazing in the autumn is much to be preferred.
(Of course it all depends if you can borrow the grazing animals at that time. We cannot. Therefore we are having a reduced number of ponies between mid Nov and end Jan again because that is the only time we can get them. We'll be cutting the sharp rush next summer more often and possibly spreading some fleabane rhizomes and seeds over that area to try to compensate. Management in future years may be different, but this year we were unable to cut our grass for various reasons, so we need the ponies to pull out the tussocks. As someone once said somewhere, I think it was on the MM facebook page, words to the effect that it is not the end of the world if one year's management goes awry.)

Update Jan 21 - Plantlife's revamped Meadows Hub website has advice on grazing: https://meadows.plantlife.org.uk/3-main ... h-pasture/

Hello folks, we had a pair of Clydesdales over winter last year from Adventure Clydesdale in Dartmoor http://www.adventureclydesdale.com/. They were magnificent lovely creatures although on the wet clay land here in the Blackdown Hills they did cut up the areas of pasture around entrances. For anyone with well drained land and a solid floored animal enclosure they are an unforgettable experience and easy to look after.

Experimenting this year with partial pasture management as opposed to a haycut, on a wet meadow - 2 unshod large horses are eating about 6 acres from May to end July.

I'm hoping that they will spare me many tedious hours of flail cutting and collecting on a small tractor, and I'm hoping that they won't eat all the flowers. Our best floral show is in August and September.

(This course of action might sound contrary to the normal advice, but my meadow is regenerating, it hasn't been stripped bare and sown, so there is a lot of grass and rush, with many perennial flowers in amongst them, and I'm trying to reduce the dominance of the grass and rush without losing the flowers.)

So far at one month in, (I'm dashing out each morning, slightly heart in mouth, to see what they've eaten down or trampled):
- they've grazed the finer grasses very short, and with them the meadow vetchling and yarrow, but I think the early summer surge of growth will balance this out
- they have eaten my lovely subsoil bank of trefoils and vetches down to almost nothing and bare earth. I'm hoping this will recover when the horses leave in August, as the plants normally flower in late July/August. The roots will still be there for next year.
- they have eaten the cow parsley
- they have huge hooves which have cut up the ground and created a lot more bare earth than expected, and they have worn new wide bare tracks. They have trampled quite a few orchid heads, but I suppose the orchid leaves and tubers remain.
- they don't appear to be eating the orchids.
- they are ignoring and grazing around the knapweed, the buttercups, the soft and sharp rush, the canary grass, the fleabane, the meadow sweet, the wood club rush, the water mint, the longer cocksfoot and the longer moor grass tumps, nettles, brambles, and, amazingly, the yellow rattle. ('Amazingly', because I was warned by DWT that ponies will preferentially eat rattle seedlings in March - but I suppose there wouldn't be any sweet summer grass available then.) Any flowers in amongst the meadow sweet are protected by it.

2 months in - the horses are still grazing the sweet areas very hard, and a small area is quite bare. The areas which have coarser grass are noticeably shorter than in previous years, when a spaniel could run through and be hidden from sight. I think the coarse grass has not recovered from being eaten down hard in late winter up until mid March by Exmoors, followed by a cold dry spring when it did not grow, and now it has been nibbled by horses from May to July. It will still need topping as my aim is to suppress it in this area. (Other areas left for taller grasses.)

2 months in - I am noticing that the horses are taking the occasional bite of flowering stems from 2 - 3 year old knapweed plants, and the flower stems on occasional mature plants of knapweed and betony are broken by trampling. There is much more light and space for the betony. The yarrow must have been grazed tight, as there is no sign of any flower heads, and normally there are large spreads of white flowers to be seen. I am confident that the yarrow will flower later on after the departure of the horses, albeit at a diminished height, but I don't think the broken knapweed will produce new flowering stems this year, though it is bulking up the leaves, so these particular plants should be better off next year as they haven't spent so much energy producing flowers and seed. There are plenty of young, more flexible, knapweed plants which appear untouched. There is a good diversity of sward height.

2 1/2 months in - now the horses have left, the yarrow and trefoils are beginning to recover. The yarrow is just starting to flower, with very short stems, a mere fraction of the height of yarrow I have in other areas, so it looks as if the horses have preferentially grazed the yarrow.

My primary aim has been achieved; there will be far fewer hours cutting and clearing. Thank goodness. The grazing has been far harder than I anticipated, but this will suit this particular land for this particular year as the grass needs to be suppressed.

There is work to be done re the latrine areas which overlap with winter latrine areas from ponies and are showing an obvious deep green, and lie mostly in the rough cocksfoot areas less favoured for grazing. I will clear some of the dung before the grass grows into it, and I'll sacrifice some flowers (knapweed, meadow sweet, betony, vetchling and trefoil which were not eaten) and cut these areas now and again in late autumn. The betony and trefoil will continue to flower after the first cut, the knapweed and meadow sweet won't, but the roots will remain for the next year and the knapweed leaves will bulk up. The marsh woundwort, devil's bit scabious and sneezewort are only just starting to bud up, so will be unaffected by the past grazing other than now having more space and light.

An extra unforeseen bonus is that the flowers are much easier to see this year. The horses have cropped the grass in between, so the large swathes of betony, for example, show up far better.

In future years, the ideal would be to have one horse for longer instead of two, but of course, one has to find a horse owner who might be suited by this.

PS September. The horses grazed from mid May to mid July. The drought happened from mid July to the beginning of Sept. The yarrow never recovered to flower and I don't remember seeing many clover flowers. I think this was due to a combination of the grazing and the drought. Other, non-grazed, areas of yarrow flowered early and then stopped flowering. I have a few unusually late (extra) very short stemmed flowers of knapweed where the stems were trampled by the horses, and the bees are loving them. I can see lots of meadow vetchling leaves have recovered with the rain, but I don't think those plants flowered, as I can see plants in the non-grazed areas are still holding ripe seed pods. I did find one ripe orchid seed head and wedged it onto the top of a fence, hoping that it will catch the wind there.

Mid Sept - just starting to mow the areas of coarser grass which the horses did not favour, though they did nibble them. In these areas many of the meadow sweet seed heads have been eaten by deer or something else, and I'm clearing the rest as I don't need any more meadow sweet, it is rampant everywhere. The orchid seedheads have vanished, and other early flowers are over. I'm leaving the areas still holding standing seed heads of knapweed and betony, and flowering devils bit scabious, sneezewort, and fleabane. Despite unusually early visits in August from flocks of gold finches, who, in normal years, visit in October, the knapweed seedheads still hold many seeds. Will mow the remainder in mid Oct if the seed heads are empty by then.