Cat Creek Rd Properties Sheridan (lease, buy, tax)

[wyoman]

Originally Posted by sheridanbound

Thanks Sunsprit. that explanation tells me exactly what I wanted to know.

We cross fence and rotate on our small property now and would expect to do that on what ever property we end up on.

Forgot to mention-you will have to pull penis out-remove ticks-doctor with unpleasant anti's and hope horse you are trying to help don't kick livin hell out of ya-suggest strong tie down post-preferably next to tack shed-mares are worse-gonna have to throw and tie.

[FiveHorses]

Originally Posted by sunsprit

If you're coming from an area with a lot of natural moisture, good topsoil depths, and naturally growing dense grasses to support your horses ... you can simply forget everything you "know" about keeping horses here. It's a whole different game ....

Very informative post - thank you.

Given what you've written, what would you suggest as the minimum acreage per horse be given in this area of WY assuming the following:
horses confined in run/stable/corral approx 14-16 hours (i.e. overnight), supplementary feeding with hay &/or alfalfa (&/or hard feed if necessary). Pasture to be cross-fenced and rotational grazing practiced.

I appreciate that there are going to be local variations dependent on all sort of other issues, but I'm just really looking for a ballpark figure.

The goal of all this being to maintain the pastures in the best health they can be in given local conditions while giving the horses what they require insofar as their mental and physical health is concerned.

[sunsprit]

Originally Posted by FiveHorses

Very informative post - thank you.

Given what you've written, what would you suggest as the minimum acreage per horse be given in this area of WY assuming the following:
horses confined in run/stable/corral approx 14-16 hours (i.e. overnight), supplementary feeding with hay &/or alfalfa (&/or hard feed if necessary). Pasture to be cross-fenced and rotational grazing practiced.

I appreciate that there are going to be local variations dependent on all sort of other issues, but I'm just really looking for a ballpark figure.

The goal of all this being to maintain the pastures in the best health they can be in given local conditions while giving the horses what they require insofar as their mental and physical health is concerned.

The situation here is different from your premise. The feeding that you'll be doing is the primary diet for your horses.

The little bit of grass from dryland pasture that you'll get through the year, depending upon moisture and season, is the "supplemental feeding". I wouldn't try to keep a horse year-around on anything less than 100 acres per horse; even that may be inadequate during the winter months without tossing some bales out to the horses.

I figure on feeding 1/2 to 1 bale (avg 30 bales/ton) per horse per day of 12% protein 120 RFV alfalfa and/or timothy ("mountain hay") to maintain an average horse in good condition. We grain only those horses needing special supplements or extra nutrition in their diets, or if they're going to be heavily worked. The average horse doesn't get worked hard enough to require the grain, but many owners add that because of their concerns about full nutrition for their horses.

You can easily keep an average horse stabled in a 12' x 12' area if turned out during the day. We did in our commercial boarding facility for up to 60 horses; the turn out was 5 acres of various fenced areas ... corrals, arena, or runs. The horses were only fed in their stalls, morning and evening, and had ready access to water when outside.

I'd also mention that many hay producers don't know what they're selling because they don't get their hay tested. Which means unless you test, you don't know what you're feeding. I've seen a lot of hay that looked beautiful in the bale that didn't test more than 3-5% protein and RFV's in the 70-80 range... which will not maintain a horses' weight, let alone enough nutrition for activity. A lot of folks around here will simply tell you that nobody else complained about their hay, and it "looked good". By the same token, you might get a load of almost dairy quality hay ... with 18% (or more!) protein and an RFV up in the 180 range ... that's pretty "hot stuff" for an average horse, and you'll want to cut it with lesser quality hay.

[FiveHorses]

Originally Posted by sunsprit

The situation here is different from your premise. The feeding that you'll be doing is the primary diet for your horses.

The little bit of grass from dryland pasture that you'll get through the year, depending upon moisture and season, is the "supplemental feeding".

Mea culpa - I worded my question badly as what I meant was the opposite of what I said - i.e. the feeding would be the overwhelming majority of the nutritional and caloric intake, the grazing would be "dessert". Incorrect use of the word "supplimental", apologies.

My pig-headedness with regards to horses being out and grazing stems not from a desire for them to cut the feed bills, but because it is, to me, paramount for mental health.

So if one had, for example say, 35 or 40 acres divided into five acre pastures - would that be adequate acreage to allow daily turn-out for turn-out's sake for five horses without ruining the pasture itself? (Think that's clearer now! )

[sunsprit]

I think 5 acre pastures would be plenty of room for the daily turn-outs from a horse "mental health" standpoint.

The only way you'll know for sure if the pastures can survive that level of grazing will be to try the rotation schedule. With the variability of moisture, soil quality, cool/warm season grasses, and seasonal temperatures ... it's very difficult to predict for any site. But at least you're on the right track with the rotation schedule to minimize the pressure for any given 5 acre area, although my bet is that there will be times of the year when you'll have to keep the horses "in" because the grasses will be stressed with any grazing on them.

Just for perspective ... and we're in SE Wyoming, which has less moisture than your area ... we have a neighbor on 40 acres who had three mustang rescue horses. These horses are never ridden and are allowed to graze about 35 acres, divided up into two pastures, with no supplemental feeding given except during winter blizzard conditions. They were pretty much starved as of three years ago, and we called the county animal control dept to check on them ... the county ordered the owner to start feeding the horses or be cited for animal cruelty. He's been supplemental feeding them, and they're now down to two horses this winter. At a time now when the pastures should be "greening up" a little with cool season grasses, they're barren. It's taken the horses just 5 years to wipe out an otherwise good producing area of dryland pasture, as the owner is again not feeding the horses and they're losing weight. They'd have done better to have been corralled away from the pasture for the winter and fed, rather than trampling down the wet ground and killing off potential surviving growth of the cool grasses. These horses were the source of a lot of ill relations with the neighbor, who kept her horses and livestock well-fed ... the mustangs would crash the fences to come over and eat her hay, sometimes 2-3 times per week. Now that she's gone, there's no hay for those mustangs to break fences to reach.

I expect that the site will be nothing but a tumbleweed patch by this summer. We'll see.

Another neighbor has 8 horses on 60 acres, cross-fenced into several parcels. They bring the horses in for feeding, but otherwise let them roam during the day. The ground was in CRP for a long time, and was in pretty good shape when they took it over 3 years ago. It's a little too soon to tell how it will fare this year, but I don't see the horses grazing it very much during the year. The horses are western competition type horses (on the pro rodeo circuit), and are well cared for with feed and grain and supplements, so if they're grazing during the day, it's out of boredom.

[FiveHorses]

Thank you kindly sunsprit.

[NVDave]

Something people should realize about horses and grazing: horses can destroy range faster than any other grazing animal out there. This is because unlike cows or sheep, horses have both upper and lower teeth.

Now, most horse-owners will say "Well, duh, thanks for that newsflash there, Sparky" -- but they don't look at what is left of the pasture when cows graze it vs. when horses graze it. Having come from Nevada, where we had over 50% of all mustangs on public lands in the US, we did a LOT of research on the impact of horses on range, and the results are not pretty. Horses kill rangelands.

The general facts:

1. Horses clip closer than cows or sheep.

2. Horses are very motivated by "mouth feel" of what they're eating - much moreso than cattle or sheep. They will seek out the more tender, newer growth, and leave the tougher, older grasses alone. Cows and sheep will eat a much wider variety of forbs on rangelands that horses will simply refuse to even consider.

3. As a result of (2), horses will, absent forced rotation, circle back onto grass that has started to re-grow and re-graze it much sooner than the grass can tolerate, because the re-growth is so tender and tasty.

4. Most people haven't taken the time to understand how perennial cold-season grasses (ie, the type of grazing grasses you will see in the west, and in Wyoming) work. In particular, people don't understand the importance of stubble height of grazing grasses.

Unlike alfalfa, grasses do not "store energy" in their roots. The carbohydrates and sugars that grasses store are in the bottom 3" of stubble (and in Timothy grass, the "korm."). So when a perennial forage grass is grazed closer than 3" to the ground, the grass goes into something of a panic, trying to get sugars and carbs produced to flood into the new growth until it gets high enough to have some storage area, and then new growth area.

This over-stressed grass that was clipped closer than 2 to 3" comes back quickly, but it is very sweet and tender -- much like taking brussel sprouts away from a kid and replacing his plate with a bowl of ice cream. Of course the horses are going to be on that stressed re-growth in a flash.

Well, the second and third time they graze this down to almost nothing (I've seen horses easily clip grass down to only 0.5" of stubble) in the same season, the grass simply gives up. It has now expended all the energy it had trying to regrow that bottom 3" and now it is done. This is why I like to point out to horse owners that, given only one horse, and poor management, I can over-graze a square mile of pasture. Not all of it will be over-grazed this year - but I'm drop-dead certain that I can kill about 10 acres of dryland pasture this year. It won't come back next spring. Next spring, the horse will start killing the next 10 acres - and so on.

The secret to rotational grazing, whether by cattle, sheep or horses, is to get them out of the pasture when they are getting down to the bottom 3" of grass. Get them out of there and give the pasture about 28 to 35 days of rest if you have sufficient water for re-growth. If you don't have sufficient water for re-growth, that pasture might well be done for the entire season.

The same applies for mechanical harvesting too. I've seen it happen time and time again when a hay producer cuts the grass too closely (this is especially possible with the new rotary mowers) and then they complain that it takes much longer for the second cutting of hay to get started. That's because the energy storage stubble for the perennial grazing/hay grass is gone. For grasses like timothy, orchardgrass and bromes, it was not at all unusual to watch a producer over-cut a grass on the first cut, and then watch them pour water and fertilizer onto the stand for an extra 15 days to get the second cutting up.

The worst time to over-graze an irrigated pasture is going into the autumn. If the grass goes into the winter with less than 3" of stubble, odds start to increase that the grass will suffer significant winterkill. With only 1" of stubble, in high desert environments, about 50% of perennial grazing grass probably won't come back from a hard, dry winter.

The other thing that horse owners on small pastures should do is fertilize their pastures. And I don't mean just nitrogen. Too many people don't realize that you must have sufficient phosphorous in your soil in order to get a cold season forage grass to fully express root development. Without enough P in the soil, the root system of the grass is stunted, and then it takes more water and is less drought tolerant than it could be with enough P. Spreading manure won't cut it - you'll need to get some 11-52-0 or phosphoric acid onto the pasture.

The vast majority of your cold season forage grass production potential is decided by the nutrients available in the soil by September of the previous year. This is because the root expression in place for this year's growth started growing last September on a cold season grass. So unless you had sufficient P in the soil to allow the grass to build up a large root system last September, about 90% of your yield potential this year is restricted according to the level of retardation in your root development.

To get a grass to fully express root development, a pasture or hay field should have P applied by late July and watered in. Since P does not "escape" like nitrogen, a big load of P for several years' growth of the grass could be laid down in one application. Soil and tissue sampling will help a person determine just how much P is needed in your soil and by your grass.

As indicated, attempts to re-seed these pastures are difficult. If I were doing it, I would drill seed for the following season into the soil in October - when it is getting too cold for the grass to germinate in the autumn, but before we get into a hard freeze-up of the soil. You need to have that seed in the soil as the snows melt and the precip of March/April arrives. We used to do this in Nevada on open range with good results in most years, and if it will work there, there's a bit more moisture here and it should work as well. But it won't work every year, and it won't work with all grasses and you can't even dream about grazing those pastures the first year after a seeding.

[FiveHorses]

Originally Posted by NVDave

you can't even dream about grazing those pastures the first year after a seeding.

Wouldn't dream of it.

NVDave - thank you kindly for your post, very informative.

It raises a couple of questions:

a) Let us say a horse owner from out of the area moves to some acreage. Where would be the best place for this person to go to get advice/help on pasture management techniques appropriate to the climate? The extension office? Is there any other alternative - either for a fee or free? I tried to use the extension office when we moved out to where we currently reside as everything here is totally different to what we knew. A very pleasant young man he was... but very overworked given the size of the area he's responsible for and although helpful to a degree wouldn't contradict or say, "No, that's wrong." I think I was more frustrated at the end than at the beginning because I was truly hoping for someone to say "you need to do x, y, & z".

b) Again, given the soil/grass/precipitation issues, is mixed grazing practiced at all? Obviously you need to have enough acreage, but if you do, and it's cross-fenced, is this something that's done &/or advisable?

[sunsprit]

RE: "local advice"

extension office is your first stop ... and some counties have knowledgeable people, and some don't. The focus in some counties is more on 4-H and home economics than agriculture or ranching, or county horticulturist areas.

Also, a lot of folks out this way would never say "no, that's wrong" ... it's too harsh of a statement, even if it's correct. More typically, you'd hear something to the effect of "most folks might do it this way" ....

You have to listen very closely to what information may be of benefit to you and decipher it from the rest of the stuff from this type of communicator. I'd have to say that I've not heard some of what information I was given very well, and paid dearly for the learning curve out here.

Your next best source of local information will be to stop by one of the horse breeding/training operations in your area. If you can befriend one of these people, you may be getting the best possible information about what it takes to keep horses there.

Good luck with your operations.

[NVDave]

One of the things that precludes anyone with experience in ag from saying "Just do X,Y and Z!" is that there are very, very few things that are truly universal in ag. Local conditions vary, often widely. What I know about producing hay in central Nevada is certainly helpful here in Wyoming, but there's plenty to learn about local conditions, soil types, water conditions, weather patterns and so on. What I've told you about horses and grass growth patterns are some "big picture" items that are appliable most everywhere. But how much grass can you grow in a season? I don't know. That completely depends on what you get for precip. What types of grasses can you most successfully grow in your location? I don't know. I do know that they'll be cold season forage-type grasses, but that's like saying "You might have more success growing evergreen trees in Wyoming over fruit-bearing trees." It is a huge category of plants, in other words.

So what you'll hear a lot of ag people say is: "Well, this works here." What they're telling you with that is "It might not work for you there."

As Yogi Bera once said: "You can observe an awful lot by just watchin'." That's how I learned a lot of things about grazing animals and hay production. One of the ways I learned a lot about horses and how & what they eat is by watching mustangs on the range when I'd be out hunting in the autumn in Nevada. I'd just plunk my buttocks down on a rock, crack open a beer, prop the gun up against another rock and watch mustangs through my glasses. When you watch horses, cattle and wildlife foraging around on the same patch of range, and you do it day after day after day during a week-long hunting trip... you start to see some patterns. When you're talking of horses grazing in a pasture, you could learn a whole lot by just sitting there and watching them for a couple of days. It sounds positively silly in this day of computerization, remote sensing and so on -- but that's how one has to start in these things. The BLM and USFS do this all the time in evaluating range conditions - they just use a fancy term for it - "ocular evaluation" so as to sound like they're oh-so-very-much smarter than you or I, when the truth is much closer to "I went out and looked at it with my own eyes, and it looked Good/Fair/Bad/Hammered-to-crap."

When we'd be haying, I'd cut 30 acres (about one-quarter) of a pivot like "X," another 30 acres like "Y," and so on. Then I'd keep notes - year after year. After about three years, you can start to get patterns and results. Having been an engineer, I was something of a nutjob for measuring things - how many bales did I get off this quarter vs. last year? What height did I cut at this time? How did the hay test this time vs. last time? What did I change? How much fertilizer did I lay down to get this sort of test? How many growing degree days did I have since the last cutting? How much water?

You can get carried away with these things. My neighbors thought I was spending more time measuring than farming at times - and in some cases, they were probably right. But I had answers to questions they had - such as "how much Phos-zap vermin bait does is take to kill a meadow vole?" (answer: about a half teaspoon, and they're dead in 15 minutes. Measured by personal observation by sitting very still on a upturned lube bucket in a field after the second cutting in July.) After a couple of years, they were asking me all manner of questions - and I'd be asking them back. Turns out that some of the old boys were keeping daily diaries that they didn't tell most people about - and while they might not have been measuring quite so closely, they were keeping copious records and impressions of evaluations. There's a lot of these guys all over the west - but many of them don't like telling people about these records, because there's an element of braggarts in farming/ranching who ridicule such people. So the diarists and note-takers clam up and don't share any more.

The issue for you is that you have animals that you MUST feed. You can't just toss them in and say "Well, I know I have enough feed, so I have the luxury of doing all manner of experiments." No, you're probably going to be short of feed from the get-go, and so you have to be on top of your game from the get-go. You're so very far ahead of most other people in your position because you're asking questions before you've gotten into a wreck. Just FYI - most people would tell you you're doing this backwards. ;-) Asking before you get into a wreck is a huge feather in your cap, for which I applaud you.

But none of us can give you a magic formula or a set of instructions for building a magic wand that will guarantee success in a situation like this.

For learning about grasses, there's some good information out there on extention web sites, and not all of it will be from Wyoming. Some states have better programs producing the information you need than others. Wyoming is one of the last states with a range science program left - rather than just take what the extention has available, you might send a note to the head of the range science progam at UWyo and ask for some pointers. Or surf on over to the Utah State University web site - they are VERY strong in these areas. Washington State University has some good information, owing to their association with their high-end hay producers in the Yakima area. Montana will have some information as well.

In general, when we were farming, the way we dug out nuggets of information was to read a LOT of stuff from a lot of different sources, and then we thought hard about "OK, what of this information will be applicable in our situation?" And for some of it, we had to conduct our own research on our farm - which takes years. Some information you can get by watching your neighbors and comparing what is working for one neighbor and not for another.