Trailblazing Horse Care

15/06/2026

Just walking my kid, pony, dog and chook over here 😄

15/06/2026

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Why can’t so many horses eat grass anymore?

This comes up a lot.

I had a great comment on my last post saying, “Thirty years ago, horses were out on grass all the time and they were fine.”

And I do think it’s a fair question. But I don’t think the answer is one simple thing. Part of it is that the grass has changed.

A lot of horse paddocks now are small, overgrazed, fertilised, sprayed, compacted, and resown or populated by survival of the fittest, with grasses that can survive heavy grazing. That does not mean they are ideal for horses.

Improved pasture, ryegrass, clover, fertilised paddocks and stressed grass can be very different to rougher, mixed, lower-input pasture.

A horse grazing a varied paddock with native grasses, herbs, weeds, shrubs, roughage and room to move is not living the same life as a horse standing in a small green square of high-production stressed grass.

We also have less biodiversity.

When paddocks become monocultures, we lose the variety that supports the whole system. The soil changes. The insects change. The gut input changes. The plants available to the horse become narrower and often richer.

Gut health, soil health and biodiversity are connected. If we simplify the environment too much, we should not be shocked when the animals living in that environment start showing health problems.

Then there is management.

Many horses now live on smaller properties with less movement, alone, more confinement, richer grass, more hard feed, more rugging, more stress, and more weight gain. A lot of equines who are easy keepers are being managed in environments that are simply too rich and “comfortable” for them.

And then there is the other part: we are also better at recognising the signs now.

Years ago, a lot of horses were probably called “a bit footy,” “arthritic,” “lazy,” “old,” “pottery,” “sore after a trim,” or “not great on hard ground.”

Now we are more likely to recognise those signs as possible low-grade or subclinical laminitis, insulin dysregulation, PPID, or metabolic stress.

So I think the answer is, the grass, the paddocks, and the way we keep horses changed. The amount of movement and the soil and plant diversity changed. And our understanding of early metabolic and laminitic signs improved.

Grass is not evil for every horse.

But for some horses, especially metabolic horses, grass can be the trigger that keeps the disease process going.

And if that horse is already showing signs of laminitis, stretched white line, footiness, thin soles, abnormal growth, strong pulses or chronic hoof capsule changes, then “just a little grass” is not a useful management plan.

We have to manage the horse in front of us, in the environment we have now.

14/06/2026

13/06/2026

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10/06/2026

A bit of a waffle about 'short grass is way more nutritious' or 'Alfa Alfa hay has more nutrients'.
Less nutrients per mouth full but all day long is much more suitable to a horses digestive system.
🛑Stop feeding 1 or two 'highly nutritious' meals per day
🏁Start feeding the RIGHT forage all day long.
There is more to horse feeding than just 'what' they get it's very important 'how' they get it too! 🙌
And yes much more to it than I can squeeze in a 2 min video, take this as a seed you can go to talk to a nutritionist about 👍

10/06/2026

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I advocate waiting until grass is 20-30cm or longer and has 4 leaves, for both plant/soil health and to have adequate fibre content for healthy horses... do you think our next grazing cell is ready? 😉

06/06/2026

Horses Are Not Grazing Animals… They’re Specialist Browsers

This might be one of the biggest misconceptions in horse management.

We often describe horses as grazing animals, standing with their heads down eating grass all day. While they certainly graze, their natural feeding behaviour is actually far more complex than that.

Wild and feral horses spend huge portions of their day browsing. They don’t just eat grass. They seek out hedgerows, shrubs, leaves, bark, herbs, flowers, seed heads, weeds and even certain tree species. They constantly move across the landscape, selecting different plants to meet different nutritional and behavioural needs.

Think about a horse turned into a field with a healthy hedge line. How often do you see them reaching through the hedge for hawthorn, blackberry, rosehips or fresh leaves rather than standing in the middle eating grass?

That isn’t boredom. It’s natural behaviour.

The irony is that many of our modern horse paddocks bear very little resemblance to the environment horses evolved to live in. Vast areas of single-species grass provide plenty of calories but very little variety.

Much of the UK’s improved pasture has been heavily selected for agricultural productivity, particularly for cattle production. Ryegrass has become a dominant species because it produces high yields and supports milk and meat production extremely efficiently. The problem is that what works brilliantly for a dairy cow doesn’t necessarily work brilliantly for a horse.

Many improved ryegrass pastures contain significantly higher levels of readily available sugars than the diverse meadow systems horses would naturally encounter. Yet we continue to place animals designed to browse a wide variety of plants onto fields dominated by a single, energy-dense grass species.

Then we scratch our heads and wonder why we are seeing increasing numbers of horses struggling with obesity, insulin dysregulation, laminitis and other metabolic disorders.

Of course, metabolic disease is multifactorial. Genetics, exercise, management and overall diet all play a role. But it does raise an interesting question:

Are we feeding horses in a way that matches millions of years of evolution?

Browsing provides:

🌿 Nutritional diversity
🌿 Natural enrichment
🌿 Increased movement
🌿 Mental stimulation
🌿 Opportunities for self-selection of plant material
🌿 Access to a wide range of plant compounds not found in monoculture grass systems

Perhaps the question shouldn’t be “How much grass does my horse need?”

Perhaps it should be “How much variety does my horse need?”

Because when given the choice, many horses don’t behave like lawnmowers.

They behave exactly as nature intended — as specialist browsers.

05/06/2026

Well .... If you have seen my stories you know what's up 😅 Kids turned the fence off and my horses broke into the grass middle for a little snackysnack.