My Winter of Living Lazily a.k.a. An Experiment with 24/7 Turnout in Winter

So if you've read a few of my blog posts you may have noticed that over the last six years of farm management, my horsekeeping practices have evolved. When I first built the place I modeled my care on my favorite boarding barns, where my horses had been stalled during the day in the summer and overnight in the winter. My stalls were simple 12x12 stalls with Dutch doors to the outside. This was how my horses had always lived and they'd been fine with it and so had I, so that's what I did. I also thought that two large horses would demolish my three acres of pasture if I left them out 24/7.

Within the first year I added a small 30'x45' corral behind the barn so I could leave the Dutch doors open and give the horses in/out access to individual runs. This was better for the horses because they weren't trapped in little boxes 8-16 hours a day, and it was better for me because the horses sometimes pooped in the runs and weren't milling around in their stalls making them messier and harder to clean. Sometimes in the winter between dinner and night check I would lock them out of their stalls if the weather was good, to minimize stall cleaning even more.

Mr. F and Dominick the Donkey enjoy their newfound in/out freedom.

Two years later I took another big step and built my wonderful dry lot, so that I could transition the horses away from stalling. I still thought they would overgraze and destroy the pasture on full turnout, so the dry lot was necessary to rest the pasture. For several years my horses lived in the dry lot all winter and I opened a gate to the highest and driest acre for about eight hours every day as long as the ground wasn't too wet. My chore time was drastically cut down compared to overnight stalling because I no longer did night check and I only had to skim manure off the stonedust daily rather than sifting through bedding and cleaning urine spots. One winter when I had two horses that didn't need blankets or much grain, I started feeding them grain only in the afternoons (in feed bags, in the dry lot) so that my morning chores were reduced to going outside in my work clothes and opening a gate! Have I mentioned how much I love my dry lot??

Well, this past winter my "efficiency" (okay fine, laziness) rose to new levels... I decided to see what would happen if I let my two horses have full access to my top acre for the whole winter. (Partially this was due to a desire to cut down on chores, and partially it was because I have a new Thoroughbred who acts like he's starting the Kentucky Derby every time you open a gate. He's not rude but he does like to gallop around and buck, and I was worried about him slipping and getting hurt. If the gate just stays open all the time, there's no novelty and no moment of, "Woo hoo, I'm free!" excitement.) Every spring my fields grow more grass than the horses know what to do with, so I was hoping the top acre would survive the additional wear and tear.

Spring is here and I can now say that my experiment was a great success! The horses were happy to come and go as they pleased, nobody ran the Kentucky Derby every morning, I didn't have to clean quite as much manure because they spent more time out in the pasture, and the field survived very well. I know I got lucky because we had a short, mild winter, but according to NOAA we did get average precipitation (no real snow though!). Here's what the top acre of pasture has looked like over the past few months:

December 30th: The gate area is gross and mucky but the mud was never ankle-deep like I've experienced at other farms. When it's dry enough I'm definitely going to add some gravel/stonedust outside the gate to prepare for next winter.

March 10th: Spring is almost here and the bare spot around the gate has stayed about the same size, though it's dry and firm now. The rest of the field is eaten down but not very torn up.

March 27th: Wow, what a difference 17 days makes this time of year! The grass has turned green and overall I think this acre looks pretty good considering how much use it got all winter.

April 7: The top acre has been freshly mown because the roughs were already getting tall. After mowing, I seeded the bare spots with some tall fescue and then used the chain harrow to break up all the winter manure and work the seeds into the soil a little. I happened to time the harrowing perfectly after a small amount of rain made the previously-firm soil soft enough to cover the seed but not mushy enough to worry about tire marks. The horses are now grazing another acre and I'm curious to see how this one rebounds over the next month or so.

Interestingly, this little experiment did not greatly affect hay consumption, which suggests that winter grazing has more recreational than nutritional value for the horses. This winter between January and March the two horses ate 140 small square bales, generally provided at the rate of half of a square bale each morning and a full bale in the afternoon. The last comparable winter (when I had two horses living out full-time and eating square bales) was 2017, when during January and March the horses ate 161 small square bales. The slight reduction probably has less to do with pasture access and more to do with three other factors: 1) my failed attempt at round bales this year reducing January's square bale count somewhat; 2) my new 1,200-lb Thoroughbred replacing the 1,600-lb Hanoverian (no exaggeration, this weight is from a scale at the clinic!) that I had in 2017; and 3) Dominick the Donkey not being included in the 2020 consumption because he has moved into a separate paddock with his new buddy Lancelot.

So far I'm still allowing the horses 24/7 access to grass (on an acre that has rested all winter) and it's interesting to observe how they spend their time while I've been working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though the grass is amazing right now and they do graze a lot, they spend plenty of time just standing under a tree hanging out, lying down napping in the sun, and even munching on the hay that I continue to provide (though at a much lower rate of half a bale every few days or whenever they clean it up). This somewhat allays my fears about them overindulging on the rich spring grass.

April 5th: the boys take a break from the spring grass to relax in the sun.

Speaking of overindulgence, here is what the research shows about horses' grazing patterns:

"It is estimated that a horse spends about 10 to 17 hours each day grazing, and this is broken up into about 15 to 20 grazing periods." (https://ker.com/equinews/grazing-behavior-horses/) This suggests that 24/7 turnout might not actually result in much more grazing time than overnight 16-hour turnout.

"At varying levels of pasture turnout, an 1100 lb (500 kg) horse will consume the following amounts of grass dry matter (all horses were given free choice hay when removed from pasture):

• 24 hours/day: 0.77 lb per hour (0.35 kg/hr)
• 9 hours/day: 1.32 lb/hr (0.6 kg/hr)
• 6 hours/day: 1.65 lb/hr (0.75 kg/hr)
• 3 hours/day: 2.2 lb/hr (1.0 kg/hr)

The less time you allow for pasture grazing, the more excited your horse will be at the opportunity to have fresh grass and he will eat nearly three times faster than if he had access to pasture 24/7." (https://www.horsejournals.com/horses-graze-pasture-247-eat-more-slowly)

I'm hoping that knowing the grass is always there the horses will self-regulate appropriately, and so far it seems to be working. My plan is to leave them out 24/7 until the heat and flies get bad, and then switch to my normal summer schedule of stalling them during the day (with access to the corral) and turning them out at night. Then when it cools off in the fall I'll turn them back out and enjoy not cleaning stalls for another 7-8 months!

All in all, I'm quite pleased with how the winter went and will probably try the same thing again next year, although I'm sure I won't get so lucky with such mild temperatures two years in a row. If you're curious, this is what NOAA has to say about temperature and precipitation between October 2019 and March 2020, compared to averages:

January 2021 update: In September when the ground was nice and firm, I added a stonedust pad to the gate area of my "winter paddock" to mitigate the winter mud situation. I used my compact tractor to remove a rectangle of grass and topsoil (not at all evenly or professionally, and probably deeper than necessary, but oh well) and then filled it in with stonedust. It took about three-quarters of a 22-ton load of stonedust. Here are some photos of the process:

I tried to excavate out to where at least most of the mud accumulated last winter.

That's a pretty big pile of stone!

The stonedust is about halfway spread now and I'm realizing how much I overestimated my needs. I actually almost ordered two dump truck loads but am very glad that I started with only one! I ended up using the rest of the pile to improve the footing in the run-in shed and spot fill some areas on the path that had suffered erosion.

I gave the new stonedust weeks to get rained on and settle, but when I first turned the horses out in that field they still left very, very deep hoof prints.

I drove across the pad with the tractor for 10-15 minutes and in this photo taken two days after the previous one, you can see that the stonedust has compacted considerably and the horses are leaving much shallower hoof prints. I may have to repeat the compaction periodically but it's well worth it to minimize mud at the gate.