Creating a new horse track - two situations

One could make a good argument that keeping domestic horses is antithetical to permies and sustainability. But I hope we can set that discussion aside in this thread.

I have horses  These days many horse owners are agreeing that the best way to provide space for horses to live on is NOT on square pastures or paddocks, but in "track systems". The basic idea is: take the same amount of land and turn that square into long, skinny spaces. For lots of reasons, this seems to be a superior approach. I can discuss that elsewhere, but for this I'd like to assume that a track system is good

I already have one track on our farm and it's working great!!  Now I need to build another one. One more thing to know about horses and tracks, for various reasons, tracks should little or no vegetation! Basically the land needs to be taken down to dirt or sand or somesuch. One good thing about tracks is that less square footage needs to be disturbed!

So my new track is partially covered in harmful weeds. The other part is in nice pasture grass. I'm trying to figure out the best, eco-friendliest ways to remove the organic material from these two spaces.

I think I want to collect the weeds and dispose of them to try to catch as many seeds as possible.

I don't know about the grass though. Perhaps I can just harrow it? (And yes, I'm a huge supporter of no-till farming, so all of this makes me queasy  )

Sorry for the rambling, any ideas about how best to make this new track, will be appreciated.

One last detail, this track will end up being 15-20 feet wide and around 800 feet long. So that's about a 1/3 of an acre?

This track system sounds kind of like paddocks, but the removal of plants makes me question how you manage erosion?

I'm fascinated and am not a horse person so I am intrigued to learn more.

What/Why are some weeds harmful to horses? Are they just susceptible to a wide variety or is it location based?

Bert Bates wrote:

I already have one track on our farm and it's working great!!  Now I need to build another one. One more thing to know about horses and tracks, for various reasons, tracks should little or no vegetation! Basically the land needs to be taken down to dirt or sand or somesuch. One good thing about tracks is that less square footage needs to be disturbed!

So my new track is partially covered in harmful weeds. The other part is in nice pasture grass. I'm trying to figure out the best, eco-friendliest ways to remove the organic material from these two spaces.

One last detail, this track will end up being 15-20 feet wide and around 800 feet long. So that's about a 1/3 of an acre?

Hi Bert,

I'm intrigued... I know the theoretical side of such a track, but shouldn't the horses have pasture grass available to them? I'd imagine they would enjoy to walk and eat at their leisure in their outspace.

Just being curious!

Good questions!

The weeds in question aren't harmful unless eaten in great quantities. But these tracks are adjacent to our high quality hay fields, and I don't want the weeds to migrate into those fields. (And BTW, our hayfields are not mono-culture, they are a mix of native grasses, hooray)

So regardless of the track, I wanted to get rid of those weeds anyway.

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So one weird, little known thing about many horses is that too much sweet Spring grass can be deadly! A common problem is called laminitis. Something in the high sugar of the grass causes severe inflammation in their hooves, and if their hooves get too damaged, the horse cannot survive. As I understand it, horse's natural environments were near desert conditions. Very sparse grass, lots of roaming required to get not many calories.

For most horses, they can spend time in pastures from late summer to early Spring, when the sugar content goes way down.

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Track systems... It's good for horses to walk, a lot. Square pastures don't encourage that. It's great when they play with each other, but even the happiest horses do that only a few times a day. So one strategy in a track system is to put their food at one end and their water at another. This is the opposite of cruel, it helps them get their 10,000 steps   Another thing is that horses are natural roamers. A long track seems to tickle their roaming instincts

Another fun thing about tracks is that it allows them to get up to top speed!  As I said, our new track will be 800 feet long and still use only about 1/3 of an acre. But the horses in our current track LOVE to gallop up and down their track at top speed. Also, very good for them

Ah, I forgot the erosion question, my bad!

We're fortunate that much of our farm is on high ground with very mild slopes, so we don't have much of an erosion problem.

We have neighbors that battle erosion and they do things like cover the tracks with wood chips. That seems to help, but not solve the problem.

The set up my horses had when I was a teenager was accidental but it worked brilliantly - they were the happiest herd of horses I ever saw!

There were four fields. One central one and the other three completely encircling them. There was a river which meandered its way around the one edge of the first field, and then right around the next two fields. Imagine a big U-shaped loop of river with land in the middle.

The horses would graze their way around the whole thing a couple of times a day, always clockwise, occasionally stopping to rest under the trees growing in the hedges, which were very unkempt.

Later in life I bought my own land, which couldn't be arranged like that, and the horses were far less happy and would just stand around eating and not moving most of the time. I think they need some sort of mental path to follow. But I also think they like to graze as they work their way around it.

Our horses love to graze too, and we can safely let them do that about 7 months a year.

Bert Bates wrote:

So one weird, little known thing about many horses is that too much sweet Spring grass can be deadly! A common problem is called laminitis. Something in the high sugar of the grass causes severe inflammation in their hooves, and if their hooves get too damaged, the horse cannot survive. As I understand it, horse's natural environments were near desert conditions. Very sparse grass, lots of roaming required to get not many calories.

For most horses, they can spend time in pastures from late summer to early Spring, when the sugar content goes way down.

==

... It's good for horses to walk, a lot. Square pastures don't encourage that. ....horses are natural roamers. A long track seems to tickle their roaming instincts

Another fun thing about tracks is that it allows them to get up to top speed!  

Thank you, Bert, for all this information! Wow, so much to consider... So just to clarify; in your track setting, you have water at one end and ...hay(?) in the other? And you 'draw' your track with white "horse tape"?

I've seen some videos on YT a couple of years ago about landscaped tracks. That looked fantastic, the horses really liked (after getting used to the situation)  the fact that they couldn't oversee the whole field but there was always something new and exciting around the corner. In the landscaped setting there was more tree canopies for shadow and some meandering track bits and one or two 'high speed' bits. They had filmed the herd moving in the track with a drone. It looked like a lot of fun for the horses!

Making a track to exercising te horses is a great idea.

Just curious, how do you use your horses?

Ours were for the kids to ride, though some folks make a business out of owning them.

Nina Surya wrote:

Thank you, Bert, for all this information! Wow, so much to consider... So just to clarify; in your track setting, you have water at one end and ...hay(?) in the other? And you 'draw' your track with white "horse tape"?

I've seen some videos on YT a couple of years ago about landscaped tracks. That looked fantastic, the horses really liked (after getting used to the situation)  the fact that they couldn't oversee the whole field but there was always something new and exciting around the corner. In the landscaped setting there was more tree canopies for shadow and some meandering track bits and one or two 'high speed' bits. They had filmed the herd moving in the track with a drone. It looked like a lot of fun for the horses!

Yes! I like the term "landscaped tracks", I'm not sure I've heard that. And you're also right that the best tracks provide varied terrain and shade and twists and turns and such. It's REALLY GOOD for horses to have to navigate logs and hills and turns and some tracks even have small ponds or streams. For humans and horses, being agile is important. We added a tiny hill to one area (it's probably 15 feet long and 18 inches high), and the horses love it. They don't have to go over it, but they usually choose to

And yes, the water is far away from the hay. As for the fencing, track systems are sort of by definition fencing intensive. If your only consideration is fencing costs then a circular or square-ish pasture gives you the most area for a given amount of fence. We use a specific sort of electric fencing called Electro-Braid. It's long lasting (we have some sections of our track using Electro-Braid that's been in use for 15 years). It's also strong and it stretches a little bit like rock climbing rope does. So if a horse runs into it, it gives way a little, but it doesn't break. It's also fairly soft so it's less likely to hurt them if they run into it. And finally, it's less visible to the neighbors than electric tape is. (Sorry, I didn't mean to turn this into an Electro-Braid commercial   )

Anne Miller wrote:Making a track to exercising te horses is a great idea.

Just curious, how do you use your horses?

Ours were for the kids to ride, though some folks make a business out of owning them.

We used to do competitions, but our thinking about compassionate care for horses has evolved mightily. My wife has created a new approach to training horses. It's not easy to summarize but briefly: We never use ropes or whips or bridles or bits or steel horse shoes. When riding we use a halter and reins, but we never put anything in their mouths.

When we work / play / train them we give them almost complete autonomy. That's a radical and controversial idea in the horse world. We make use of their innate desire to play. A scientist named Jaak Panksepp showed the world that all mammals (and many other creatures too), have a strong, intrinsic motivation to play. And it's not just the youngsters, even the adults like to play. When we go out to play with them, they get to choose whether or not they want to. But as it turns out, they almost always want to, and we have to separate them because they all want to go first

Our play with them is hard work! We ask them to do very athletic, difficult things, similar to what you might see in the Olympics. Our goal is for them to be athletic and strong and agile, and to be able to carry riders while maintaining healthy posture. If you know what you're looking for, most horses can't maintain healthy postures when they're being ridden, and that's not good for them.

My wife makes and sells training videos for horse people, so I like to say our horses are our on-screen talent

So all the horsie questions are great, it's fun, keep 'em coming!

But I'm still trying to figure out how to clear the organics off of these tracks. I'm about to buy a disc harrow and I have a brush hog, and a new drum mower.

It seems like some form of cutting and raking followed by harrowing? But that's about as far as I've gotten, and I want to minimize manual labor for the sake of my middle aged body

Bert Bates wrote:So all the horsie questions are great, it's fun, keep 'em coming!

But I'm still trying to figure out how to clear the organics off of these tracks.

Thank you for your insightful replies!

Ummm... I'm going to possibly say something stupid (or not), but the first and only solution my tired-after-the-day brain comes up with is: pigs.
They love to clear out fields. But they don't leave a level surface after them. At our place I decided to call the new landscape "pockets of microclimates".
And also, even though pigs plough your field, there will be seeds of weeds in the soil that get their chance as soon as the pigs are tilling the soil.
Perhaps run chicken after the pigs, in concentrated areas??

Good luck and please keep us posted!

Hi Bert! I'm from the not-so-good old days of horse training when I was young (standardbreds, thoroughbreds, polo), and have come around after using my horse training skills on dogs, turning it more to play instead of discipline, and from that angle what your wife is doing makes perfect sense. Sounds excellent. I also think the track system is a zillion times better than the small paddocks we used to use on the farms.
I'm concerned about what happens after discing or harrowing if it's wet. Maybe you live in a less rainy place than me (statistically very probable!), but I'd want to avoid mud bogs and associated non-laminitis hoof issues.
I wonder if you have any neighbors with goats (for the weeds) or cattle (for the spring grass) who might go through first- it would be almost zero effort.

Hey Nina and Tereza,

I've thought about using grazing animals. We live in a very remote spot, but there are goats and sheep in the neighborhood. One issue with that approach is hundreds and hundreds of feet of fencing for those critters. The fencing we use for our horses would not keep goats or sheep in place. I do have a couple of hundred feet of electric sheep fencing, I suppose I could let them graze a spot for a few days and then move the fencing.

We do let our neighbors put a few cows on our hay field for a few weeks after haying, so we're already open to that kind of thing. My lazy side thinks that getting grazers transported and so on would be a fair bit of work... i'll ponder that.

(BTW, is there a way to add a poster to a response without quoting them? In other forums I can do something like @nina)

As for mud, we're very fortunate to have high ground. Even in the rainiest season our few, muddy, horse occupied spots are small and last only a few days.