 Welcome to you all. It is 12 o'clock, so we want to get started on time. My name is Rachel Wald. I am with NDSU Extension. I work within McHenry County, so I'm a county agent. Along with my counterpart here today is Paige Brummond, who is also from a local county, Ward County. She's the Ward County agent. Today we will have two specialists with us. I'm just going to pop through a couple of slides here. Welcome to the Spring Horse Management webinar series. Today we're going to do spring grazing management. And the exciting part about today is we actually have 339 people registered, representing over 2,000 horses, ranging in horses from five to over 75 head that are either being managed or or in their herd. Presenters today, not in any particular order. I will be working as the moderator today. Paige Brummond will be running the chat and answering or asking some questions that might be in there. Our two specialists today are Kevin Sedevic, Rangeland Management Specialist, and Mary Keena, who's a Nutrient Management Specialist. So there's a couple of things in the chat here. I'm sure Paige is just encouraging everyone to say welcome and where you're from. It's exciting to hear where everybody's coming from. And I am actually going to get started. I'm going to share control. Okay, Kevin, I have given you control. Great. Well, thanks, Rachel. And it's a pleasure to be on today. I want to say good afternoon for those of you who are in the Eastern part of the region. Good morning, Steel, for those who are in the Western part of the region. My topic today, we're going to talk about, is spring and early summer grazing. I do want to cover a little bit about grazing readiness. And then we'll get a little bit about management strategies for horses. And for those who don't know who I am, I'm the Rangeland Management Specialist. I've been here for about 35 years. And my wife and I have been raising horses since about the early 1990s. And so we've been breeders for that long. And so obviously I have a passion for horses. And I'm a grazing person, as well as a manager. So we're going to get to these different topics. And I want to encourage any of you have any chats or any questions, please ask those as well. Two different topics today for discussion. And one is when to turn out to pasture. And we're going to deal with a little bit on grass health. And when it comes to pasture turnout in the spring, we're going to talk a little bit about equine health, because we have some different issues with our monogasterns versus our ruminants. And then we're going to talk and with a little bit on grazing management. And the important part, as any producer, is healthy grass creates more forage and less weeds. And we want to end with some management strategies to give you that opportunity for some healthy grass. Let's start with healthy grass. And it really comes down to the beginning of the grazing season when you turn these animals out to pasture, when our grass is already. And if you live in North Dakota, especially the eastern half of the state, most of our pasture is still covered with snow, it's obviously not ready to be grazing grass. And so our grass growth, our proper turnout is really a function of phenology. When that grass produces enough above ground tissue so it can produce its own food. Grass phenology is a function of day length. It's a function of growing degree days. And all growing degree days mean is you have enough temperature for those grasses to grow. So phenologically, moisture is not a driver. It's really a function of day length and growing degree day temperature. And so those of you who are interested in looking at how do you do growing degree days? It's just a function of calculating that maximum daily temperature plus the minimum daily temperature. And you divide that by two to get you your base temperature. And then you subtract the base temperature for your grasses. So in North Dakota and the Northern Plains, our dominant grasses are cool season grasses that have a base temperature of 30 degrees. If you live in Southern Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Georgia, anywhere down south, you're going to have warm season dominant grasses. And your base temperature is going to be 40 degrees. And for my example here, if you have a high of 62 degrees that given day in a low of 38, you'd add them up to get 100. You divide that by two and you get 50. You then subtract that base temperature, which is 32 for up north. You'd have 18 growing degree days for that given day. And I'll come back to this. I'll talk about phenology first and I'll show you how you can do this if you're interested in doing it. But I want to first talk about when do our grasses reach that phenological growth stage when they can produce enough leaf area to produce their own carbohydrates or food source. And on the average, we reach grazing readiness at about three leaves for exotic grasses like Timothy, orchard grass, brome, crested wheat grass. If you are down south, that'd be like a Bermuda grass. If you're way in Georgia, be Bahia grass and also tall fescue. If you're in the western part of the U.S. and you're grazing more native range, we typically have about a three and a half leaves as required for those grasses to reach grazing readiness. So when you go out this spring and you start walking your pasture, look for leaf stage. And it is important to look at the green leaves, not the one dead leaf in the bottom. And you can count them and you can get when you get to the three leaves, you know, you're going to be fairly close to phenologically ready to be grazed or turn up pasture, at least phenologically. And I'm going to show you how this kind of works. This is some a graph developed by a company called pasture. And if there's two parts of this to the slide of the top part, you'll see leaf stage. So number one is one leaf, two is two leaves, three is three leaves and four is four leaves. And the bottom half of this graph, you'll see water soluble carbohydrates levels within the plant. And as the plant first comes up, it has to rely on foot, foot, root reserves for these carbohydrates for them to grow. So you'll see at the one leaf stage, it's consuming carbohydrates from the root tissue. Once you get to the two leaf stage, it's still consuming that stored carbohydrates. As you can see, we get to about three leaves, three and a half leaves. It's at that point where it's now stored enough carbohydrates to put it back to what it had pre-growth. And so you need enough factory produced where it'll actually start to produce enough carbohydrates to replenish that root reserve. It's important to understand that it is critical to have root reserve to do this. And so healthy grasses will grow faster in the spring because they have more root reserve than unhealthy grasses. And so this will become a delay if your pastures tend to be grazed short, especially in the fall. This tends to delay this time period in terms of water soluble carbohydrates in the grass, in the grass of the species. So it gives you a feel of why we want to have those first three leaves to replenish those roots so you have healthy plants. So we talked about growing degree days and this is a table developed by the USDA ARS station in Mandan. And the matter where you're at in the country, they'll have some of what we call the on stage, on stages of development and how much growing degree days it takes to reach a different phenological growth stage. So we just focus on the three leaf stage in this graph. We go to the bottom, because a lot of our horse owners tend to have seeded pastures and the northern plains tends to be grown grass, crested wheat grass. In the Minnesota, it'll be probably Timothy or orchard grass. You'll see it takes about 450 to 600 to 700 growing degree days before it reaches the three leaf stage. If you are grazing native range, if you're in the Western Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana, even farther west, where most of our producers or many of our producers are on native range, it takes more growing degree days to reach that growth phenology. So it's about 1,000 to 1,100 growing degree days to achieve that level. So my previous example there where we had 18 growing degree days, if we had maintained that temperature throughout, in 30 days, you produce about 540 growing degree days. So which that would put you at about phenologically ready to be grazed some of our exotic grasses. Where on native grasses, it's gonna be probably closer to 45 to 60 days because it just takes more growing degree days. Also, it's gonna get warmer longer. So you're gonna accumulate more growing degree days within a day that we do early in the season. So if you're interested, there's some really good resources out there that shows you how to do growing degree days and you can use that as a factor. For me, I tend to like to go out and walk my pastures. Spring's a beautiful time of the year and I'll look at my leaf stage and see where I'm at phenologically and see if I'm ready to be grazing. So when we talk about phenology and the importance of day length and temperature to get that, there's a second caveat that has to be talked about when it comes to actually being what I'd call ready to be grazed. And that's moisture and all moisture does is the level of productivity. And so even though you may have three and a half leaves, if it's a dry spring, this year looks like we might have a good spring, we'll still see a lack of production. And it comes down to, if I don't have enough biomass, I might be phenologically ready to be grazed, but I don't have enough biomass, I still will delay turnout. On an average, what I like to look for is about six to eight inches of height on my brome grass as well as Timothy or orchard grass, pressure wheat grass, that's gonna be more around that six inches. If I don't have the height, I still will delay turnout. I'm gonna show you a couple of slides that talks about how this affects it. And grazing history will also drive that. So if you grazed your pastures short in the fall, you'll get a lack of vigor, you'll get a lack of tiller development, and you'll see a delay that you're, even though it may be phenologically ready, production may not be there. Hopefully that makes sense. I do have two pictures here that I'll show you what I'm talking about. So this is a brome grass in the picture here taken on May 10th of last year, actually. We're at about three, three and a half leaves on this brome. It's about five and a half inches tall. This pasture did not have an issue of moisture, and it was not grazed heavy in the fall. You look at another pasture, this pasture was literally a half a mile away. It was grazed hard last fall. And so we're still at about three leaves, but the height of this plant's about three to three and a quarter inches. So biomass or production will play a role in when this reaches readiness. If you wanna turn your horses out to pasture. And this driver here in this case was actually a grazing history, not a moisture history. So I will look at those caveats with the theology to help me determine when I wanna graze. So on the first picture, I would have felt my horses were getting ready. I could turn them out because I was about five and a half inches tall. On this one here, I'd probably wait another 10 days to 14 days to get sufficient growth to handle the horses. And I'm not a very good artistic person, but I'm gonna walk through this grass, and I'm gonna show you what I mean. So on the left side of the graph is percent growth. So the blue line is grass growth throughout the spring and into summer. And in our country, our crops and grasses reach peak production sometime in late June, early July. And if the grass is healthy, your forage production, which is the green bar will mimic those two bars. And so they'll peak about the same time. My red bar is actually turning out livestock. In this case, we turned our horses. We consume about, we're shouldn't produce about 35 to 40% of the production. And you'll see we turned out our horses before or behind what I call grass growth. So basically you're grazing ahead of the grass growth versus behind the grass growth. So you can maximize or optimize your forage production. In a year where we got some drought conditions or we have a delay in growth in terms of production, this example of the same exact bars except for my production is lower, started lower because of some condition. And you can see I actually turned the horses out ahead of the grass versus behind the grass. And what happens is they tend to graze it shorter, quicker because the biomass is not there. And in the end, you give up production in the system. In this example, we give up about 35% production by turning out too early, even though we were phenologically ready, we didn't have the biomass to support it. And so it's important to understand that time frame. So you can actually maximize your production for the horses versus having to actually feed earlier in the year because you ended up grazing them too short. And so just remember that phenology is number one for production really is another factor of when you should turn out on these pastures. Now with horses, I love to see green grass in the spring and it's always pretty to look at, but there's always can be some issues with horses on this lush green grass. And so let's talk a little bit about equine health as you turn on to these lush green grasses. So our grass in the spring, and we're only literally about a month away from where we can be looking at turning out to pasture in North Dakota, it's about 80% water, which means you have a diluted resource of nutrients with a lot of water in the system. They're also low in fiber. They're high in water soluble carbohydrates and they're very palatable. So what you'll see with any class of livestock and horses in particular, they'll consume a lot of feed, which can fill the gut in that scenario. And when you have a highly fermentable carbohydrates, they can build up in the hind gut and you get a build up of lactic acid. And so this can lead to some health issues and some digestive issues turning on to lush grass. And especially if you have horses that are prone to laminitis, you wanna have some precautions when you turn out to this grass, even though it may be phenologically ready, you still may have to worry about some issues. And our primary issue is really gonna be laminitis, digestive problems and caught. And I've seen this even with our horses when we turn out to spring pasture, you'll see some digestive issues in some of the horses, especially if they got a little age to them. I tend to wanna make sure it's consuming time, give them some dry feed. And that's what you're gonna look for on these lush pastures. So what are your strategies? And there's a few different strategies you're gonna look at when turning your horses out to pasture. One is make sure they have a full belly of feed of hay, dry hay before they go out and continue to offer them hay while they're feeding on this lush pasture. You're gonna think, well, they're gonna eat the lush grass anyway, because that's the most palatable. But almost all forms of livestock will look for fiber. Horses are no different. They're gonna look for some fiber in their diet. And as they're eating that grass, they're gonna come back and feed on that, some of that fiber. So I'll always offer them some free toys. If it's early in the season, that grass is really lush. The second one you can do, and this is what Joe and I do, is we'll limit grays on pasture. We'll turn them out for about two to four hours, and then we'll bring them back in and put them on feed. And we can build up that time period so you can lengthen that over time. And the really big trick is once those grasses become phenologically where you got a boot stage or where that seed head's about to pop through the comb, fiber content goes up, the sugar content of the carbohydrates goes down. You will see less incidents of digestive problems as that plant matures. So then you can, so basically delay that turnout from two to four hours to start and you can build it up over a couple of weeks to where you know you're safe, putting those horses out to pasture. The other one you can look at and we know our big issue here is lactic acid buildup with those water soluble carbohydrates. Consider using a hindgut buffering product to virtualize those lactic acid buildup, especially on some horses that you know can be prone to laminitis. The last thing I have on the equine health thing is, if your horse is prone to laminitis, and most of you probably know if your horse is, you wanna delay pasture turnout, not because the grass isn't ready, but because your horse isn't ready. And you're gonna wait for those grasses to reach that boot stage to seed head stage before you turn them out. Now I know horses are finicky grazers, once you get a seed head they tend to wanna pick and choose more, but to be safe for those horses, if you know you got some laminitis issues, wait for that time period. We also see it higher incidence of overweight horses, ponies, horses with Cushing's disease, and we tend to see it more even in thoroughbreds versus quarter horses. But even at our place, we have a couple of mares that have gotten older and I noticed more cases of laminitis as they've aged as well when we turn on too early. So we'll just delay that turnout. So just know about these issues with equine health. I know the grass is green and they're gonna wanna get out there, but if you have any issues, just be careful and use precautionary status as with these horses. So let's go into some grazing management strategies. We're gonna look at turnout. You know, how do you eliminate or how do you maximize your production so you have healthy grass? For me, healthy grass means healthy animals. You know, the number one leading cause to deterioration of our pastures is overgrazing. Most of that's not a secret to you. Overgrazing leads to low plant vigor, less forage production, and usually higher rates of larval ingestation because the horses are grazing closer to the ground. It's important to know that these grasses have to produce that factory all the time from to continue to grow and stay healthy. So whatever you can do to minimize overgrazing, it's important to do that. A one-time overuse is not detrimental to the grass, but you gotta be able to allow some recovery those grasses are gonna maintain production. So we'll use it with less production. Usually means we get more bare ground. We get more bare ground, we get more weeds. If most of you are like me, I mean, the last time I had one horse or two horses was the 1990s. So we tend to accumulate horses, but your carrying capacity doesn't change in your pastures. So you're gonna have to have some opportunities to give these pastures some recovery so your grasses can stay healthy. And the worst case scenario, and we'll see this a lot on different pastures, is we get really weedy pastures. And once you get to these phases of a high weed concentration that the horses will not consume, you're gonna have issues in terms of production. And then you're gonna deal with a lot of weeds you don't wanna deal with. I mean, I just hate getting cockaburrs and you're dealing with cockaburrs in the main. This is an example of some must that must this. So I was asking about Colorado. This is an example of a pasture close to me where we get boxed to a barley, invaded these sites. So it's important to keep those grasses healthy so you're not dealing with these weedy species. And we can, on a future talk, we can talk about some opportunities to control these weeds as well. So remember, bare ground will lead to more impalatable weeds than use less production for your horses. And so the goal here is to have, to leave sufficient plant growth so those grasses can continue to maintain and produce carbohydrates and healthy roots. You have to have healthy roots to keep the above ground growing. So keep that factor growing. On an average, we tend to like to keep the stubble height of your grasses of four to six inches to where you can continue to have that factory working. So I always like to keep at least a six inch double height so I don't like grasses around. Then you can look at ways to manage these pastures so you can maintain that production. And we don't see a lot of horse owners use multiple paddocks for rotational grazing, but it's a great practice you can use to create some natural deferment in your pastures as well as recovery within your pastures. It doesn't take a whole lot of pastures to do this. It's a fairly simple tool that will allow you to optimize for production. You can minimize your overgrazing. The trick to this, especially on small acreage is you need to have a sacrifice or what I call a dry lot area for these horses to go when you need to add more recovery time. So I'm gonna show you some examples here on rotational grazing and when you look at a rotational pasture, you need a minimum of three pastures. Two pastures just is not enough cells to give you enough recovery within those cells. Three will give you that. I really like four or five pastures. And you can see in this example here, this is a six pasture system. It's just got a really pretty border but this person is just using an electric fence or a hot wire to maintain these different paddocks. You'll see in this example, we have a holding pasture or holding pen for these horses when we do have to have some more extra recovery. On an average at our place, you run about a quarter to a half an acre of holding pen for four to five horses. So you wanna have enough space in there so you can deal with the territorial issues of these horses, but not too large that you get a lot of weed built up as well. So within this example, you always try to create that dry lot area, especially if you have small acreages, it's a great way to basically create in this case, it creates a seventh pasture. But I know I'm gonna deteriorate it. It's gonna have issues, but I have six pastures in this scenario that are healthy, growing grass, and it's a great resource and feed for your horses. So I'm gonna show you how this works. This is basically a four pasture system that I have here for an example. You put all your horses in one pasture, you allow them to consume about 25 to 30% of the grass. That's about 50% of the above ground biomass because most of your growth's in the bottom part of the plant. From there, you rotate to your next cell so you get recovery of the cell you came out of. You get natural deferment or you get time on the front side in pastures two, three, and four where the grasses can grow, get healthy, produce those critical carbohydrates in the root system. So you create a really nice four pasture system and you allow this rotation to really work well within the system. And then what you do is you wanna graze all your cells within, it's really 30 to 65 days. I have 30 to 45 days, but if you're in the Eastern part of the Dakotas, Minnesota, Iowa, or farther East, the recovery time periods for regrowth is about 30 days. In the central part of the US, same with North Dakota, it's about 45 days. As you get into the drier climate, you want about a 60 day recovery before you come back in the cell. And if any of you are on from the drier countries, let's say you're from Western Wyoming or you're even into Utah, you may only do a one-time rotation because moisture drives this regrowth. So the idea is then to come back and repeat that rotation again and graze that nice regrowth that occurs. So you always have a high quality diet for these horses. Your grasses are allowed to recover. So you have a healthy grass stand and you minimize your weeds. This is another example of a four paddock system. Basically it's just hot wires, two water sources, and they have an open gate and they move these horses through the system to get the recovery system. It's not a very difficult part when you build these systems, you wanna build them based on your water source and then put in your hot wires to get the natural recovery and deferment within the system. Hopefully that makes sense. The goal of rotation system should be one, keep the grass actively growing as long as you possibly can. You wanna minimize seed head production. So all of you have probably mowed your lawns at least once in your life. And when you mow the lawn before it heads out, it regrows. Your pastures are the same way. If you can keep it from heading out, you can continue to have elongation of your leaf fishing so you can have high quality grass longer into the grazing season. And in the end, you produce more production. The wetter your climate, the more production you can create through a graze, recovery, graze, recovery scenario. It just encourages regrowth. The more moisture you have, the better you'll have. So the one thing that people don't think about this is it also increases the forage quality. And what happens is when you graze a grass, you get an imbalance of carbon to nitrogen and the grass responds by trying to produce more carbon. It does that by producing more tillers. If you're in the South, you might produce more stolons like you'd see in Bermuda grass. That actually thickens your stand up. So if you graze it and rest it and get tiller development, you can actually thicken your stand up over about a three year period. So a thin stand can become heavier through a rest, graze, rest, recovery. So hopefully that makes sense and it works within the system. So to summarize this part of the talk or this part of the webinar today, look at delay pasture turnout until your grass has a minimum of three to three and a half leaves. And think about your production. Look for a minimum of six to eight inches of height before you turn off the pasture. When you're grazing lush grass, be cautious when putting out your horses on pasture because of the health issues. Mostly you know your horses. For what we do when we turn on our horses, we'll go out and we'll feel the hooves of hooves starting to get warm. That's an early sign of lamininus and we'll bring them in. So just know how your horses respond to lush grazing and use the strategies to help you get by this period. Do not over graze. And I, you know, I talk to, no matter who I'm talking to, whether it's a livestock producer, you got horse horses or you got sheep or cattle, you want to minimize your over grazing, but don't feel bad if you had an overuse event. And what I mean by overuse event is if you graze it hard one year, just give it enough recovery the following spring so you can get the leaf area back. It's the long-term over grazing that creates stress in these grasses and you start to get a weedy issue. So just be careful with how long you over graze these cells. And I think it's important to look at strategies to find ways to increase your quality and production. Rotational grazing is a very simple three-pasture system is a great tool to enhance your production and give some recovery within those pastures. The goal is to maintain a healthy, thick grass stand in the end so that everybody's healthy within that system. So that kind of ends my talk and I'm gonna turn it back over to Rachel and see if we can introduce the next speaker and I'll look at the chats and try to answer some of the chats while we're at it. If you don't mind, we'll just address some of those questions right now. If you're all right with that. So the first one was when you were talking about those rotational cells, how big were each of those paddocks if you had four or five horses? What's your recommendation? That's a great question and I like to, I don't wanna get too small and you don't wanna get too big. So if you're running four or five horses, I think a minimum of one to two acres should be your goal. When we created ours, we ran about an acre and a half. We ran about four to five horses. The more intense you have, so the more horses you have on an acre, the quicker you have to rotate. On an average, you wanna run about one animal per one acre, but if you rotate through quicker, you can run about a half an acre per one horse. And then how do you recommend, so horses will graze some areas really short and some vary, they won't touch at all. So how do you average out when you should be moving them? That's a good question. You know, the more horses you have on a cell, so let's say you run four horses on an acre and a half, you will get more uniform use across that pasture, but horses are horses and they're gonna pick the sweetest spot to have out there. What's really, and that's gonna happen, the biggest important part is you move to the next cell and you get enough recovery so even those short areas can recover to get at least about a six inch double height back for you to come back in that cell. Horses are just finicky. You know, with livestock, it's a little bit easier with horses they like to graze in those sweet spots. And so you may have to have more recovery or just watch it a little closer, but it just happens and just look at how you can increase that. One thing you can do, and when we get that look at pastures, we didn't talk about fertility today. If you add fertility to the other areas, you're gonna sweeten those areas up because you get more protein from the nitrogen you add to it and it'll actually almost force them because they're gonna go for that sweeter spot that you created for more protein. Now it becomes a spot way of applying fertilizer to that posh. All right, so we have a question in the chat about recommendation for seeding bare ground for hay production for horses. And this particular person is located in Western Minnesota, but can you provide where you would send people to find recommended varieties? Well, one, I would call your local agent, county agent. In Minnesota, you'd have your area specialists. Unless you can talk to a local seed dealer, without what you wanna try and do if you're gonna reseed bare areas, is try and seed the same species of grass that's in the pasture. So if you have brown grass, seed it with brown grass. If you've got blue grass, seed it with blue grass and brown grass. If you have Timothy, use Timothy. Most of those species are available from any seed dealer. And like your county extension office is a great resource for where you can get it from. And then you wanna try and seed them as early this spring as possible. The trick is you can't graze those areas for at least a year once you see them. All right, so in those tall grass areas that they never seem to graze, is it recommended to go in there and mow them to keep that seed head from forming, keep them in that vegetative stage? Absolutely, mowing is a great way to take away those high surface areas. When you do mow these tall vegetation, you wanna stubble height on your mower about six inches. Your goal is to still mow it above its growing point so that the tissue you left there will elongate or produce new tillers. So mowing is a great way to even out that use and it'll take away that spot grazing or at least minimize that spot grazing as best you can. But it's important to keep the stubble height at about six inches. Unless you have a blue grass pasture, then it's about four inches. When you're seeding a new horse pasture, how long do you have to kind of keep the horses off before they can graze it? Or how long will it take before the grass is ready to be grazed on new seedings? So on new seedings, most of you are gonna seed probably an exotic grass. A minimum of a year, it depends on how well you can get it established. So obviously your best way to get it established quickest is to drill it in, use this drill, drill it in, pack it, make it shallow. It'll take at least that growing season to become productive or at least grow and become a healthy plant. The next year, if you have a nice healthy grass, you can go out there but graze it light the first year afterwards. But by year two, if you don't have enough foot reserves built up where you can graze it normally. But it takes that long. You cannot go out there and graze it six weeks later or even six months later. And so we have a couple of questions that are kind of pertaining to manure. So I don't know if we'll wait and address these when Mary talks or not, but the questions are, do you clear the manure or rake up the manure after you rotate? And then the other question was, do you harrow it or drag the manure around after you rotate? And I don't know if you want to tackle this one, Kevin, or give it to Mary. Well, I'll give you my quick response. And what we do is we will drag the manure because manure is a great, is an awful way. You get patch grazing because of manure, but as you spread manure, you also spread more larvae. Most cycles on our pasts, I guess, is about a 28-day cycle. So normally if you spread it, you want to wait a minimum of 30 days to go back in that cell to let them go through a life cycle. And even 45 days is better, but that's one way that at least, know you're gonna spread the larvae when you do spread them on her, but give it enough time before you come back in that, or you're just gonna spread more larvae throughout the pasture if you're in there at the same time. All right, and the last one I have in the chat for you is we have an alfalfa grass mix field that we're looking to turn into a pasture. Any considerations for grazing pastures or the high alfalfa content? My biggest worry with alfalfa is laminitis. It's a pretty lush feed and horses will consume it. And if it's a shift from a grass to a legume, I would worry about that more than anything else. Horses don't bloat like cattle do, so you don't have the bloating issues. To me, it's more of a shift of a lush diet. If you can extend that time period to where the room and microbes can adjust, then you'll see less and less issues of laminitis. But I don't mind alfalfa in a stand, it's just I don't want a lot of alfalfa in a stand. I like it at least about a quarter or less. And I'll drop a link in there. I know the University of Minnesota does some research on grazing alfalfa with horses, so I will share that with you all as well. So all right, that wraps up our questions in the chat and I'll turn it back over to our host to move on to our next topic. All right, my next speaker here that we have today is Mary Keena. Mary is our extension specialist and livestock environmental management. She is here to talk to us about a little bit of manure. I am gonna give her some control over the screen so that she can get started on her presentation. Okay, so like Rachel said, we're gonna talk a little bit of manure today. And so when I was making this, I was first like, I don't know what I'm gonna say. And then 60 slides later, I was like, I have too many slides for 20 minutes. So that typically happens. I am going to do my best here to give you an overview, but just know that we have talked about, we talk about manure management almost every single time. And so because of that, we do have other videos and those links will be shared in the email that you get following this video. So if you have questions, go ahead and pop them in the chat and we'll address those at the end. So today we're gonna talk about manure and flooding considerations. And so I put the flooding in there because in North Dakota, we are in the ultimate fall right now and it has been a long winter, so much snow, and now there's gonna be a lot of water and we're excited about the water, but not so much about the flooding. Composting review, and so we're gonna just review it. We're not gonna go deep into it, but again, I have links to other things that you can go and watch and learn from that we've done in the past, and then sacrifice areas and dry lot management. We're gonna talk just a little bit about each of those. So first I like to start with the why. Why are we gonna manage our manure? Why do you wanna manage manure? Besides the fact that your horses make a lot of it and it's kind of annoying because there's a lot of it and you have to do something with it, I like to go into the why. Why do I want you to care about this? So manure contains valuable nutrients that plants need. If the nutrients are not used, they become a pollutant and ultimately they're wasted. We have a two-year-old daughter and we talk a lot about wasting lately. We don't waste our food. We don't waste toilet paper. We don't waste tissues, stop with the wipes. And so I also don't want you guys to waste these nutrients. So improper manure storage and land application, if you're not applying the stuff properly, whether that's manure or compost, whatever source it's in, you have excess soil nutrients which leads to surface runoff, it can also lead to leaching. So down through the soil profile and this also can lead to water contaminated with manure. So the picture over here on the right is of a harmful algal bloom or a hab and that's when we get a little too much nutrients in our waterways and that becomes toxic then to our water. So I want you to manage them because of that but also for your considerations, external parasites, so flies. We wanna manage our manure because of flies, bacteria and pathogens, rodents, odors, internal parasites, you guys spend hundreds of dollars and a lot of time thinking about internal parasites, let's manage that manure and make that a little bit less. Weed seeds is something that I want you to think about and then just visual appearance in general. So in North Dakota, there are manure, stacking or stockpiling guidelines for manure and not just North Dakota, every state has these rules. And so if you're not sure what your stacking or stockpiling guidelines are, you can talk to your local extension person, you can talk to your department of environmental quality or department of natural resources or soil conservations or NRCS offices. All of them should be able to give you access or help you find what your stacking or stockpiling guidelines are for your state. In North Dakota, we have a short-term and long-term or permanent and so short-term manure may not be stockpiled for more than nine months at a time and the same location cannot be used from year to year and then in our permanent you can use that for more than nine months. You can use the same site every year but there is some regulatory oversight that goes with that as far as the soil investigation goes and so just something to keep in mind there. Generally speaking, our sandy soils have rapid permeability. This allows nitrates to work through them quickly and so we wanna make sure then that we're using more of a loamy or clay soils. It's gonna slow the permeability. It's going to help retain some of the nitrate in the soil profile. So we're not leaching out those nutrients. Something else to consider when we're deciding where we're gonna put our manure, depth to groundwater and then location to our surface waters. Again, generally speaking in we don't store manure or we don't put our stockpile areas and gravel pits, excavation sites, flood plains. So that's becomes really important here this spring and then certain distances to water wells whether that's private or public. So, manure management this spring. A couple of things I want you to think about. Access, turn, clear, plan. Okay, so assess. So where is our manure currently? What did we do with it this winter? Was it a really long, hard winter? You didn't move enough snow. You didn't get it far enough back from the barn. You literally opened the barn door and put it there and put it there and put it there. Now you have a huge mound right outside the door. Is it still just laying in your corrals where you had your horses? Where is our manure right now and doesn't need to be moved before becoming inundated with floodwaters? So are your pens, once the thaw is complete, are your pens going to be completely drowned? Are you gonna have a mud mess situation or are they actually sitting in an area where there might be floodwaters? Do you need to move that? So assess where your manure is now and let's try to move that now if we can in the next couple of weeks here at least in North Dakota, Minnesota as we're starting to thaw. Turn, turn the snow bedding mountain to keep it heating. So right now I have a couple of my own snow bed mountains out in the corrals and it might just look like snow and bedding right now, but there's manure in there and it's heating. I almost guarantee if you go out and open those piles up there's gonna be some heat coming out of there. That's a good thing. We're getting breakdown. We're getting that, it's already starting to compost and so let's keep that going. Don't let it set until June or July and then say, we should go open that up and turn it. Turn it now to get that snow to melt, to use that water properly, but also to maintain that heat. Let's keep things heating. Clear, clear what you can now in your dry lot because it's almost guaranteed in several parts at least in Eastern North Dakota, we're gonna have again a mud mess on our hands. And so can we clear some of that snow out that hasn't melted yet. Clear some areas that we didn't quite get to. Stuff got piled up at the end of February and we just stopped moving it, okay? And so let's go ahead and move that now. Clear it out so we can hopefully with these beautiful North Dakota winds we're getting and probably in your states too, let's let that dry out a little bit so we can have a nice dry lot. And then plan for next year. So I put this one up here because I said to Paige and Kevin and Rachel before we started, I'm a little grumpy still. It's nice out, the sun is shining, the birds are chirping, the melt is on and we're excited about that, but I'm a little grumpy because we went through six months of winter and in two days, once we hit some really nice temps and some sunshine, we tend to forget what all of those six months felt like, okay? But I want you to look back and plan for next year. Take the lessons that the six months of winter gave us and let's plan for that. How can we move stuff around for next year? Where should we put our things? Take a couple of notes. I know it probably sounds crazy. We're gonna take notes about where the wind blew the snow. Yes, take note of where you have water setting right now. Where should your manure pile maybe go next year? When you're mucking out barns and you're cleaning out corrals, you're pushing snow around to keep things clear next winter. Where should you actually put it? Instead of where you put it this year if it's an issue. So let's plan for next year. So we're gonna assess, turn, clear and plan. Okay, so just a few benefits of composting. Like I said, I'm not gonna go deep into composting. It's a whole lesson by itself, but benefits of composting manure. You already have that manure piled up. It's piled up and it's heating awesome right now already. Let's use that. We can decrease our weed seeds. We can decrease our pathogens. We can decrease and kill our parasites, both flies and internal parasites. We're decreasing nutrient loss and we're increasing nutrient stability. We're also decreasing the volume that we have. And so who doesn't want less manure, but also a stable product at the end when you're done. So composting is just mixing of organic residues. And so piling, we're mixing, we're moisting, which the snow has already done for us. And then we get decomposition. Now there's a little more to it than that. I know that sounds really simple and very fast. It takes a little more management than that, but ultimately not much. And so in the end then you get, like I said, all of the reduced weed seeds, pathogens, parasites, volume, but then also a really great product to use or to sell. So composting, there's a whole workshop that I did with the University of Minnesota online. It's on YouTube, you can find it here. I'll put it in the email that I send out after this. So in a couple of days, you'll get an email with the link to this recording, as well as all of these resources. And so this link will be in there. It goes through step by step, all of the composting, the basics, the site selection, how do we turn it? How do we calibrate our spreaders? When are we gonna use it? What does that look like? What do we need to take into consideration? Okay, so we're gonna switch from composting now over to dry lots. So dry lots, sacrifice areas, exercise pads, we might call them a little bit of all of that. The basic goal of all of these areas, so some of us use these words interchangeably, but the basic goal is to sacrifice a small part of your grazing or hayland resource. So a lot about what Kevin talked about, your grazing and your hayland resources. We're gonna sacrifice a small portion of that to ensure the majority of your land has the rest it needs to stay healthy and productive. And so the first thing you're thinking is, what's a little bit, Mary? So a little bit's gonna depend on how many animals you have, what kind of resources you have, what kind of space you need. So shelter, water, feed and space are all things that you need to take into consideration when you're deciding what kind of sacrifice area you're going to have. So some of these factors to consider, location. Where will you store your manure in relation to surface and groundwater? So when you have this dry lot, you still have to manage the manure. And so where are you gonna store that manure in relation to the surface water and groundwater? So where's a good place to put that sacrifice area then? Soil characteristics and structure, will the soil type be able to withstand continuous hoof action? So this is gonna be an area where your horses are gonna be in stomping around, they're gonna be exercising, they're gonna be eating, they're gonna be drinking water in their shelter, they're gonna be there a lot. Basically it's a corral. And so don't pick your low area of the pasture that you might be thinking, I'm gonna sacrifice this area of my pasture to save the rest of it for grazing. And then you pick the low area where all the water drains and drains to it and it gets muddy as soon as they stomp around a little bit. So that's probably not an appropriate area. Ease of use, where is the sacrifice area in relation to your water, your food, manure storage areas, and then also your other paddocks? So is it easy for you to bring your horses into the sacrifice area and kick them back out then? Can you make it so it's easier to use and a little more convenient for you? Space, does your sacrifice area provide adequate space for exercise? How big or small is that? And is that something that your horse is gonna need? Miner collection is something else that we have to consider with our dry lots. Collecting manure and moving it out of that area will help reduce fly infestations. So how long will your manure storage area be used? Is your storage area large enough for your equipment? So I ask that because if you're gonna think long-term and you're going to have your storage area here but your sacrifice areas way across the yard is that convenient for you? How are you moving manure? Are you moving it in a wheelbarrow? Are you moving it in a small trailer? Are you moving it by a skid-steer load? How is that moving? And what is your convenience factor there? Fly control, how are you gonna manage for external parasites, such as flies? So they're laying their eggs in the top few inches of our manure. If we keep our sacrifice area clean of manure, put it in this compost area and turn it every few days, we're gonna disrupt that fly cycle. And so just another factor to consider. And then of course, there's also the internal parasites and Kevin had mentioned these. So removing manure daily from those paddocks or the sacrifice areas that we're gonna have is something a way to reduce our internal parasites. Be sure pastures and paddocks are well-drained. They're not overpopulated. Composting, composting can kill the parasites. Using a feeder for hay or grains, get it off the ground. So if you are feeding hay or grain in that sacrifice area, can we get it off the ground so they're not actually eating down there? Implementing fly control programs, keeping water troughs and bins clean. Routinely examined horses for infestations of parasites and I put on the bottom their work with your veterinarian. And so this would be a great time to check in with your veterinarian about, all right, so we're gonna have a sacrifice area or I'm going to be spreading some of the manure out on this pasture and what do we have to do for parasite issues? Kevin already mentioned some management that you can do as far as rotating. I mentioned composting. So composting is gonna kill those internal parasites if we get it up to proper temps. And so those are two management things that you can do. And then of course, work with your veterinarian as another tool. Okay, and then using manure. In North Dakota, there's no restrictions as far as when we can spread manure. Now it's not recommended. As Kevin said that we spread raw manure and we do like, if you're gonna go out and you're gonna be grazing those pastures, absolutely go drag them. Break that product up a little bit. It spreads it, it's a great fertilizer. Okay, and so we can spread it around but also we break it up into smaller chunks. We give better access to the sun and to the heat to kill some of those parasites that are there. Use common sense. If you are gonna spread manure or compost, if this goes for both, both of them are fertilizers, both have soil amendment properties in them as far as the nutrients go. Don't spread before, during or after a large rain event. We have access to smartphones. We know when it's gonna rain almost down to the minute. And so we just wanna make sure that we're not doing it before, during or after a large rain event. Don't spread over water, quality will be compromised. Just keep those common sense things in mind and that goes for all states and all states are different as far as when you can and can't spread. So again, going back to your regulatory department or your extension folks and asking when can we spread this stuff. So in review, manure contains valuable nutrients that plants need. If the nutrients are not used, they become a pollutant and they're wasted, don't waste. Composting reduces weed seeds, pathogens, parasites and the volume that we're gonna have to deal with. The goal of the dry lot area is to sacrifice a small part to keep the bigger parts productive. It's gonna become especially important this year as we're waiting for the sun to get its heat and melt the snow that's everywhere. And so be patient. Proper management can lead to reduced parasite loads and flies and then also just using common sense. With that, there's a few resources. I myself have a resource especially for the manure part of stuff. Cabin is a great resource for the grazing and hay management. The livestock and poultry environmental learning community another great place to go if you have questions about manure or manure management or compost. Any of your local extension offices whether that's here in North Dakota or your extension programs in other states have people that want to help with your questions whether that's horse questions, manure questions or grazing questions. And then here's a few more resources just different things that we talked about today. And again, these will all be sent out at a later time. With that, I think I'll turn it over to Paige and you guys are more than welcome to pop questions in as far as if you have questions about either grazing or manure. All right, Mary, are you ready for your questions? Here we go. So the first one is a question from someone that uses straw. They do not see it breaking down as nicely as you had in your example picture. So how long will that take in general? And maybe can you provide some tips for getting compost to break down quicker? Yeah, so the larger the carbon source the longer the time is going to take to break down. And so certainly that is something that we see folks that have wood chips that almost comes out perfect, right? And when they bring their manure out of the stall or out of the barn, it just comes out beautifully. The rest of us have to work a little harder. And so turning is going to be something that becomes important the more access that our manure and our microbes inside there have to the actual pieces of carbon. So the carbon is the straw. We have a better ability to break that down. And so we can, we do see breakdown of the straw and hay, even corn stalks. We will see complete breakdown of that stuff. It's just going to take a little longer. So moisture control, if it is completely dry, if your pile is just bone dry, moisture is going to be something you're going to want to add to it. Now here, we have more of an issue right now with it maybe being a little too wet. And so we're going to have to turn it a couple of times to get it to dry out a little bit. So we're not drowning our microbes and they have the ability then to come back and start working. So it's just going to take a little more time on the turning. A lot of that stuff we go over in the calm hosting video series I had referenced earlier. And so all of that stuff is in there. Perfect, excellent. The next one is what works best for breaking down the manure and spreading it out when dragging the pastures. So I'm not 100% sure if that's referring to the composting process or if they're talking about maybe manure spreader recommendations or a type of drag recommendation. Maybe you could address any or all of those and we'll get some follow-up. Yeah, so let me just scroll back up to the question again. Yeah, use a hero doesn't damage the grass. And so I would say that and then if you are going to use a manure spreader so if you do have, I know that this is probably referencing just breaking it down right out in the pasture. If you are going to spread it out as far as take it from the corral or pasture or sorry from the corral or sacrifice area and go and spread it. Using a spreader that has some kind of beater system on it is going to help break that up break up the chunks a little bit. Also keep in mind if you have a certain area where you maybe had bedding for your horses and then you have a lot of manure over here. So if you're going to go and spread the bedding there's going to be more chunks than such in there might be a really good idea I think and I know this isn't necessarily the best thing or easiest but composting it, right? Putting that manure with the carbon source turning it a couple of times is going to help break it up a little bit. But yeah, out on pasture, Kevin says use the harrow. Yeah, and if you don't have a harrow aren't interested in going and purchasing one I've seen some pretty creative homemade things using pieces of chain link fence or something else that will lightly scratch the surface and spread that manure around without ripping up your grass or damaging their root system. I always find it interesting you can almost always find a used harrow at an auction sometimes it doesn't take much a four-foot harrow it works great that's what we use just a little four-foot harrow. Yeah, something to hold behind an ATV or a small vehicle. The other question it looks like Kevin addressed as well but we can address it verbally and that was a question about tree foil. Kevin, do you have any comments on that? Yeah, and we do see tree foil a lot and especially in western Minnesota throughout Minnesota even in the valley we'll see it is not as palatable as alfalfa for horses it does not cause bloat like alfalfa did I know horses don't really bloat it also doesn't have the quality that alfalfa has so it tends to not be as big an issue turns out digestive issues with the tree foil versus an alfalfa. So I have tree foil in my pasture my horse won't eat it I don't like it that much but they have other grasses to pick from so I wouldn't worry about the tree foil as a problem. All right, we've run out of questions in the chat box I guess this would be the last call for any questions on grazing management or manure management or our specialist on today with us. Hearing none, I'm gonna turn it back over to Rachel and if you think of anything throw it in the chat. I just wanna say thanks again for joining us today we will be sending out a survey or I'm sorry an email after this that'll have all of the links and all of the resources that we've used Mary just popped up a poll to talk about if this was extremely useful for you or not useful at all, please let us know so that we can edit and change our webinars as we go along. There will be access to the recording and that will actually come out in the email as well. We do have a lot of our webinars already posted on our YouTube site Mary has the link that she will also send out in that email. So if someone you know missed today they will be getting that email as well so as long as you've registered for this event and the next ones make sure to register for the next ones as well if you haven't Mary will send out that link also in the email. So that's a lot of information that's gonna be going out to you here shortly. Just checking it looks like we do have a couple more questions in the chat I don't know if you wanted to address those page before we got going. A couple of questions for Kevin. So Kevin, how do we get rid of hoary elissum in our pastures? If I have hoary elissum what I usually do is grab a 240 product we'll do a good job with it. You can spike it but I'm not gonna put a herbicide names out there but visit with your local extension agent and they'll give you some great resources for what herbicides work the best. There was a question on ryegrass for laminitis and horses do like ryegrass but it's lush it will also have an issue high protein, low waters and you can have some issues with ryegrass so make sure it's a little bit further along for you crazy. But not headed out, they don't like it. How about Foxtail? Foxtail barley or Foxtail millet? Mollet. Millet? I don't like to use millet Foxtail in particular with horses because it contains a glucoside in it that can cause liver damage and horses tend to be more prone with it than cattle. So I tend to not recommend Foxtail millet for horses. How to get rid of it? How to get rid? Well, it's probably not Foxtail millet that's probably Foxtail barley. And that's a great question. Foxtail barley is a very resilient weed. If you have Foxtail barley that means you've probably been grazing it fairly hard and there's more moist areas. You can go in there and seed a wheat grass that will do well in those areas. Burn down the Foxtail barley, put in your seed and give it some recovery time for the seed to germinate and come up. They just purchased the land and it's been overgrazed for so long and I have a whole lot of weed problems. So that's why I was asking. If it's big enough area, I would almost break it up. I don't hate to say tillage, but you may have to start over with that. So you can get a really nice grass base for the horses. I would also recommend talking to your local extension agent about herbicide control prior to breaking up so that you don't end up with extra seed in the ground. Yeah, good point. Thank you. All right, seeing as it's one o'clock, I just wanna say thank you everyone for joining us today and we will be sending out that email here shortly. You guys have a wonderful rest of your week and I hope we can see you next week, Wednesday, same time, noon to one and we'll be excited to see you then.