 Good afternoon. Good morning. Wherever you're at. Welcome. Thank you for joining us. We, this is our second in a little series that we're doing just on horse management. So our first one was about manure management. And now we're going to go straight into grazing and we were just talking a minute ago about the grass growing and how awesome that is. And so I think perfect timing. I think Paige and Rachel picked the perfect time to have the grazing webinar for our horses. And then this webinar, like I said, is being recorded. It'll be available on our website. So on the livestock extension website. And then you just click on manure nutrient management and horse management webinars. And that'll take you right there. So we have a, there's four of us today and all of us are speaking, we all have a part. And so we are going to rock and roll through this so we have enough time for everybody and just as a side note. This is also being shared on Facebook live right now. And so those folks, I don't believe can really see any of the participants or what's happening over here, they can just see the presentation and who's presenting right now. And so just an FYI for that something new we're trying. Okay, so today is going to mainly be based around grazing grazing management. And so with that, what types of grasses fertilizing pastures, toxic plants grass seed what's the best grass seed or and what are some of Kevin's favorites grazing strategies fencing strategies when to graze dry lot management so if it's grazing, we're covering it and that includes dry lot management with some manure at the end so you get to hear from me after a while. Okay, who is here. So we did this last time and I appreciate you guys doing it this time as well. So we have a awesome contingency from North Dakota again, a few from Minnesota as well so thanks for joining us. We also have a handful of folks coming in, just from other states, and then Peru and Australia as well. So, Kevin now you know who's watching us and who's who's registered for this, and maybe more interesting to our speakers is this slide the grazing strategies per participant and so out of the people that had registered as of 10 o'clock this morning, I went and grabbed how many people were doing what strategy. So 30 people are rotationally grazing versus 23 are continuous, and then we had a handful dry lotting some that have no horses and then some that were other. And so I was a little surprised I didn't think that many people were rotationally grazing so that was a surprise to me. And so just so we know who we have here today with us. Okay, so our first speaker is going to be Kevin said of it Kevin is our range land specialist for NDSU extension and he's going to talk to us a little bit about everything pasture management, especially in terms of horses and how to manage that so I'm going to stop I'm going to let Kevin take over so let me turn my video off here Kevin and I will let you take over and you can talk about what's in your pasture. Thanks Mary I sure appreciate it and it's nice to see a good turnout for another webinar. The webinar sessions have been new to me and so it's been kind of fun to do these opportunities that hit people that normally couldn't make it to North Dakota. And so today I'm going to kind of talk about what's in your pasture and kind of look at what grass species you may be looking at what grass pieces you mean when a plant. So we'll get a little bit of management hints to make that grass more productive and and more sustainable for your horses. I've raised horses for over 30 years. And so even though I'm a range guy, arrange person I have been in horses for most of my life in reality so it's been always fun to incorporate equine science and equine management within some of our range land talks. So these types of grasses in North Dakota and of course this also fits in much of the northern Great Plains, what you may have in your pastures are the good grasses bad grasses, and then look at ways to manage them to get the most out of them. So we'll talk about fertilizing, as most of our pastures that we use for horses are planted pastures and they typically become deficient of nutrients. So why would you fertilize when would you fertilize and how would you fertilize. We'll look at some plants toxic to horses from North Fonda, North Dakota. We're fortunate in North Dakota we don't have a lot of toxic plants as for either horses or cattle. And so it's one of those that when we have them, they tend to be rare, but we do have a few plants that tend to be horses tend to like or find and, and then you have some issues. And then we'll kind of end with where to secure grass seed if you're looking to plant a new new pasture for horses, or if you have some pastures that look a little bit light in the grass production can you oversee these pastures. We'll talk about a little options there as well. So I took some pictures on Monday I went out to look at how our grasses are looking right now as the spring approaches and we got some moisture here and so the grass has popped. And probably one of the most common grasses you'll find in our pastures, especially horse pastures in particular are our bone grasses. Another one you see is smooth broam grass. And this is a picture of smooth broam grass here in the picture and wondering about broam grass you can always tell you have broam by having the W in the leaf. So W or M putting how you look at it, and it tells you you have a broam grass horses actually like broam grass it's a very palatable grass, high quality feed, and it's fairly productive throughout the northern plains and into Southern Canada. So it's a common plant we'll see in pastures. It's also one of the more common grasses we'll see in our ditches. And so we do see a lot of ditches put up for hay. And so broam grass will be a common one you'll see. One thing about broam like a lot of our cool using grasses, once they become mature, they become less palatable and low in quality so this is a mature, smooth broam grass stand, a fairly solid stand. The nice thing about this dad here is the leaf tissue is still green. So you still have some palatability and quality in the stand when they get fairly brown quality goes down and then horses tend to stay away from those that grass in particular, once it gets brown. So it's one of those grasses if you have in your pastures. It's a good grass to have. And so it's one that that will look for our pastures is a good is a good indicator. One thing about overgrazed horse pastures, we tend to see broam grass go out of those pastures, and they tend to be invaded by the next grass, which is Kentucky bluegrass. Here's our picture of Kentucky bluegrass in the middle here. I just took this on Monday of bluegrass has what's called a long skinny keeled shaped leaf. And it's the same bluegrass that you have in your lawns in North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana and Southern Canada. It's one of them grasses that is common in our pastures. It's even common in our rangelands. And it's one that you'll see in some of our mixes. It's very high quality. It's modern enters of production. So it's not as productive as smooth broam. And it's very palatable and horses like it when it's in this phase when it's immature. It is a common invader grass that we'll see invade on broam grass fields, as well as native rangelands. So when this plant matures as you can see in this picture here, it doesn't you see it's not a very tall plant gets about a foot tall. Once it gets to this phase, horses tend to actually stay away from it. It's palatable. And it's one of those grasses that doesn't get the palatability as it matures out. This is one of them grasses that if you have it in your pastures, you do want to rotational graze it. If you can keep it immature, it will always be palatable and horses will graze it. If it gets mature on you, you should actually mow it to keep it vegetative. If it gets to this phase we're starting to get brown as well. You just will see horses will no longer consume that grass. What you look for in your pastures know it's a good grass. It's just not the most desirable of the plants of the grass that we put in a plant mix. You know, another one will find that's common, especially in the Western Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, in Alberta is Crested wheatgrass. So those of us who have horses in the middle of the North Dakota or even Eastern part, we would never use this grass in a in a horse mix, but it's quite common. You can get into the Western Dakotas in Montana. It's a perennial, perennial grass that grows better on drier soils. So it's recommended for those areas where you have precipitation of usually less than 14 to 15 inches. It's palatable, but it's immature and it's high producing. This is a grass so that once it becomes mature, it really has very little feed value for horses, and horses by the most part will actually stay away from this grass and find anything else to graze once it gets to this phase. And you can see it's a fairly, we call it a wolfy plant, very poor quality, very poor palatability, but it's one of those grasses you can look at in the Western Dakotas in Montana and Wyoming. Another one I put in here is one that you'd say, why don't we've got quackgrass as an option. It's not really an option to plant, but it's one of those grasses that we'll see common in horse pastures because it does take grazing pressure well. This is, it looks very similar to smooth bromegrass, except for it doesn't have the W and it typically has a pinch on the very end of the leaf. So if you have quackgrass in your pastures, horses will actually like it and consume it when it's immature. It's got moderate production. It's another common and baby grass on overgrazed pastures. If you have some saline soils where you have pastures for horses, quackgrass is common invader on those sites, and is much more desirable than the other option, which is a foxtail barley plant, which becomes very unpalatable. So it's one of those grasses you can look for. It's in your pasture. You know it's got value for horses. Once again, you need to want to graze it while it's in the immature stage. This is a picture of a typical wheatgrass. This is also quackgrass. You can see as it heads out, just becomes a little less palatable like most of our wheat grasses. When we look at planting pastures for horses, we typically don't put in wheat grasses unless it's, unless you've got some salty areas because of its unpalability once it gets mature. So the other option you'll see, especially in the western Dakotas, in the western part of U.S., is horses be grazed on native pasture. So this is actually a rangeland that's never been tilled. It's probably one of your best options for grazing any class of livestock, including horses. It has a diversity of plants, diversity of grasses, also has your broadly forbs, and some shrubs. It gives you the greatest wind of opportunity for grazing throughout the growing season because it has different plants that fit different seasons. And so if you have native range, it's one of your best options. The problem with native range is it tends to be lower producing on marginal lands where you're crested as well in marginal lands and your grown does a little better. We've had producers or we've had some growers look at planting their pastures back to native range. It's extremely expensive. It takes a lot of time to do. And it's one of those that I typically will not recommend for horses unless you've got a lot of acres and it makes sense. But for the most part, it's not very cost effective. It tends to not be as productive as say a brome or a crested or a wheatgrass. It is the prettiest of them all. As you can see in this picture here, gives you the greatest aesthetics. It's a great place to go riding your horses. Range land to me is one of the prettiest areas that provides the greatest aesthetic value for riding a horse. So we look when we look at managing these these these these pastures, of course, grazing management in terms of stock rate tends to be a driver and how well your pastures are doing. But a lot of our exotic pastures like a brome or a crested or a bluegrass become deficient of nutrients. Once they get to be about four to five years of age. And so they tend they need to be fertilized if you want to maintain production. This is just a lawn I'm showing in this picture, but this is a fertilized lawn. Nice and green, very dense. This is an unfertilized lawn. You see the more brown or tissue that stands not as vigorous and tends to let produce less production. And so fertility is a way to manage these pastures to get more out of them for your horses. This is another picture taken I believe in Nebraska that looks at us a test trip here for fertility and a control strips strips so you can see there's quite a bit of difference if you fertilize your pastures for production as well as quality. And so we get the question, you know, we look at fertilizing pastures we do not recommend fertilizing range. So if you do have range as your resource for pasture management. Do not fertilize these pastures. They will basically tend to go to bluegrass in the end, and you lose your diversity across the area. So brolgrass crushing wheatgrass intermediate wheatgrass Timothy orchard grass or common seeded pastures for horses that do need to be fertilized. Use you by year four or five of the seeding. And then once you fertilize it you can fertilize it about every other year to maintain that production and quality. And so for the data, the data out there on fertility and it will give you more production and will give you a higher quality grass. So what do you fertilize with and when it comes to grasses in the northern plains. There's one mineral that becomes deficient and only one that will drive production. And that's nitrogen. We tend to only fertilize with nitrogen to increase the production and palatability of those grasses. You can put on phosphorus, you can put on potassium, they cost you money, but your production tends to not increase from those two additions. So for the measurements, usually your number one source you're going to look at in the western Dakotas you're looking at about 40 to 60 pounds of actual nitrogen per acre. And in the eastern part of the states, you're looking at 60 to 80 pounds of actual material for that production. And once you do it the first year, you tend to do it every other year to maintain that production. So when do you fertilize. If you're going to fertilize we should be fertilizing now, usually about late April to mid May is the best time to fertilize. Usually the only time that I recommend fertilizing pastures. A lot of people will talk about fertilizing in the fall, which you'll do in your lawns. But you fertilize in the fall tends to increase root production and not biomass. So the most common one that we tend to use is urea. It's a 46% nitrogen product. You can buy it at any local elevators, and it's just a broadcast type of fertilizer so it's fairly easy to do. If you have a small fertile a small broadcaster, or you can contract it out to get it fertilized. This is just another picture of urea. You can see it's a small granular product that spreads really easy on your pastures. You're going to what you're going to do is basically top dress those pastures about this time of year. And once you top dress it you're going to basically look for that to be incorporated into the end of the plant material. So we want to fertilize when the temperatures are below 70 degrees Fahrenheit when it gets above 70 degrees Fahrenheit, we tend to see volatilization of the nitrogen. So we want to do that about 50 to 60 degrees, and hope there's some rain that follows you within the first couple days. So there's a picture of it once it hits the ground. Once you get some rain on top of that it breaks down and goes into the soil, and then those grasses have access to that that nitrogen. So when we look at we I'm going to kind of transfer from fertility to what we commonly see in some of our horse pastures and that's weeds. And I'm going to concentrate on toxic weeds today, but what you'll see a lot of overgrazed pastures you just tend to see a lot of annual weeds. The one I have in the picture here is actually Mary's tail or horseweed. It's a common annual plant we'll see many of our pastures, if they tend to get overgrazed. A common one we'll see right now coming up that's even starting to flower is dandelion dandelion is a short lived perennial. Some will call it a biennial but it tends to live longer than that. Very commonly found overgrazed horse pastures overgrazed cattle pastures, wherever you got some decent soils you'll see dandelion coming in. And it's not a very difficult plan to control if you're controlling at the right time. And then you got noxious weeds is just a big picture I took on Monday of Canada thistle is just starting to show up by law you need to control your doctors weeds. But that's a separate talk today is just to look for noxious weeds if you have them. Canada this was the most common one you're going to see in horse pastures and absent wormwood. And so create a strategy in place to control those to reduce spread. So that there's another picture Canada thistle that actually got bitten by a horse you can see the top been grazed off. So look at toxin toxic weeds and every spring we get the calls on on I had some have a horse died or horse got that seriously ill and they think toxic weeds are a problem. And so we'll look at what the options are. The one thing in North Dakota we don't have a lot of toxic weeds that's true of South Dakota, even true of Eastern Montana and Eastern Wyoming. And so probably the most common one that I get calls on is the red maple trees are your maple trees, which includes the box elder trees, other maple trees, they tend to be toxic to horses, usually as the leaves is the most toxic part of the plant. And all it takes is about three pounds of ingestion per thousand pounds weight of a horse to cause death. You consume less than that you can see some, some, some illnesses and some staggering issues will see some severe anemia, depression, increased breathing as a toxic level comes in there. They continue to consume it. You can see death in those horses. Even the seeds have a little bit of toxicity in them, but the leaves are the primary source of toxicity on your maple trees. The other one we'll see a lot is choke cherry. We always think about choke cherries are really nice fruit very good to eat, but it is extremely toxic to horses. If you eat too much of the choke cherries, they get cyanide poisoning. And what typically happens if horses get into choke cherries, they're eating the leaves on it, they will tend to die before you even find them. And so it's one of them, the toxics that's extremely toxic for any class of livestock, including humans. And so when you see a stressed or wilted leaves in particular are quite toxic, and the bark can be somewhat toxic as well. So that's the flower of a choke cherry. We won't see any flowers for another probably four to six weeks, but it kind of just show it looks a lot like an apple tree, the way the leaves come out, and the flowers are somewhat similar to an apple or obviously close to a cherry. So death usually occurs before you find them, you're going to look for flared nostrils, labored breathing, lack of coordination, and then trembling and agitation within your horse. Whenever you see trembling or agitation or the horses just seem off terms of coordination, there's something wrong. And so you're going to look at toxicity is one of them. And if you know you have choke cherries, along your edges of your pastures, or in your past year, know that it can be a potential problem. Now I'll tell you this that choke cherries not the most palatable of all the plants and so them to graze choke cherry that tells me that your grass is probably short. Or you might have an individual animal that does like choke cherry. And that's just something that will happen with individuals within a group of horses, or any group of livestock that you can that you're looking at. Other plants that may be toxic, but not as palatable. And this is the true horse tail is the one if you're ever a kid and you went out to the wet meadow zones and you picked this plant that you can pull apart and put back together. That's your horse tail. Local weed is a common one you'll see talked about in the horse industry, especially if you're from the Western Dakotas in Wyoming. Horses tend to not like it that much, but there tends to be individuals that will consume it. Once they eat it, they tend to get get tend to like it, and then you'll see low chism within a horse. And those horses that have low chism tends to stagger, it affects their vision and their nervous system to the to the eye, we tend to jump a lot or they'll see a little, a little cattle trail and they'll jump over it and they do seem like to really off in terms of their movement. Milkweeds can be toxic, but tend to be very unpalatable for horses. If you're from the Southwest part of North Dakota, in the South Dakota Minnesota oak trees are common in oak leaves and the acorns are both toxic to horses as well. Poison hemlock you'll find in our wet meadow zones, whether not very palatable plant, but it's extremely deadly if they eat part of the lower part of the plant or the root and it will kill them within about about an hour. So this is the plant that I tend to look for. If I have plenty of forage for horses, I don't worry about it. If the passions are getting short and you see them walking into these wet meadow zones, all they have to do is pull a road up by accident and consume it, and it will tend to kill the horse. The last one are ragwarts and we'll see a lot of the ragwarts are common in Minnesota and Iowa. We'll see them in the prairies of North Dakota. The one you find in the wet zones tends to be the most toxic of the ragwarts, a very unpalatable plant. Rarely would see a horse even eat this plant, but it comes down to situations. If you have ragwarts in your wet meadow zones that have salt in them, life's not going to go to the salt areas and consume the salt, but the pasture is short, they may start to consume some of these plants. So I wanted to look for, if I do have ragwarts in my pasture, I want to make sure I've got plenty of grass for those horses to consume. And so the biggest one that causes problems with horses is probably nitrogen accumulating plants or nitrate toxicity, and you'll see this mainly in our annual broadleafs in the northern plains. Probably the most common one we'll see is kosha, and kosha is fairly palatable in this phase. When it's young, like you're seeing right now, this plant is palatable and you'll see horses consume it. I mean, they're going to get toxicity levels, but if you'd enough of it, you can see some issues in terms of nitrogen toxicity. Another plant that's common is a Russian thistle. This is a mature Russian thistle plant, also not as palatable as the kosha. A lamb's quarters tends to be another one you'll see consumed, also a very palatable plant, and horses will eat the lamb's quarters more than they will other ones of the plants. So you don't have to consume a fair amount of it for death to occur. What typically happens with horses, if you get nitrate toxicity, is they run a high fever. And that high fever will cause problems first, normally you can correct the problem and they'll come out of it, but you can see death. With cattle, it's a bit different. They tend to not get as high a fever when you tend to find them that you tend to kill the cattle before you find them. So these horses give you a little bit of a clue in terms of a fever before something bad happens. So this is a picture of a lamb's quarter. It's one of them plants that actually even humans can, it's a fairly tasty plant, and I actually eat this with myself out about in the pasture. Not a lot, just a little. So let's end with a look at sources of seed or if you're going to seed a new pasture, what could you seed it with, where can you buy seed, and that's true of also overseeding existing pastures. I always tell producers or horse growers, visit with their local seed dealer. Whoever you have in your local town, whether it's a CHS or a store that may have the seed you're looking for, I go there first. From there I usually look at some larger seed companies. I'll give you my example here because that's who I use in West Fargo, but you may have a dealer in Bismarck, you'll have a dealer in Minot, Grand Forks, Dickinson. You can also visit with those with those dealers on getting seed. And so I'm going to end here with my favorite horse pasture mixes with the Northern Plains. My favorite grass is metalbrown grass. Horses love this grass. It's a very palatable grass. It's also a bunch grass, so it's not an invading grass, and you can plant it with alfalfa. It makes a really nice pasture as well as makes a really nice hay for horses. If you're going to graze it, I like alfalfa to be less than 20% of the stand, not necessarily as a bloat issue since horses don't bloat, but if you have horses that tend to be founder prone, the high quality of alfalfa can lead to foundering in some of your horses. The other good option is metalbrown orchard grass mix. They both have great regrowth potential. The orchard grass is more of a southern species, more of southeast North Dakota, eastern South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa. Those are great areas for orchard grass, and that makes a really nice mix for horses if that's an option for you. The second option is probably a lower palatable grass, but the wheat grasses are very easy to establish. They're cheap to make a nice pasture. There are those pastures though that if you let them get away on you, so they mature out on you, they tend to be less palatable and less grazing. You see a lot more spot grazing from horses. What they'll do is graze areas, and they'll keep them short, and then the rest of the areas get tall, and you have a very uneven use out there. You can manage those pastures by haying them once a year to get the regrowth out of them. But that's kind of a second option, especially if you have saline areas, that's probably your number one option on saline or salt areas. The third option if you're in the western Dakotas is crested wheatgrass in El Belfa. This is true of Montana or Wyoming. Crested wheatgrass is one of those grasses that you wouldn't think about as a horse pasture, but if you have some pastures in the Dickinson area or if you're down along Rapid City, it's an option. You'd go with the fairway variety. It's more of a sod forming crested wheatgrass. It does very well. The nice thing about crested wheatgrass is you can actually graze that one pretty hard, and it will come back as long as you give it some recovery. And so when you look at seeding these, you're going to want to seed these grasses. Right about now, usually early April to late May, is your window. Your second window is that mid-October time period from early November. It's called dormant seeding. Both of them are very good options. And depending on what you have for soil types, if water is an issue, the dormant tends to be more prone to be used on wetter areas. But those would be the time periods I would tell you to look at for seeding. And so if you're going to look at overseeding, and I get this call a lot as I have a horse pasture, it's been grazed fairly hard. I have a lot of bare areas. What can I do to increase my stand without tilling it up and starting over? I'm going to first tell you this is probably the least successful of the producing pastures, because the problem is typically you've overgrazed it. You have to be able to fix the overgrazing issue first before you can put in another seed of those bare areas. I've actually done this to pastures. I will overseed with the brome, using metal brome. Or I'll overseed with the bluegrass, because bluegrass is very easy to establish, and it tends to fill in those gaps fairly quick. So those are the two I usually look at. So fixed overgrazing tended to seed what the species you already have in the mix. If you don't know what you have in the mix, then I'd go with the brome as an option and seed it early or again late as your two options. And if you can drill it in, that's the most successful technique. The second, of course, is broadcasting it on and hope for some rain. From that, I'm going to turn it over back to Mary and so we'll introduce the next speaker. Okay, awesome. Thanks Kevin. With that, we are going to actually switch over to Rachel. And so Rachel, if you want to come on here and we'll get you access. Here we go, remote. While we're getting that set up, Kevin, we have a question for you and the Q&A. Do you see much for horses getting sick from bur oak in North Dakota? That's a good question. And where I have seen some issues in the southeast part of the state where we have a fair amount of bur oak trees that tends to occur from the acorns, not the leaves. It's rare, but I would not say it's impossible. But on the average, I would say it's not an issue for North Dakota. Okay, well, I'm going to talk about some grazing strategies today. And we kind of hit that earlier where Mary had that pie chart. And everyone was talking or had mentioned kind of their strategies, the continuous grazing, limited turnout time, or rotational grazing. Continuous grazing is when that horse is always on a pasture. And usually you want around two to two and a half acres per thousand pound animal when you're doing a continuous grazing. And that kind of depends that the amount of animal per acre kind of depends on what kind of grass you have as well. The limited turnout time you're probably going to see in a stable type situation. So if somebody has animals in either at night in a stall and then turns out during the day or vice versa. So if you're doing a lot of riding and those horses come in during the day and are turned out at night. And the next one, rotational grazing is the one I kind of want to talk a little bit more about today because that is going to be the most beneficial for most situations. So if you have a larger pasture and you want to use it efficiently, breaking it up into some either smaller pastures or locks or paddocks is going to be the best way to efficiently use that smaller piece. So if you have two horses, if they're like my horses, you're going to see kind of those areas where they eat a lot and it is, it is golf course quality putting green area and then other areas they leave quite a bit of grass on where you get your legs wet as you're walking through it. So making sure that those horses are a little bit more efficient about grazing is is where you're going to see this rotational grazing really become a benefit. So when you look at it for rotational grazing, the, the sacrifice area that you have is is usually where you're going to have either shelter or water water is your main concern, because that's going to be where you want your pastures to go back to that water source. So when you're thinking about setting this up, think about your water source, first of all, or if you don't have a well out there or water out there, where you're pulling your hose from to fill it up, or where it's the easiest for you to to haul, haul in your water. So that's going to be where you focus your main portion of it off of. I know some people have, you know, waters in the center of center of their paddocks. And that's what where they're going to base the remainder of their pastures off of wherever they can get back to it from from there. So if you have two horses, you're able to to more efficiently graze that first pasture, then you can move them to the second. And usually when we're talking about rotational grazing. We want to talk about days that you can graze those paddocks. So in the early spring, a lot of depending up again depending upon what grass you have there. You should be able to graze those paddocks for seven to 14 days, and then move them over to the next one and give those paddocks a rest. So a seven to 14 day rest, hopefully, so that you can get some of that grass growth growth back. As you move later into the summer, you're going to need to rest those paddocks longer, but you can also graze them a little bit longer. And then in the fall you'll have to shorten up again. To make sure that that the grass has time to establish a deep root system so that it can overwinter. So when we talk about fencing for these product type situations or rotational grazing situations. I took this from the extension website for the University of Minnesota that they have a lot of good resources off of there for fencing considerations. So a wood fence with with post in rail or plastic or vinyl fencing steel pipe. Those are going to be your perimeter fences so your main fence area that'll that'll hold everything in. And then when we get to high tensile wire electric wire electric tape that is going to be the more temporary fencing that you can use in between each paddock. So if you're out there and and doing a move instead of having a more permanent fence for those for those locks and you're moving wire instead to create those smaller paddocks. So having step in posts or electric wire or electric tape is going to be easier for you so it just depends on your situation and what you like you know those pretty vinyl fences that look so beautiful as you're going through that Kentucky area. It may not work for you where you're out and nobody else can see so you're going to do probably a post wood post in rail fence or or some some other options. So here's some options of perimeter fencing that I've seen locally for us. So this is actually oil field pipe. It's all welded together and it has five or six different levels to it. And then there's also barbless wire. And that's a four strand there this fence it's really hard to see I was hoping that it would show up a little bit better. You can see there's there's two or three T posts in between would post to help make sure that that is a substantial fence for a longer period of time so knowing that your perimeter fence you're probably going to spend a little bit more money on and then those paddock more temporary fences, you can you can use not quite as much so our temporary fence here is just a single hot wire. And as you can see there, they're in an area that's fairly grazed down. This is actually their wintering area kind of their sacrifice area. And then this is, this is the next step to go into. And this was taken not too long ago so just know that it's going to, it's going to be a while before those horses go on that grass. And what it looks like there are a ton of options if you go down the aisle at any of your, your farm stores you're going to see so many options so it just is what works for you and what you like braided electric wire electric tape that high tensile electric wire. This isn't used to electric fence make sure you, you, they're able to see it. So you can put ribbon on it or set it up and have kind of a test fence so that they know they know their boundaries is essentially it so that they don't run through it. The T posts with insulators is another option. It's a little, a little more temporary if you wanted, or I'm sorry, a little more permanent. If you wanted something more temporary these step in posts here are a good option. If you're just moving, moving your fence as you go. So it all just depends on what kind of setup you have and what what you plan on using so up next I'm going to move this over. It looks like two page who will be next for presenting All right. Looks like I'm just trying to get control the screen. Perfect. All right, so I'll talk about when to initiate grazing and when to stop grazing and let your pastors rush rest. Ideally, we want to go with the leaf stage method. And that's probably the most accurate and you want to first determine the type of grasses that you have in your pasture. And after that, the majority of the grasses in North Dakota, we would want to start grazing when they reach that three to three and a half leaf stage. On the pictures on the left. We have an example of a grass that has one, two, three mature leaves and then this picture on the right we have one that grass that has 123 and the fourth leaf is just starting to emerge about halfway. So this is a grass at the three and a half leaf stage. That's the ideal time to turn your horses out onto your pastures. The second way that some people use that maybe isn't quite as scientific and as more of a rule of thumb is to just go by the height of the grass. And that's when you want to start with the majority of your grasses are six to eight inches tall. This isn't going to work for all grasses because some grasses are going to be mature headed out at a height lower than that and that's going to be dependent upon the environmental conditions as well. If you follow that rule of thumb, you want to stop grazing when the majority of the grasses are four inches tall or half of it. We want to use that take half leave half recommendation so that we're not overgrazing our pastures. For more detailed guidance on how to determine growth stage and determining when the grazing pastures are ready to graze. You can look at this publication from NDSU. We also have some of those resources at the end. So why don't we want to graze too early? It's common. We get excited in North Dakota. We have long winters. We want to get our horses out there as soon as it greens up just a little bit. But if you graze too early, you're reducing the number of leaves on that plant in the leaf area that's needed for photosynthesis and growth of that plant. So you're going to reduce the plant health and vigor. You're going to end up with thinner stands of grass in your pasture, lower total forage production throughout the grazing season. And then you have increased wheat pressure disease and insect infestations. The other thing to keep in mind is that even if you overgraze or graze too early, just occasionally, it can take several years to regain the original productivity. So we really want to stress that you want to make sure that you're turning out at the appropriate time. On the flip side of that, you can also graze too late. And if some of those grasses reach maturity, like Kevin was talking about, they're not as palatable and the horses aren't going to consume them and trample them. Something to keep in mind that when you're rotating out of cell grazing and out of pastures, it's a good idea to mow the grass that they did not consume. Horses often don't consume areas where they defecate in. They kind of pick their little bathroom areas. You want to mow those to keep the plants in a vegetative stage if possible, and that'll increase production or palatability of your pastures. Here's a couple of pictures. I just want to stress again the detrimental things that can occur when you overgraze. So if you remove more than half of that leaf tissue, you also have a reduction in the percent of root growth. So on the chart on the left, once you reach 60% of leaf volume removed, and remember you're only supposed to be taking half approximately, you're going to slow that growth down by 50%. If you consume, your horses consume 80 to 90% of the plant, the root growth completely stops. So here on the right side, we have a plant, number one, that was grazed pretty short after grazing, and about 10 days later, it's just starting to grow back 15 days, two weeks after you remove them from that pasture. The grass still isn't up to the original height, and look at what it does to the reduction in the root growth as well, and the roots are what are going to access the moisture and nutrients needed for those plants. Whereas if you don't graze as short on the second plant after a couple weeks, the plant has a healthier root system and also more vegetative production. I want to switch gears and talk about transitioning your horses to spring grass after being on a dry hay forage diet throughout the winter. Typically our spring grasses, they grow rapidly during the day as the sun comes out and it warms up, and then they shut down at night as we're getting cool below 40 degrees. And that rapid growth has an increase in non-structural carbohydrate production. These cool season grasses store that in sugars, starches, and fructans. Horses that consume large amount of these and quickly go into a different diet from dry hay to lush green grass, they have an increased risk of laminitis. And that's kind of across the board for all horses that have that increased risk. Even higher are going to be horses that have insulin resistance issues, Cushing's disease, or a higher body condition score. In the picture on the right, I have a horse in one of my pastures. This is a Clydesdale horse from years ago that she didn't have a huge risk until the last couple years where she fits into that category of having a high body condition score unfortunately. This year she's probably at eight on a one to nine scale. And this year I'm not going to be able to turn her out onto green grass without having a high risk of laminitis. So how am I going to work with that? I want to adapt her to spring grass slowly. So starting with 30 minutes of grazing every day and increasing that by 30 minutes every few days until she's able to spend the majority of the time out on pasture. That allows their digestive system to slowly adapt to the changes in nutrients. You want to monitor your horses closely and the grass closely. Another option that you can do is utilize grazing mussels and turning out on just certain times of the day. So what does that look like? The nonstructural carbohydrate levels in grasses tend to increase throughout the day. They peak around that three or four p.m. time frame. And then they decrease overnight to where the lowest amount of N-C-N-S-C's are in the early morning hours. So in spring cool season grasses are in that active growing stage. They result in that higher sugar production and turnover. But the spring evenings, again, because they get cool, the temperatures drop below 40 degrees. The plant is unable to use those carbohydrates for growth and it causes those sugars and fructans to accumulate. So again, some of those strategies. Avoid grazing on sunny afternoons when their levels are going to be the highest. Turn out overnight if you can. Use grazing mussels to decrease the amount of intake on these high risk courses. And realize that even at the lowest levels of nonstructural carbohydrates in these spring grasses, early in the a.m., it can still exceed the intake that's recommended for at-risk courses. I'm going to turn it over to Mary. So you should be able to hear me and see me. Perfect. Okay, so I'm going to wrap us up here. We are going to fly through dry lot management. Most of this stuff we talked about last week, so I'm not going to go too deep into the manure part of it. However, I will refer us back to the webinar that we did two weeks ago about manure management, and I will link that in here somewhere in the resources section so that you have access to that as well. So dry lot management, what does that even mean? The sacrifice area, we talked about that earlier, so it's commonly called the sacrifice area, dry lot area, or an exercise area. And so this is a place for your animals outdoor living space. And so basically, you're giving up a piece of land, but you're giving that up to hopefully protect the remaining land that you have and give that the remaining land a rest, whether that's your pasture land or another piece of land that you're using for grazing. And so you save for rotational grazing, for hay production, for stockpiling, anything like that. So basically we're just, we're taking one piece of land and saying we are going to have this as an area where our horses are gathered where Rachel talked about watering and having their shelter. There's going to be a lot of hoof action in those areas, so there's going to be a lot of activity there. But we're going to have that in a smaller space versus that happening all over the place on all of your pasture. Okay, so examples, when would you, when would this come in handy? We talked earlier when we started about how it's been raining in North Dakota and certain places. And so when the ground is muddy, when there's frost in the ground, anytime the grass needs a rest from grazing. So anytime where you want to implement some of the strategies that we talked about, or maybe you're going all the way back to what Kevin was talking about in seeding. You're going to start something new. You don't want to be out there using it right away or using it so much that it never really has a chance to establish. And so that would be something, or an instance where we would use a dry lot management. So an example of why to dry lot. I said this was a perfect picture. This is from this morning. This is in North Dakota. You can see, you might be thinking, gosh, it looks kind of muddy, but can you imagine if this was out on your pastures, you can see the pasture in the background. Can you imagine if this was out in your pasture and you were then trying to actually manage that or maintain that or grow something new there, that would be a mess. And so this is actually, this is a great example of the dry lot management, why to use it. You use your dry lot. Okay, so just a few considerations for that. So location of the dry lot. Where's it going to be? What's your drainage going to look like? Where's the surface water? Where's your groundwater? Are you potentially going to contaminate that if you don't have that structured properly or engineered properly? What are the soil characteristics and the structure of your soil? Will it be able to handle hoof traffic or will it just turn into a big soup hole? Will it be clay based underneath so it's not permeable or will it be sand where you're going to lose a lot of those nutrients, especially from the urine? Ease of use. So some people like to put their sacrifice area right in the middle of where they're grazing. So they'll put that in the middle and then they'll have all of their paddocks around that. So like the hub of the wagon wheel. Other people have it up by their barn. It really doesn't matter where you put it. It matters on how you're going to use it. So if it's too far away, will you use it? Or will you be more likely to use it if it's closer to where you're actually grazing your horses? So that would be the ease of use. And then also for ease of use would be manure collection. So in that area, you're going to want to collect manure out of there. Some say twice a week, more people say weekly. And so location relative to manure storage. Is it going to be really hard for you to remove that manure, take it all the way across your farm and put it in your manure storage area? Or can you have your manure storage area relatively close to that dry lot management area so that everything kind of flows together and it's easiest for you to use and manage? Okay. So the manure that you're picking up, of course, I'm the manure person. So we're going to talk about it. So the manure you're picking up can be composted and applied to your pastures during times when it's dry. So just like you don't want your horses out there when it's wet, you don't want to be spreading manure when it's wet either. And so again, we talked about most of this stuff two weeks ago. And so I will link to that. Some other considerations for dry lot management. Rutgers is a great place to get some information about dry lot management, as well as Minnesota like Rachel had alluded to earlier. So is the space large enough to provide exercise? And it doesn't necessarily have to be, but if your goal is to have that animal living out there, it has to be big enough to provide an area where they can move around. Rutgers says 400 square foot per adult horse. And so that can be a square. That can be a rectangle. Just really depends on what works best in your area. Okay, we talked a little bit about why managing manure. So we're not losing some of the excess nutrients. We're not losing that stuff to soil. We're not going to contaminate our water. Those are reasons I'm concerned about it. I don't want to see algal blooms like this picture. Really pretty blue, green, really bad for your animals and bad for our water. You guys are probably more concerned though about the manure management considerations as far as flies, bacteria and pathogens go, internal parasites, things like that. And so if we're going to have a dry lot area, we still need to manage it. So we need to manage our grazing, but we also need to manage our dry lot area when we have that. And the best way to keep your flies out, your pathogens down in your internal parasites at a minimum is to manage the manure that's there. Okay, so we had Kevin said Vick on today, our rangeland specialist talking about what kind of plants is your horse actually grazing, what do you have out there? Do you have a grazing fertility plan? Are you fertilizing your pastures? Do you want to? When should you seed your pasture? Is that something that you're considering doing? And if you are, are you inside the window of doing that? Are you outside of that? Is it going to grow best? Are you going to be wasting your money? So things to consider there. Rachel, then Rachel Wald, who's our McHenry County Extension agent came on and talked about which grazing strategy works best for your lifestyle, for your pastures and for the health of your horse. And Paige Brummond, who is our Ward County Extension agent, talked to about transitioning your horse from going from winter into summer and how is it best to go from maybe a spring hay that you're feeding into a summer pasture, especially for some of those high risk horses. Using a dry lot gives you a place then where you can put your horses if they need a break, if you need to get them off the pastures, and then manure contains valuable nutrients, and we can use those in a positive way or they can become a pollutant just depending on how we manage them. So with that, we are going to end. I'm going to go here to the resources page and so this will all be posted online on our, when I post the video, I will email all of you that are watching on the Zoom platform. You had preregistered and so you'll get an email saying here's the link, and then we will put the Q&A at the end of this as well as these resources. We have a few other resources that we want to add here as well. And so with that, I'm going to turn it over to Paige and Rachel, and we are going to answer some questions while I'm putting up a couple polls to see what you guys want for next time if we should do another one. Feel free to keep typing some questions into the Q&A. Kevin's been doing a really good job of getting them answered. So we don't have any open questions right at this moment. If you're interested in hearing about and learning what some of the other questions were and the answers provided, feel free to click on that Q&A. And of course we're here to continue to take new questions. A lot of questions on fertilizing different seed mixes, and Kevin's been answering those. It looks like even some about alkali spots in the pasture and what to use. Oh, interesting. Alright, so we have a couple more questions coming in. Should a dry lot be dirt or gravel or does it matter? Maybe let Mary take that? Yeah, I would say I'm more concerned about, there's a few things. So if it's gravelly, what kind of, what is underneath the gravel? So the gravel is going to drain really well. But is it, what's underneath that gravel? If there's clay underneath of it, it'll drain well, but it won't permeate, it won't go all the way into our soil structure so that we're leaching out a bunch of nutrients there. However, if it's dirt, and when I think of dirt, I think of just like fresh, a load of fresh dirt, and it's like digging in the garden and when that, when the rain hits it, it's going to be a mud hole. And so I think you really have to think about what it's going to look like when it gets wet, how long your animals are going to be on there, what your goal is for having those animals on there. I think those are some things that you're going to have to consider when you're choosing that. But we really like a clay base and then just making sure that you're not putting it in a hole. We don't want it in a hole, or when you're cleaning to make sure that you're cleaning off those areas nice and evenly so that you're not digging a hole and causing an issue for where water will set. All right, Kevin's been answering on but the next one that came in is someone told me that the soil has to be 50 degrees before planting. Kevin typed in that 40 degrees for cool season grasses and alfalfa is suitable and also for those in North Dakota, we want you to know about the end on weather network. That'll give you up to date current soil temperatures for your area. And I'm just going to hop in here with the pole that's up if you want to take that full that would be awesome. If you guys want us to do another one. This will help us decide what we should do next, especially based on the season and the fact that you guys are probably going to be you probably are out riding already but especially hopefully next week it'll quit raining and you can really get out there so if you do want to hear something we'd like to do them soon. And so just whatever is is appropriate for hearing next. I just want to click on that that would be awesome last time somebody said you only let us pick one. And we're doing that on purpose we want you to pick the most important and then we're eliminating as we go. And eventually we'll get down to that and if you have something other than what's on there, you can type it in the chat. So there aren't any current open questions or unanswered questions, few others that came in their questions about is it okay to fertilize at the same time as your seating and Kevin answer that yes that's all right. I have a question about keeping a horse off pasture for a certain amount of time after fertilizing and typically we recommend about seven days. But that'll also depend on your environmental conditions and how much rainfall you received if that fertilizer granule still sitting on top of the soil, because you haven't had any rain you're going to want to hold off longer. And I mentioned the topic on the alkali in the pasture and what can be seated there and Kevin added that a mixture of green wheat grass western wheat grass and slender wheat grass with different different pounds per acre to put in your drill or you can broadcast that at one and a half times the seating rate that he had added That's a great question we have a Kevin question for Kevin. Who can we work with about weed control, particularly warm one. That's a great question and my my first response is always contact your local extension agent. There should be options of what to use for different controls and otherwise you also contact your local weed board members. There's a number of options you can look at and so you have one of your attention agent to call and they'll help you out with rates and timing and a question for Mary will I be able to print this PowerPoint and keep it. I do believe that I added the PDF last time when I posted it. I just so I posted on the NDSU extension livestock page and from there you're going to click on minor management and from there you click on horse webinars and so I posted underneath of there the PDF. So yes, you should be able to I will also make sure that I put a link to that PDF in the email that I send out so that you have that it'll be a little easier for you to access that way. I'm all done with my polls. So as to not pull you to death. We really appreciate you asking these are answering these questions for us they help us to know where we should go. What direction you want us to head in so it's looking like deworming is something that's really interesting to folks a big question so if we do another one, we will decide that here and we're done. We'll get the information just like you did this past time when I sent out the recording I also sent you the info for the next one and so if we have enough responses to that we will do another one. And I think unless there's more questions. We can be done. Thanks everybody for joining us today. Yeah, thank you. And if you guys do have follow up questions you are more than welcome to always send them to me and I will get them to the speakers and we'll get them answered for you. Thanks for joining us.