Well, I finally got the horses home! YAY! We brought them home this past Sunday and home finally feels like HOME now that I can look out my kitchen window and see my horses.

Now for the questions:

The horses (four of them) are on a pasture that is about 1 1/2 to 2 acres for now, until I get the rest of the property fenced in, which will take forever, since we are doing wood fencing all the way around. My problem is that since last Sunday, my pasture is already brimming with crap. I went out today and picked poop until my back gave out but there still was a significant amount of poo in the field. I'm thinking about buying a pasture drag and draggging the pasture once a week to break up and spread the manure. I KNOW that removing the manure would be the ideal thing to do but then I would have to pick everyday to keep up with it, and I know with my work schedule and the size of the field that is simply not going to happen.

Do ya'll think that a drag would sucessfully help manage the manure/fly/parasite issue?  Would a daily dewormer be a good idea since they are in such a small area?

 Also, the pasture is dirt, hardly any grass and I'm feeding them hay off the ground. Should I give them a monthly dose of psyllium? I'm in GA, so technically it's clay, but the ground is very loose and much like sand.

Does anyone use feed thru fly control supplement? Is so, what products have you used sucessfully? I'm also planning on trying Fly Predators this spring, any luck with that? TIA!

I don't have any answers for you, but I, too, would like to hear what the others say!

4 horses on 2 acres is tight, though.  You have more acreage, just not fenced?  Have you thought about doing a temporary electric fence until you can install the wood fence?  Winter, by the way, is the best time to install the wooded fence.  The ground will be softer!  Right now, you'd have to use a jack hammer to get throught the clay!  (I'm assuming it will rain again sometime.  LOL!!!)

I hope you have  a good supply of hay put up.  I just put up an additional 64 bales of bermuda yesterday.  Paid $4 per bale off the ground.  I was glad to get it.

I have 5 horses and 3 goats on 7.5 acres.  I have them out 1'/2 day and stalled 1/2 day.  Except for the arena and the turnaround near the barn it's all grass.  (Well, it WAS grass!  Without rain, it's getting to be more and more like a dry lot!)

I don't have a manure pile per se.  I dump carts of manure out in the fields, filling in low spots caused by old tree stumps and roots that rotted and created low spots.

I was GOING to overseed with ryegrass this winter, but without rain, the seed would have been wasted.  If it rains, I may still try it.

We are plagued by flies in the summer.  The flys were bad even BEFORE we brought in horses.  There are chicken farms in the area, so even if we prevent them from growing on our land, we will have invaders.  There's cows in the pastures, too.  In fact, when I was building my barn before the first horse was on the property, the flys were congregating at the barn.  Geesh.  Let's not even talk about the spiders...

 gottabayqh6 wrote the following post at 10-03-2007 10:43 PM:

Do ya'll think that a drag would sucessfully help manage the manure/fly/parasite issue?  Would a daily dewormer be a good idea since they are in such a small area?

First, congratulations! There's no better way to greet each day than sipping a cup of coffee on the back porch and passing out breakfast treats to the horses.

A good rule-of-thumb is to figure 1 horse = 1 acre, unless you run a registered feed lot. So I'd concentrate on getting a couple more acres fenced ASAP so you don't run into any problems with your neighbors/city-county zoning/humane society. Maybe throw up some wire temporarily. Dragging a couple times a week will go a long way toward controlling the parasites. An old chain link gate with an old tire on top for added weight and dragged behind a garden tractor works pretty good. If you run the mower blades at the same time, it works even better! And spreading the manure won't affect their grazing since there's no grass anyhow. A regular worming schedule should be sufficient since all the horses are your own (no visitors or boarders). You have the same type soil I do here in Florida. I started my girls on BOSS (black oil sunflower seeds) to handle the sand problem and it works just fine at $15 for a 50# bag. I initially gave them 2 cups (NOT SCOOPS!) each per day for a week to clean them out and then mixed the remaining BOSS right in with their bulk grain conatiner on a 2:1 ratio; 2 scoops of grain to 1 scoop of BOSS, so they get a maintenance BOSS dose every day with their grain. I go back to a 2 cup per day treatment for a week about every two months. Some people complain about sunflowers popping up in the yard (undigested seeds) but I've only had 1 come up in almost three years. Dragging the yard on a regular basis pretty much eliminates seedlings.

I don't use feed-through fly control or predators but I know some here on the forum have, with mixed results. In fact, if you do a subject search on the forum you may find some of those previous questions & answers. ~FH

I would love to put up temporary fencing around the remaining property but we are trying to get the grass established before we throw horses on it. 

We will probably be fencing in the remaining portion of the property late this winter.  We did the field they are in now this summer and it was a nightmare!  We burned up an auger in the process, the ground was so hard!

We did manage to get a good supply of hay.  100 bales at 4.50 each.  I'm looking to buy another  50 bales somewhere.  The horses are on stict rations as well as grain to help keep them fat, which isn't hard with my herd!

Spiders are GOOD for fly control!!!!!! LOL!

Thanks for the advice!  I've heard great things about BOSS for other horses owners so I'll defintely give them a try. 

Getting the rest of the acreage fenced in is my top priority but first I want to get some grass established before I throw the horses on it.  I also have a ginormous pile of trees/brush from where we cleared the land that needs to be burned before we put the fence up. Unfortunately, there is a burn ban due to the drought so until I get some rain, the remaining property has been put on hold.

I HATE having them on such a small area but I had to bring them home to help save some money.  Board and the gas used to go take care of them twice a day was killing me!

I have an old piece of chainlink fencing that should do the trick.  Great idea!

I have had really good results using feed through (I use Equitrol but I've heard good things about Solitude; heck, they all work the same way) and fly predators at the same time, but you need to be at least a 1/4 mile (I think - it may be farther)) from the nearest cow/horse/chicken/etc farm or they just mosey over from there.  A small acreage is perfect for the predators, since they can only fly/walk about 200 feet.  They worked well on my four acres, were a waste of time and $$$ on 13 acres.  I just couldn't get them spread around enough.  The combo of the two meant almost no flies!!!  Yea!!!

And I like a daily wormer, just for my peace of mind, plus both Strongid C2X and Continuex have a colic guarantee that you can sign up for through your vet - they'll pay for treatment and/or surgery up to $5000, and they send Ivermectin free twice yearly for Spring and Fall deworming.

But that's just worry wart me talking - ask my poor, constantly exasperated vet! lol

 OOPS! Wendy caught me... Strongid C2X does NOT send Ivermectin, only Continuex, which is what I use.  I a-s-s-u-m-e-d and we know what that means!  lol!

 I had to learn alot and am still learning about having horses at home.  We have 4 horses on about 7 acres but we rotate between 3 fields and still need to break up the large field as they overgraze part of it...with no rain it has been horrible I had to start feeding hay in mid August.  Either way we use an old bed spring mattress with a tire on top and it works great...we tow is behind our 4 wheeler.  Vet said only drag if its been hot and will be hot for a few days or it wont be effective for parasites...no problem with this weather.  We really need to seed this year but with no rain it would be bird food so???

I use iverease on feed dewormer...never used the daily dewormer or fly control so don't know the answers.  Horses on small acreage is a battle especially when the weather is working against you.  as long as you can keep the happy and fat you are doing fine! 

We used equi-trol this year for fly/parasite control and it was awesome. The manure spreader is right by the barn and last year we had to keep it covered, flys everywhere, it was nasty. This year we never had to cover it, no problem with flys in the stalls, I was thrilled! We debated between fly predators and the equi-trol and decided on the equi-trol because the predators have to be placed on/aournd the poopy piles to work, which would have been fine with the manure speader, but not very effective out in the pasture (four pastures for a total of twenty acres). In addition, temps had to be within a certain range for the fly predators to be effective.

With a pasture that small with so many horses you are going to either drag the pasture (which will tear up any grass you have in it) or remove the manure on a pretty regular basis. I know the need to grass to grown on the rest of the property, but you might want to consider going ahead and fencing some more of it off and rotate the horses between the pastures to give the ground a rest.

Good luck, I'm totally envious, my barn is three miles away, god, how I'd love to have my horses out my back door!

A good rule-of-thumb is to figure 1 horse = 1 acre, unless you run a registered feed lot.

Just thought I'd put this wrinkle in....I have 5 horses on 1/2 acre.  Yes, you read right.  That's the Norco limit.  We do have to clean up after (almost everyday) and pay for manure haul away, though.  The horses are all in large covered corrals or stall run outs. (And they get exercised or ridden regularly). They eat alfalfa and grass hay.  There is no such thing in California as "pasture" except in the winter for some lucky people.  So for all you with 1 horse per acre, I envy you!  As for the flys, the better I pick up, the better the control, but fly masks, sheets and spray help.  The problem with parasites or feed through control is, if the neighbors aren't doing it, we are subsidising their problem, and most people in Norco have several horses to their typical 1/2 acre. 

Our 2 kids are in a 1-acre dry lot. We pick up the manure once a day. Sometimes we skip a day in the winter, though. We used Equitrol last year. We now have a Waste Management dumpster which is emptied once a week. It's out by the road about 250" from the house and 450' from the horses. We actually had less flies this summer with the dumpster and no Equitrol than last summer because there's no manure laying around.

 We too are on clay, which gets pulverized into a fine dust by their hooves. Since we feed off rubber mats in the loafing shed, the vet said we don't need psylenuim (sp?). He said you only need it if they are eating over-grazed pasture or picking hay out of the dirt. So it might help in your case. Ask your vet.

 Oh, and the fly traps which work best for us are the "Fly Sticks" by Farnum. They're the sticky kind.