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The
Natural Horse Group was established in 2001.
It aims to provide
information that enables people to explore ways of keeping and managing
equines that enhance wellbeing and encourage a natural lifestyle
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Articles
Finding Out About Foggage
By Abi Hogg
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Tony Jenkins of the Shire Horse Farm near Scarborough was the first person I heard talk about foggage, though he didn’t call it that. What he said was that instead of making hay from all his land, he left half his fields alone so that, come winter, the grass went straight from field to horse, bypassing the huge effort of cutting it, drying it, moving it, storing it, then delivering it back to the animal. I’m sure that there will be readers who are surprised I’d never heard of grazing foggage as it is a traditional farming method, but in these days of dust-extracted hay in plastic bags, it wasn’t something I’d come across. However, I really liked the idea, but didn’t have the nerve to try it out until forced to by the rains of last year.
Summer 2004 was pretty wet and opportunities to make hay were few. The result was that no hay was made from my mum’s land in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, and only half the hay was made on the farm where I keep my horse in Masham, North Yorkshire. Left with dry, dead grass covering the fields we were forced to try foggage and in both cases it has been a success. The horses have had grazing all winter and the fields have gone through with a thick covering of vegetation that has protected them from poaching. There are none of those signs of overgrazing that are so depressingly normal in horse-keeping in this country; fetlock high mud and pools of water. The foggage area, while getting squelchy under the grass at times has remained dry underfoot.
The success of foggage depends on having sufficient land for the number of horses so that the grass lasts. The hope was that the fat ponies would have lost weight using this system, but it hasn’t proved to be the case. In fact, the Fell pony, Janet, has put on a few kilos. Her genetic selection must have taken place on even more peripheral grazing. Dante, my Welsh Cob x Arab has gradually dropped weight, having been obese at the beginning of the winter, but I’ve not seen him hungry whilst doing so. Veteren Poppy, and highly strung Roisin have been fed high energy forage feeds to boost their calorie and protein intakes, just as they would have if we had been feeding hay. By the end of the the winter they were spending their nights in a large shed with ad lib feed and their days on the hay field, which is essentially rye grass and begins to green up at the first hint of spring.
Another advantage has been that Tarquin, a laminitic horse, has been able to return to grazing because the foggage does not have the lush growing tips of short grass and is not as badly affected by the frost-sun combination that is so detrimental to laminitics. We have gradually built him up to going out overnight and on overcast days with no ill effects.
Whilst exercise has been limited owing to dark nights, the horses have kept moving all winter because they have gone out to graze. This has reduced the time they spend standing around eating hay and there has been less clearing up to do around the barns and yards.
The effect of having a blanket of old grass over the new as spring comes in is that there is a gradual change in diet as new grass finds its way through, meaning that the horse isn’t suddenly faced with transferring from winter rations onto a field with a flush of spring grass.
All this said, I would not like to depend on foggage alone, unless I had only fat natives. Having a stock of hay in as back-up is comforting. It means that when the horses chose to shelter in the buildings in bad weather, we could provide forage and that there was hay to supplement the skinnies and to use in the horse-box. But gone are the worries about running out of hay and there is still a large stack to see the fatties through the summer, when the aim is to keep the diet as constant as possible throughout the year.
The fields will need to be left to recover this year, just as in any other year. If possible a herd of sheep will be run over the field to take off the rough stuff that’s left. The fields will be harrowed and rolled then they can grow on again. Harrowing pulls out the remaining dead grass allowing new growth to flourish.
Another attraction of using foggage is that it is an ecologically sound method of land management. It allows the late-seeding native grasses and wildflowers to complete their life cycle. It reduces pollution from the use of tractors and decreases the amount of plastic that is now ubiquitous in the countryside, thanks to the arrival of haylage and silage. There are benefits to the fauna too, as animals aren’t disturbed by the sudden disappearance of their habitat.
And what do we do about those ponies who actually expanded the weigh-tape over the winter? Get riding of course. |
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