• Grow more varieties of plants in your fields, if you don’t know where/how, start small with green hay laid on bare patches. Take the green hay cuttings from a field with higher diversity or from a broad grass verge by the roadside.
  • Stop using synthetic fertilisers, these unbalance the grass/plant ratio, allowing the grass to thrive and all the other plants to fail.
  • Lots of different plants growing in a pasture massively increases the range of organic material accessible to the soil, improving both soil health and field growth better than any fertiliser.
  • Let your field reseed itself at least once every three years, the horse can eat the standing hay through the winter months, the sward will become thicker and more able to protect itself against impaction or turning to mud in the wet winter months.
  • Healthy soil produces healthy microbes, millions find their way into the gut of your horse and protect him against gastric disease and many other chronic inflammatory syndromes.

    • Before reaching for the omeprazole be patient and don’t despair, restoring quality meadows for horses may take some time, 50 years of scientific agriculture has had a devastating effect, destroying many important eco-systems, it’s going to take years to reverse.