Pasture management tips
Good pasture management and animal husbandry techniques will also help to reduce your reliance on chemicals to control your horse’s worm burden.
Follow these simple guidelines and read some of our more in-depth articles (below) to help keep your horses and their grazing environment as healthy as possible.
- Keep horses with the same grazing companions for herd stability. Rest and rotate grazing and don’t overcrowd fields.
- Poo-pick at least twice a week to keep parasite levels down and try to leave some fresh dung piles to help dung beetles do their bit too!
- Cross graze pasture with other species eg. sheep.
- Keep new horses separate until tested and treated accordingly.
- Don’t worm and move; after worming ensure horses stay on the same pasture for a few days to help slow down resistance.
- When first starting on a targeted worm control programme all horses should be tested when worming is due or slightly overdue so as to get a true result.
- Check for resistant worms; if a positive result is found, treat the horse then use a reduction test to sample again in about 10-14 days. If the wormer has been effective the second count should be either ‘no eggs seen’ or very low.
Managing your horse after worming
The reasons to manage horses carefully after worming are two fold – most obviously to optimise parasite control for your horse and to help slow down wormer resistance, but also to minimise the effect of the strong chemicals in the environment.
Better worm control in competition horses
We know from studies in agriculture that worm burdens in animals have a significant impact on their performance and development; this definitely makes them something to guard against if you’re aiming to succeed.
Location of your muck heap
Location is everything as they say; carefully choosing where to position your dung heap and managing it appropriately will help to protect the health of your horses and the land.
To learn more about best practise pasture management click here.