Pasture Management

Using our Growmaster® crop services, you'll get the expert level of advice you need to produce and maintain a healthy and environmentally safe pasture for your horses. If it matters that your yard tastes good, you're our kind of people.

Fall 2009

Battling Weeds With Herbicides - When weeds encroach into weakened stands of forage crops, they not only reduce the yield but also affect its quality and hurt your pasture’s appearance. Once established, weeds reproduce by seed and extensive root systems to take over weakened areas of the pasture. The fact is, horses don’t like weeds.

Spring 2009

Basic Pasture Management - There are simple, relatively inexpensive pasture management practices that you can apply to your pasture that will enable you get better performance from it. This will cut back or even eliminate the need for supplemental feeding, thus keeping your livestock healthy, well fed, and also possibly saving you money. On the opposite side of the coin, pastures that are poorly managed will produce low yields of poor quality forage and particularly worn pastures may even harbor parasites that could infest your livestock.
How Many Animals Will Your Pasture Support? - Pasture, like any asset must be managed to achieve optimum performance. However, before you can manage a pasture you will need to know just how many animals your pasture might support.
Putting Teff to the Test - Teff is a warm-season, annual grass hay that you might not have heard about before now. With hay prices from $150 to $250 per ton (maybe even more depending on your area), Teff is worth considering. It can be planted through June and can easily precede a fall rotation into a perennial such as Derby Timothy, Benchmark Plus Orchardgrass, Horse Pasture or Horse Paddock mixes.

Summer 2008

How can you combat high fertilizer prices? - Fertilizers have been a cheap input that more than paid for themselves with significantly higher yields. That equation has changed. What is the cause? How can you plan for the future and combat ever increasing fertilizer prices?
On the Alert For Poisonous Plants - How do you know what plants are safe, and what are some ways to prevent the potential for acute or chronic poisoning? Generally, horses naturally avoid toxic or bad-tasting plants, but watch out for some conditions.

Spring 2008