For The Pasture That Has Everything, Give The Gift Of Dung Beetles

I hate mud and pasture mud is often the result of soil compaction. I hate for horses to look weak and ragged and such appearance is often the result of worm infestation. I hate to see horses bloated, lame and fat and such suffering is often caused by diets loaded with sugar and lacking in natural forage. I hate soil erosion and deep ruts and gullies often begin with soil lacking plant cover.

Some peculiar little bugs that are likely already in you pasture to some degree can help with every problem set out above. I currently have a mare and foal, a yearling and two grown mares in a paddock of about two acres. They live off of hay with the mare and foal being supplemented with some horse feed. The soil is light and sandy.

And in recent weeks I have noticed that there is rarely even a hint of more than a eight or ten manure piles at any given moment. It is as if every night the manure fairy comes and magically cleans the pastures. Yesterday I had to go out and look to find any manure.

The manure was not easy to find. The soil is pierced with thousands of holes from the diameter of the little finger to the diameter of the thumb. In many areas the holes are no more than two inches a part. These holes are the work of dung beetles who bury pieces of horse manure in each of these burrows. The manure that is buried carries with it the parasite egg load that it bore. Hence the pasture carries radically fewer parasite eggs than would be the case with out the beetles. The holes serve to aerate the soil and reduce soil compaction and decrease runoff. The manure breaks down under ground and is readily available fertilizer for use by the roots of the plants in the pasture. The result is increased foliage which prevents erosion.

I do not know of any downside to dung beetles. They have one deadly enemy--ivermectin wormers. The recent trend is to encourage reduced usage of all wormers to prevent the development of drug resistance by the parasites. There was a time when I used Ivermectin on a constant basis.

At that time I had nearly no dung beetles. Now I have greatly reduced the use of that drug and horses that are given it are, for the most part, kept in sacrifice areas of the horse lot so their ivermectin loaded manure does not fall on the grass pastures. It is an easy enough thing for all those who have a few horses to keep them off of the pasture for a few days after giving ivemectin.

In one of the greatest perversions of truth that our culture sees, one can expect that the Industrial Food Complex with its reliance on factory farming will push localities to place more and more environmental restrictions on small and organic food operations. This effort to reduce competition on their part will result in increased environmental regulation of horse lots and pastures. Everything that we can do to improve the soil will matter in the fights to come over these efforts to completely close the door on family farming.

Dung beetles, diakon radishes, and composting are great for the soil and eventually serve your horses well. Proper stewardship of the soil should be viewed as a moral and religious responsibility.

Replenishment of the soil is a sacred act and should be viewed as such.