Horse Pasture: How to Repair It, or Renew It Completely

Overseed when the sward is still mostly grass: graze it down, open the surface, sow 25 to 30 kg per hectare of a grazing mixture and roll it. Renew completely when weeds dominate or the field has not been touched for years: soil analysis first, correct the pH, put the minerals back, then sow 45 to 55 kg per hectare, or 90 for a paddock. Autumn is the better of the two windows. Everything below is the reasoning and the detail.

Part one: your field is a feed store

Why can you not sow a horse pasture with ordinary grass seed?

Because a horse eats differently from a cow and digests differently from a cow, and standard pasture seed is bred for cows.

Two things separate a horse mixture from a general one, and both are about the animal rather than the grass.

The first is the growth point. A horse clips grass off close to the ground with its teeth. A cow wraps its tongue around a bunch and tears it, and physically cannot get as low. If a bite takes the growth point of a grass plant with it, that plant stops growing. Not slows, stops. Conventional cattle grasses carry their growth point higher, because nothing was ever going to bite below it. Put those in a horse field and the horse removes the growing part of the plant in its first pass over its favourite corner.

The second is sugar. A grass bred for milk production is bred to be high in sugar, energy and protein, because that is what a dairy cow converts into yield. A horse's digestive system is not built for large amounts of grass sugar. What a horse needs from a pasture is structure and fibre with the sugar kept down, which is close to the opposite specification.

Both Organifer pasture mixtures are built on that basis. Every variety in Pasture Grass Seed Meadow and Pasture Grass Seed Paddock is selected for a low growth point and a low fructan index, and both are Dutch NAK certified, which guarantees the composition and the germination and purity standards behind it. The specific grasses are further down, in the section on choosing between them.

What is fructan, and why does it matter most in spring?

Fructan is the form grass stores sugar in. A horse processes large amounts of it poorly, and the gut flora can be overloaded by an excess.

That overload is the mechanism behind a lot of what horse owners recognise as spring trouble. It is also why a low fructan mixture is described as reducing the risk of laminitis specifically in spring rather than year round.

The reason it concentrates in spring is worth knowing, because it explains something you can actually manage. Grass makes sugar in daylight and uses it to grow. On a bright spring day followed by a cold night, the plant makes sugar all afternoon and then it is too cold to grow, so the sugar stays in the plant. Repeat that for a fortnight and you have grass carrying far more fructan than the same grass in July. The same thing happens in autumn, and it happens to drought-stressed grass that has stopped growing but is still standing in the sun.

None of that is a reason to keep horses off grass. It is a reason to start from a mixture that does not carry a high baseline in the first place, and to be careful about turning out onto a bright cold spring morning's growth.

Two things follow for the field itself. A mixture bred for low fructan starts you lower for the life of the sward, which is a decision you make once at sowing. And grass that is growing steadily is grass that is using its sugar rather than storing it, which is an argument for a field that is fed and limed properly rather than one that is limping.

Why does a horse pasture go bare in the same places every year?

Because horses graze selectively and habitually, and once the growth point is gone from those places the grass does not come back on its own.

Walk any horse field and it reads the same. Bare and hard at the gate, the shelter and the trough. Grazed tight in a few favourite areas. Coarse, stemmy, untouched grass everywhere the dung is. Horses will return to the sweetest short grass and leave the rough alone all season, which concentrates every bit of grazing pressure onto a fraction of the field.

So the pressure is uneven while everything else is even. Rain falls on all of it. Fertiliser reaches all of it. The horse does not. That is why feeding a patchy horse field does very little for the patches: the plants there are not short of nutrition, they are short of the part that grows.

On top of that come the gaps nothing to do with grazing. Urine patches scorch. Molehills bury. Frost lifts. Drought kills outright on the thin ground. And a field left several years without renewal fills every gap that opens with weeds, because bare soil in a pasture never stays bare.

Which is why the answer is nearly always seed, and why the two mixtures below are built to survive being grazed the way a horse grazes rather than simply to grow fast.

Your field is a feed store, not a lawn

It is worth being blunt about this, because it changes how much the whole job is worth doing properly.

For most people reading this, the field is a significant part of what the horse actually eats, either as grazing through the season or as hay off the same ground. That makes the sward a feed crop. Its yield, its fibre, its sugar and its palatability are all feed characteristics, and they all trace back to the mixture that was sown and the state of the soil underneath it.

Two consequences. A poor sward is not only ugly, it is bought-in hay you did not need to buy. And a field is exporting minerals off the holding in every bale of hay and in every barrow of picked-up dung, which is a slow, permanent loss that almost nobody accounts for. There are two sections on that below and they are the part most people have never had explained.

Part two: which route, and what to check first

Should you overseed, or renew the field completely?

Overseed if most of what is growing is still grass worth keeping. Renew completely if weeds dominate, or the field has not been renewed in years, or the ground itself needs work.

Judge it by walking the middle of the field rather than standing at the gate, because the gateway always looks worse than the field is.

Thin and gappy with grass still the dominant plant means overseeding. You are filling holes in a living sward and the existing grass will close in around the new seedlings. This is a day's work with a harrow and a spreader and the field is back in use the same season.

More weed than grass, or bare ground over large areas, means renewal. Overseeding into a weed-dominant field waters and feeds the weeds alongside your new grass, and you will have spent the seed to get a slightly better class of weed. Docks and thistles in particular will simply take the extra light and space.

Three other things point at renewal regardless of the sward. Ground that stays waterlogged after every shower. Ground compacted by machinery or by years of hoof traffic, where the roots stop at a hard layer. And a field where a soil analysis comes back badly wrong on pH or on the base minerals, because there is no point sowing expensive seed into soil that cannot feed it.

There is also a middle case, and it is the most common of all. A field that is fine everywhere except a heavily used strip around the gate, the shelter and the trough. That is not a whole-field decision. Overseed the field and treat that strip as its own small renewal, with a different mixture, which is covered in the seed section.

Why does a soil analysis come before the seed?

Because the analysis changes what you buy, and it is the cheapest thing on this page.

A pasture that has been grazed and cut for years has been losing minerals steadily, and it has been acidifying steadily. Neither shows up early. By the time the sward is visibly thin and the clover has gone and the docks are winning, you have been losing yield for several seasons. Seed sown into soil at the wrong pH germinates and then sits there, because the nutrients are chemically locked and the roots cannot reach them, and then people conclude the seed was poor.

Organifer reads soil analyses free of charge. Email the results and you get a fertilisation recommendation for that specific field, including whether liming is needed and at what rate. There is no obligation and no minimum order attached to it. If the honest answer is that the field needs lime and feed rather than seed, that is the answer you will get.

Take the sample properly or the recommendation is worse than none. Fifteen or twenty cores taken in a W across the field, mixed together in a clean bucket, and one sample sent from that mix. Keep out the gateway, the trough surround, the shelter and any obvious dung patch, because all of them will skew the result and none of them represents the field.

When can you sow a horse pasture?

March to November, avoiding the hot summer months. Late August into September is the strongest window of the year, and April into May is the workable second.

Autumn wins for four reasons that stack. The soil still holds summer warmth, which drives fast and even germination. Rain is more reliable than in high summer, and on a field you cannot irrigate that is the single biggest variable. Weed competition is much lower than in spring. And there is enough growing time left for roots to anchor before the sward has to sit through winter.

What makes July impossible is not heat but drying. You are relying entirely on rainfall across an area you cannot water, and a dry fortnight after sowing costs you the whole job. Autumn does not remove that risk, it reduces it.

Spring works from April once the soil has genuinely warmed. Expect slower germination and considerably more weed pressure, since your new grass and every weed seed in the field germinate in the same fortnight.

If you have reached November, do the soil work now and sow in spring. Cultivating, liming and remineralising have no temperature limit that matters, and doing them in autumn gives the improvers all winter to act. On heavy ground, leaving a rough cultivated surface over winter lets frost break the clods apart for you, and you sow in April into a better seedbed than you could make with a machine. Seed put into cold ground in late autumn does not germinate, gets eaten, and is bought twice.

[ANCHOR #overseeding starts at the next H2.]

Part three: overseeding an existing pasture

How do you overseed a horse pasture?

Graze it down hard, open the surface, sow, roll. Four steps and the first one decides whether the other three were worth doing.

Take the grass right down first, by grazing it off tight or topping it. This is the step that gets skipped and it is the most common reason an overseeding does nothing at all. Grass seedlings cannot compete for light with established grass, so anything you leave standing shades out the seed you are about to pay for. If you can see soil between the plants when you look down, you are ready.

Then open the surface with a harrow, a drag or a chain harrow. You are not cultivating and you are not trying to break the sward up. You are scratching the surface so seed can find soil rather than sitting on thatch, and disturbing the existing sward enough to let something new in. If the field has a real thatch or dead mat layer, harrow it hard enough to pull that material up and then harrow it off or rake it out.

Sow at 25 to 30 kg per hectare of Pasture Grass Seed Meadow, or 45 kg per hectare of Pasture Grass Seed Paddock on ground in daily use. Go to the top of the range on a field in poor condition. Then roll it with a pasture roller, and this is not optional: seed pressed into contact with moist soil germinates, and seed lying in an air pocket does not. On a field you cannot water, that contact is the only thing standing between you and a failed sowing.

Keep horses off until the new grass has rooted properly. Young seedlings pull out whole under a hoof, and the worn areas you most wanted to repair are exactly where they will be walked out first.

One thing worth doing at the same time, because the harrow is already out: harrow the dung. It breaks up the piles, spreads the nutrition, exposes worm larvae to the sun and, over a season, reduces the rough patches horses refuse to graze. It costs nothing beyond the pass you are already making.

By hand, with a spreader, or with an overseeding machine?

A machine is the better job and there is no point pretending otherwise. But not everybody has one or can get one onto the field, and sowing it yourself works if you are willing to put the effort in. All three routes are below, in order of the result they give.

An overseeding machine or a disc seed drill is the best of the three. It cuts slits into the existing sward and places the seed directly into soil contact, which is the one thing broadcasting from the surface never fully solves. On a thick sward it is the difference between a strike and nothing. Hire it or get a contractor in, and if a contractor is coming anyway, the drill places seed well enough that the lower end of the seed rate is sufficient. On a large field this is the cheapest route per square metre once you count the seed you are not wasting.

The honest limit is that a contractor's minimum charge on a small paddock can cost more than the seed did, and plenty of fields cannot be reached with a machine at all. That is not a reason to do nothing.

A fertiliser spreader is what most holdings will actually use across a field, and it does a good job provided you calibrate it. Do not trust the number on the dial. Put a known weight in, run the spreader over a measured strip on a hard surface or a sheet, sweep up, weigh what came out and adjust. Ten minutes of that is the difference between an even field and one that comes up in visible light and dark bands for the rest of the year.

By hand is a real option, not a consolation prize, and it goes a lot further than the gateway strip. A 15 kg bag over 3,000 square metres is an evening's work at a steady walk. What makes hand sowing fail is never the hand, it is guessing the area and skipping the roller.

So do it properly. Measure the area rather than estimating it, and split it into strips you can see, with canes, tape or the tyre marks from the harrow. Weigh out the seed for one strip at a time, because a bag that feels like it is lasting well at the top of the field is a bag that is going to run out at the bottom. Split each strip's share into two halves and sow one walking up and down and the other walking across, since crossing twice at half rate is far more even than one heavy pass. Keep the upper end of the seed rate, because you are broadcasting rather than placing. Do not sow in wind, because pasture seed is light and a breeze you would call mild puts your fine seed in the hedge. Then drag or harrow lightly and roll, which is what actually gets the seed into contact and is the step people leave out.

Whichever you use, the seed has to reach soil. That is the entire reason for grazing down hard and harrowing first, and it is why rolling afterwards matters. A well-walked field with a roller behind it beats a drill on ground that was never grazed down. Every other decision on this page is secondary to that one.

[ANCHOR #full-reseed starts at the next H2.]

Part four: renewing a pasture completely

How do you completely renew a pasture?

Soil first, seed last. That order is the whole difference between a field that is still good in ten years and one that needs doing again in three.

The sequence, and every step has its own section below.

• 1. Soil analysis, and act on what it says.

• 2. Correct the pH. This comes before fertiliser, not with it.

• 3. Put the minerals and trace elements back.

• 4. Fix the structural fault your soil actually has, sand or clay.

• 5. Feed it.

• 6. Destroy the old sward and work the ground.

• 7. Level, firm, sow at the full rate, roll.

This is the one occasion in the life of a field when you can reach the soil rather than the surface. Every product below is worth more applied now, worked in, than it will ever be worth spread on top of an established sward. That is not a sales argument, it is where the roots are going to be.

Correcting the pH: why grazed land turns acid

Grazing and cutting both acidify soil steadily, and acidity is what quietly stops a field responding to anything else you do.

Grass takes up calcium and magnesium as it grows. Some of it comes back in dung, but not all, and none of it comes back from a field you cut for hay. Rain leaches base minerals downward. Nitrogen fertiliser acidifies. None of these is dramatic and all of them run in the same direction, year after year, which is why almost every long-established grazing field drifts down the pH scale unless somebody actively puts it back.

Below about pH 5.5 the chemistry turns against you. Phosphate locks up. Trace elements become unavailable. Root development slows. And the plants that thrive in those conditions are exactly the ones you do not want: sorrel, buttercup, and horsetail, which is genuinely toxic to horses and is a reliable indicator of acid, wet, compacted ground.

For correction, Algae Lime is pure lithothamnium calcareum, a marine algae deposit rather than a quarried rock, with a pH above 9.5 and 20 percent magnesium carbonate, so it lifts the pH and supplies magnesium in the same pass. A first application is 200 kg per hectare and subsequent applications 100 kg per hectare.

One rule matters more than the rate and it is easy to get wrong. Apply the lime first and fertilise afterwards, never both together. Lime and nitrogen fertiliser applied at the same time lose part of that nitrogen to evaporation, so you pay for feed that leaves as gas. Lime, wait, then feed.

Do not lime a field that does not need it. Above pH 6.5 you gain nothing and can push it too far the other way, and lime is not suitable near acid-loving planting. This is exactly what the soil analysis is for.

Putting the minerals back: what every bale takes away

This is the section most horse owners have never been given, and it is the one that explains why a field that gets fed every year still slowly declines.

Fertiliser replaces what a growing season consumes: nitrogen, phosphate, potassium, the headline nutrients. It does not replace the mineral capital of the soil. Silicon, calcium, magnesium and the trace elements are drawn out of the soil by the crop and carried off the field. On cattle ground much of that returns in dung, spread across the whole surface by animals that are not fussy about where they graze. On a horse field it largely does not, for reasons in the organic matter section below. And on a field you cut for hay, none of it does. Every bale that leaves the yard is minerals leaving permanently.

Do that for twenty years and you have a field that responds less and less to the same fertiliser, thins out, and grows weeds where the grass has lost vigour. It is not a nitrogen problem and no amount of nitrogen fixes it.

Lava Grit from Eifel primordial rock is the direct answer to that. It is volcanic rock rich in silicon, calcium, magnesium, potassium and trace elements, released gradually through weathering rather than leaching away, so one application works for years rather than one season. Its silicon content shows up measurably in the leaf, and silicon in the plant is what strengthens cell walls and improves resistance to drought, disease and pest pressure. It also has a high pore volume, which improves structure, water and air balance and root permeability in compacted soil, and its page notes an indirect effect against horsetail and other weeds, which follows from improving exactly the conditions horsetail depends on. For pasture the rate is 1,500 kg per hectare.

Basalt Meal is the finer-ground option from the same volcanic region, and it does something Lava Grit does not: it reacts with the clay-humus complex and breaks the bonds between clay particles, so heavy ground crumbles and becomes workable. It also fixes nitrogen against rapid leaching, and carries high concentrations of silicon, lime, magnesium and trace elements. For a meadow the rate is 1,500 kg per hectare, doubled on genuinely heavy clay, and it mixes into clay far better applied damp or watered in than dry.

Choosing between them: if your problem is mineral depletion and compaction, Lava Grit. If your problem is mineral depletion and heavy clay that sits wet and sets hard, Basalt Meal. On a light soil that is simply worn out, Lava Grit. Both at 1,500 kg per hectare, which sounds like a great deal until you remember it is a once-in-several-years application on a crop you are feeding to an animal.

Sandy soil that will not hold water

Sand has one problem and it is not fertility. It does not hold anything: not water, not nutrients, not the fertiliser you applied last month.

Bentonite is the answer to that specific fault. It is puffed clay minerals from natural rock, 70 percent montmorillonite, and it absorbs up to ten times its own weight in water. What it does structurally matters even more: it forms stable clay-humus complexes, which are what hold nutrients in the root zone instead of letting them wash through to somewhere no root will ever reach. It also makes sandy ground noticeably more cohesive and easier to work, and it reduces wind and rain erosion on light soil.

The rate is 150 grams per square metre on genuinely light soil, or 100 on medium soil that dries out. At field scale that is 1,500 kg per hectare on light soil, converted from the stated square metre rate. Work it into the top layer during cultivation.

On a sandy horse field this is often the highest-value thing you can do, because sand plus drought plus selective grazing is precisely the combination that produces bare, hard, sand-exposed patches, and a horse grazing sand-exposed ground is taking sand in with the grass.

Heavy clay that sits wet and sets hard

Clay has the opposite fault. It holds everything and releases nothing, sits wet through winter, sets like concrete in summer, and roots cannot push through it.

Basalt Meal is the product for this, and the mechanism is in the mineral section above: it breaks the bonds between clay particles so the clay crumbles. Rate for a meadow is 1,500 kg per hectare, doubled on genuinely heavy clay. Apply it damp or water it in, because dry basalt meal on dry clay sits on the surface.

Two things to do alongside it, both free. Break any compaction pan you find while the ground is open, because a pan under a renewed field will drown the roots in the first wet winter and there is no second chance to reach it. And on clay, cultivate in autumn and leave the surface rough over winter. Water in the clods freezes, expands and breaks them from the inside, and by April you have a crumbly seedbed that no machine could have produced. Sow then.

Organic matter and soil life, and where it actually fits on a field

Worth being straight about scale here, because the honest answer is not the one that sells the most product.

Soil Improver Activator Mix is the best thing in the range for waking up dead soil. Worm castings and dried cow manure with lava meal, carrying living mycorrhizal fungi and beneficial bacteria including Azotobacter, which fixes nitrogen from the air, and Bacillus, which promotes root growth and resistance to disease. Those fungi partner with grass roots and extend their reach for water and nutrients well beyond what roots manage alone.

But the rate for establishing grass is 2 to 5 litres per square metre. Across a hectare that is twenty to fifty thousand litres, which nobody is spreading on a field and I am not going to pretend otherwise. This is a product for areas measured in tens or hundreds of square metres.

Which is exactly the worn strip. The gateway, the trough surround, the shelter approach, a small sand paddock corner you are trying to bring back into grass. Those are the places where the soil is genuinely dead, where they are small enough to treat properly, and where the return on treating them properly is highest because they are the places that fail every year. Use it there, at the establishment rate, worked in.

Across a whole field the organic matter question is a different one, and it starts with understanding why a horse field runs out of it faster than any other kind of grassland.

Why does a horse field lose organic matter faster than a cattle field?

Because almost nothing goes back, and it goes wrong twice.

Horses dung in latrine areas and then refuse to graze anywhere near them. So whatever does return lands on the fraction of the field that was already the least productive, while the areas being grazed hardest get nothing. A cow is not fussy and spreads its own fertility across the surface it uses. A horse does the opposite of that on purpose.

Then there is picking up. Most people poo-pick, and they are right to, because it is the best worm control there is and no wormer replaces it. But every barrow that leaves the field is organic matter, nitrogen, phosphate, potassium and trace elements leaving the field, every day, for as long as you own the horse. A picked paddock behaves less like grazing and more like a field cut for hay. The loss per day is small and it never stops.

Ten or fifteen years of that is what turns a field into thin grass on hard ground that no seed mixture will fix, because the seed was never the problem. Soil that has had every deposit removed and nothing put back has lost the organic matter that holds water, feeds worms and keeps structure open under hooves.

Two free things first. Harrow the dung on any area you are not picking, which spreads the nutrition, breaks up the refused rough and exposes worm larvae to the sun. And if you can get hold of well-rotted farmyard manure or good compost, spread and harrow it in, because bulk organic matter at field scale is cheaper by the trailer load than by the bag and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

Cow Manure Pellets 3in1 is the bagged version of the same job, and pasture is one of the uses it is made for. It is 100 percent pure cow manure with lava flour added, over 60 percent organic matter, NPK 2-2-3, rich in magnesium, calcium, humic and fulvic acids and in minerals and trace elements. It releases over more than 120 days, it leaches very little because the nitrogen is organically bound rather than mineral, and it causes no leaf burn. It is hygienised, so it is pathogen-free and free of weed seeds, which matters far more on ground that animals graze than on a border. And it is sold in big bags up to 1,000 kg, so this is a field product rather than a garden one scaled up hopefully.

Three things happen at once, which is where the name comes from: the grass gets fed, the soil structure and water holding improve, and the soil life gets going again. On a picked-clean horse field the second and third of those are usually what has actually gone missing.

The dosage table gives a lawn rate rather than a pasture rate, and a lawn is grass growing on soil in the same way a sward is. The autumn lawn figure of 1 kg per 10 square metres works out at 1,000 kg per hectare, which is exactly how the 1,000 kg big bag is sized, for 10,000 square metres. That is the working field rate. On genuinely poor, hungry, long-neglected ground go to 1 kg per 5 square metres, which is 2,000 kg per hectare, and judge that from what the soil looks like on a spade rather than from the calendar. Dark, crumbly, full of worms needs less. Pale, dusty or setting hard needs more.

Spread it when rain is expected or the ground is already damp, so the pellets break down into the sward instead of sitting on top of it. In a renewal year, spread it before the final cultivation pass and work it into the top layer, which is where the roots of a new sward will be looking for it. Any season except ground frost.

Keep the horses off for seven to fourteen days, and let the weather decide which end of that you are on. Rain is what breaks the pellets down and washes them into the soil, so after a decent wet spell a week is enough. If it stays dry and you can still see whole pellets lying in the grass, they have not gone anywhere yet and neither should the horses. Look at the ground rather than the calendar. This is also the practical argument for spreading just before rain: the sooner it washes in, the sooner you get the field back.

Cow Manure Pellets or Pasture Fertiliser: which one does your field need?

They do different jobs, and the field usually tells you which.

If the field is simply hungry, feed it. Growth is even but weak, the colour is pale, and the soil itself is fine on a spade. Pasture Fertiliser All-In-One is the season's nutrition and there is a section on it further down.

If the field is not so much hungry as worn out, feeding it will buy a flush of growth on the same dead soil and you will be back next year with the same field. Hard under a spade, no worms, no crumb, picked clean for a decade. That is the Cow Manure Pellets job, and it is the one that compounds instead of running out.

One extra reason, and it is specific to horses. A starved, overgrazed, stressed sward is not a low sugar sward. Short grass under bright light still photosynthesises but cannot turn the sugar into growth, so it holds onto it. The low fructan in these mixtures comes from the varieties. Keeping the field growing steadily rather than starving is the management half of the same job, and it is free to understand.

In a renewal year, do both. Cow Manure Pellets 3in1 worked in during cultivation, Pasture Fertiliser once the new grass is up and growing. On an established field in an ordinary year most holdings need one or the other, not both. And if the analysis says the pH is wrong, correct that first, because the wrong pH locks up everything else you are about to spend money on.

The seedbed, sowing and rolling

Destroy the old sward, work the ground, get it level and firm, sow at the full rate, roll it.

On the old sward: if it is mostly grass, work it in and it becomes organic matter exactly where you want it. If it carries couch, docks or thistles with running roots, cultivating chops those roots into fragments and every fragment regrows, so you are propagating rather than clearing. On a field with a real perennial weed problem the honest answer is that clearing it is its own job before the seedbed is made, and rushing it means doing the whole renewal again.

Work the ground to a level, firm surface with a crumbly top few centimetres. Roll it, then look across the surface from a low angle rather than down at your feet, because hollows are invisible from above and obvious from the side. Take those out and roll again. If you have the time, leave it a week for rain to settle it and fix whatever appears, because a dip that shows up now would otherwise be a wet hole in your field for the next decade.

Sow at 45 to 55 kg per hectare for Pasture Grass Seed Meadow, closer to 60 on very small plots where edge losses are proportionally larger, or 45 if a contractor drills it. Pasture Grass Seed Paddock is sown at 90 kg per hectare, which is close to double, and that is not an error in the figures. Then roll again. Seed to soil contact decides this whole job.

Part five: choosing the seed

Meadow or Paddock: which mixture for which ground?

It comes down to how hard the ground is worked. The two are built from different species rather than being the same mixture at two prices.

Pasture Grass Seed Meadow is the grazing and hay mixture. 36 percent late diploid perennial ryegrass, 33 percent mid-season diploid perennial ryegrass, 14 percent timothy, 14 percent common bentgrass and 3 percent creeping bentgrass. The two diploid ryegrasses give palatable, structured growth without the sugar loading of a production ryegrass. Timothy is the fibre and the hay quality, and it is a grass horses will readily eat. The bentgrasses give a low, dense base that tolerates being grazed close. It suits extensive conditions, works on all soil types, and produces a resilient sward with a long life and a high yield.

Pasture Grass Seed Paddock is for intensively used ground. 30 percent perennial ryegrass of a sports pasture type, 20 percent perennial ryegrass of a low fructan pasture type, 20 percent timothy, 20 percent smooth-stalked meadow grass and 10 percent creeping red fescue. The smooth-stalked meadow grass and the creeping red fescue are the difference: those are the species a sports turf mixture uses for wear tolerance, and they are why this holds a closed sward where a grazing mixture is worn open. It roots deeper, which gives anchorage against trampling and resilience in both drought and heavy rain, and it recovers from grazing faster, so bare patches close before weeds find them.

Two health consequences follow from that closed sward rather than from any additive. A firm, unbroken turf reduces the risk of sand colic, because a horse grazing a worn-out paddock is taking soil in with every bite. And the low fructan content significantly reduces the risk of laminitis in spring, which is when that risk is at its highest.

In practice, most holdings need both. Meadow across the field where the grazing rotates and the hay comes off. Paddock on the strip around the gate, the shelter and the trough, and on any small paddock in daily use. That worn strip is what you will reseed every single year if you keep putting a grazing mixture into it, and it is a small enough area that the higher seed rate is not the problem it looks like on paper.

Can you cut hay from the same field you graze?

Yes, and both grazing mixtures are made for it. Meadow suits grazing, ensiling and hay, and Paddock is suitable for mowing and haymaking as well as for intensive grazing. If your field is primarily grazed and you take a cut off it when you can, either of them is the right seed.

Timothy is the reason both work as hay. It is a genuine forage grass with real fibre content and horses eat it readily as hay, which is not true of everything that looks good in a field. And because both mixtures are selected for low fructan, the hay coming off them starts from a lower sugar baseline than hay off a production ryegrass ley.

So a field that is grazed and cut is a Meadow field, or a Paddock field where the ground takes daily traffic, and you do not need anything else for it. The separate hay mixture is for ground that is never grazed at all, where mowing is the only thing that ever happens to it. The next question covers that case.

One practical point that applies either way, and it is the mineral one from earlier. A field you cut is exporting minerals in every bale rather than cycling them back in dung, so a cut field needs remineralising sooner and more often than a purely grazed one. If you are taking hay off the same ground every year, the Lava Grit or Basalt Meal application in the renewal section is not optional maintenance, it is replacing what you are selling or feeding out.

Which mixture if you are cutting hay rather than grazing?

Hay Grass Seed is the mixture for ground you only mow, and the difference from a grazing mixture is not marketing. A grazing sward is bred to survive being bitten to the ground and walked on. A mowing crop is bred to stand up, yield, and come off the field cleanly, and those are close to opposite jobs. If the same ground is grazed at any point in the year, you want Meadow, or Paddock where it takes daily traffic, rather than this.

The composition tells you what it is for. 49 percent tall fescue, 20 percent timothy, 10 percent festulolium, 10 percent cocksfoot, 10 percent meadow fescue, and 1 percent sweet vernal grass. Timothy, meadow fescue and cocksfoot are the fibre and the palatability, which is why horses clear the manger rather than sorting through it. The tall fescue is the deep-rooting bulk that carries the yield through a dry summer.

That 1 percent of sweet vernal grass is not a rounding error. It is the grass that makes hay smell like hay, and a horse eats with its nose first.

Three things follow that matter to anybody making their own roughage. It yields up to 30 percent more per hectare than a standard hay mixture, which on a field you are cutting twice a year compounds fast. It grows evenly and densely without coarse stems, so mowing is clean and there is less rubbish in the bale. And it dries faster after cutting, which in a northern European summer is the difference between hay and mouldy hay more often than anybody would like.

It is low fructan like the grazing mixtures, so it reduces the risk of laminitis and obesity, and it is NAK certified on germination and purity. It roots deep, holds a stable sward for years, and needs less overseeding than a lighter mixture would.

Sow it at 60 to 65 kg per hectare with a machine. Overseed at 30. Every pack size states its area at 60 kg per hectare, so at the overseeding rate a bag goes exactly twice as far.

The honest limit: this is not a grazing mixture. It will tolerate some grazing, as any sward will, but a hay mixture under daily hoof traffic at a gateway will open up, and that is what Paddock exists for. So the decision comes down to two questions, how hard the ground is worked and whether it is ever grazed at all. Grazed and cut on ordinary ground: Meadow. Grazed and cut on ground that takes daily traffic: Paddock. Never grazed, only mown: Hay.

Should you mix meadow herbs into the seed?

It is worth doing, it is cheap next to the seed, and it is far easier at sowing than at any point afterwards.

Meadow Herbs is a nine-herb mixture developed for horse pasture: 18 percent caraway, 14 percent fennel, 13 percent parsley, 13 percent ribwort plantain, 12 percent chicory, 11 percent yarrow, 8 percent cleavers, 8 percent wild carrot and 3 percent wild parsnip. Mix 250 grams into 15 kg of the grazing mixture, covering roughly 3,000 square metres, and sow it as one.

What it does is two things and both matter for a feed crop. It makes the pasture more palatable, which on a field where horses graze selectively means a more even intake and less of the bare-patch problem this guide opened with. And the herbs carry natural compounds that support healthy gut flora and digestion, which helps a horse get more out of the same grass, alongside supporting general resistance and vitality.

Chicory and ribwort plantain are worth knowing about individually. Both are deep-rooting, so they reach minerals and moisture the grasses do not, and both are genuinely eaten rather than avoided. Yarrow and caraway are traditional pasture herbs for the same reason. This is not a wildflower mix for appearance, it is a forage decision.

Two honest caveats. The mixing instruction is written for the grazing mixture at 250 grams per 15 kg. A paddock mixture is sown at nearly double the seed rate per hectare, so holding the same weight ratio would put roughly double the herbs into the ground per hectare, and the instructions do not cover that case, so ask before scaling it yourself. And mix it thoroughly: herb seed and grass seed are different sizes and weights and will separate in a hopper, so check the mix has not settled out halfway across the field.

How much seed and how much soil improver for your field?

Worked out in real areas, because rates per hectare are awkward to apply to a paddock measured in metres.

Pack coverage on both seed mixtures is calculated on the full sowing rate, so a bag stated for 3,000 square metres does cover 3,000 square metres for a renewal. Overseeding at roughly half the rate, the same bag goes about twice as far, which is worth knowing before you order two.

Measure the field rather than estimating it. Almost everybody underestimates a paddock they look at every day, and running short two thirds of the way across leaves a visibly thinner strip for years.

Part six: after sowing, and every year after that

Feeding a new or renewed pasture

Pasture Fertiliser All-In-One is built for horse pasture specifically, and the reason matters. It is based on hygienised manure enriched with natural minerals and trace elements, and the nitrogen becomes available gradually across about 120 days rather than in a flush. That gradual release is the point for a horse field: the grass does not run into a growth spurt, and the protein content stays where you want it for a horse rather than spiking. The result is palatable grass and roughage rather than a lush surge.

Rate is 1 kg per 20 square metres, which is 500 kg per hectare. First application in spring, second in summer, an optional third in autumn. Apply when rain is expected or water it in. Suitable in any season except ground frost.

It is supplied as a microgranulate, which is deliberate for grazing ground: the granules work into the soil quickly rather than sitting on the surface where an animal could take them up. Because of that, animals can return to the pasture shortly after fertilising, and 14 days off gives the best result. Those are two different questions. Safety is answered by the granules going in; results are better if the grass gets a fortnight to use the feed before it is grazed. If you have the grazing to spare, take the 14 days.

And remember the sequencing rule from the lime section: lime first, fertilise afterwards, never both in the same pass.

When can horses go back on?

After sowing, not until the new grass has genuinely rooted, which on an autumn sowing realistically means the following spring rather than a few weeks in October.

New seedlings pull out whole under a hoof because they have not anchored, and the areas you most wanted to fix are the ones that get walked first. A sown field looks finished long before it can carry weight. If you only have one field and cannot take it out of use for a season, do the worn strip now and the rest of it next year, rather than half-establishing the whole field and losing all of it.

Introduce grazing gradually when you do come back. Short periods first, and ideally not in the wet, because a newly established sward is easy to pull out of soft ground.

What if the pasture stays thin?

Work out which of five things happened before you buy more seed, because four of them are not a seed problem.

Grass left too long before sowing is the most common of all. If the existing sward was not grazed down or topped hard, the seedlings never got the light to compete and the job was lost before the seed went out.

No soil contact is second, and it usually means the field was not rolled, or the seed went onto thatch that was never harrowed out. Seed on dead material dries out and dies whatever the weather does.

Drying out is third and on a field you cannot irrigate it is partly luck. It shows as thin results across the whole area rather than in patches, following a dry fortnight after sowing.

Soil chemistry is fourth and it is the one that repeats. Wrong pH or a genuine deficiency, and the seed germinates and then stalls, and it will do the same next year and the year after. This is what the analysis was for.

Grazing too early is fifth, and it is the most avoidable. If the thin areas map onto the paths and gateways, you know what happened.

Not sure which of those you are looking at? Send me the soil analysis and a photograph of the worst part of the field, and I will tell you honestly what I think happened, including when the answer is that it needs another month and no more money.

What to do every year so you do not have to do this again

Most of what keeps a horse pasture good costs nothing, and all of it works against the pattern this guide started with.

• Rotate and rest. Selective grazing is the root cause of patchiness, and the only real answer is taking the horses off long enough for the grazed areas to regrow past their growth point. Split a field with electric tape if you only have one.

• Top the rough. Horses will not graze the tall stemmy areas around dung, so mowing them keeps the whole field in productive growth rather than letting half of it go to seed.

• Harrow the dung on anything you are not picking up. It spreads the nutrition, breaks up the refused patches and exposes worm larvae. This is the single highest-value free job on the list.

• Put something back if you pick up. Keep picking, it is the right thing to do, but budget for the fact that the field is being stripped a barrow at a time. Farmyard manure, compost or Cow Manure Pellets 3in1 at 1,000 kg per hectare, once a year or once every couple of years depending on what the spade shows you. Time it for a paddock that is coming out of the rotation anyway, so the seven to fourteen days off costs you nothing.

• Keep off wet ground. Hooves on saturated soil is how compaction happens, and compaction is what you spent money fixing during the renewal.

• Use a hardstanding or a sacrifice area in winter if you have one, and if you do not, at least keep them off the wettest corners when you can.

• Test the soil every three or four years rather than waiting for the sward to tell you. It will tell you late.

• Overseed a little every year rather than a lot every ten. Thirty kilograms per hectare into a field that is only slightly thin is far cheaper than a full renewal, and it never lets the weeds get a foothold.

A horse pasture is a crop being harvested by an animal that grazes unevenly and stands on it. Managed with that in mind it will last decades. Left to itself it declines quietly, and by the time it looks bad you are into a renewal rather than a repair.

And if you want a second opinion on any of it, send me a soil analysis. Free, no obligation, and if the honest answer is that your field needs nothing this year, that is the answer you will get.