Roughs aren’t just for golf

I’m living on a little farm now and the horses have grazed the main pasture area down, which I just found out are technically called lawns and roughs.

The lawns are the short grazed areas and horses prefer them.

So sort of like golf, the roughs are taller. However, they’re not made of beautiful manicured golf grass. Instead they’re filled with weeds and forage that horses consider undesirable. In my life that would include vegetables like brussel sprouts.  Well that’s not really what they’re leaving behind, but I would totally leave those behind if I were grazing and they grew in my pasture. Well, I think you get the picture.

So if you live outside, you eat outside and you go to the bathroom outside, then you’re going to use the area you aren’t eating for your bathroom, right?

Well since these areas tend to fill up with manure, which can be a source of parasites that then contaminate the pasture and then create a cycle of reinfection, it is important to keep roughs trimmed. It is also important to remove their waste weekly, but that’s beyond what I want to cover here.

Instead of trimming the roughs with power equipment, you can use other animals that like the vegetation that grows there to keep that forage short. Like passing your brussel sprouts under the table to your brother who loves them.

My roommates have used electric wire fencing that is portable to contain the roughs to keep a small herd of eight bachelor sheep focused on these areas. I have watched them clear out the areas along the irrigation ditch in short order. Then I come home to find a different area has been fenced off.

Really it’s a great system. Both the horses and sheep need to eat. They eat slightly different plants and we don’t have to clear the area using power equipment. So it’s peaceful and of course it’s really fun to watch the sheep and horses using the land in different ways.