Worm-free Horses Without Pharmaceuticals
by Stuart Pattison of Devon, UK
There are three main classes of chemical sheep wormers used in Britain. Sheep worms are becoming resistant to all three of them. That’s not the way to go. Routine use of chemical wormers is the best way of building up drug resistance and, itself, is an indication of poor management. Drug addiction is no good for man nor beast.
In this short article I propose to set out how I have kept farm horses clear of worms for many years without any drugs. Any system has a few rules. These are mine:
1. Suckling foals should not be weaned until they have come in off the pasture in early winter. Mares’ milk keeps foals clear of worms.
2. All horses at all times must have free access to lump rock salt or mineralized slat block licks. Worms like acid conditions, they cannot stand salt.
3. At the end of the grazing season, horses, including foals, should be fed substantial quantities of a “hot” brassica such as kale. Worms cannot stand the hot mustard oils that kale contains and after three weeks feeding the white roundworms will be seen flushed out with the horses’ droppings.
I emphasize: care is needed when feeding brassicas to horses, as these crops (which may include swedes/rutas, turnips and cabbage) are windy and cause flatulence. Hay must be fed both immediately before and immediately after feeding kale, without fail and a period of 10 days allowed for them to get used to this feed. Sloppiness in this regard brings its own reward – flatulent colic. But it has never happened to me.
Kale can be strip-grazed behind an electric fence if the horses have been properly trained to this system from foals (as all horses ought to be), or cut and carted. They make more efficient use of the kale stems/stalks when the crop is carted to them in yards.
4. Clean grazing. This means keep the horses moving and keep them away from their droppings as much as possible, and compost the yard manure so it gets really hot and keep turning it and then spread it on to crop land. Pastures that are grazed early should then be shut up and mowed for hay or silage in late summer. Fields that are mown in June should then be grazed in the late summer so that all fields have a long rest from horse manure. Keep grass short in grazing fields with a flail topper so that areas of rank grass around dunging areas do not develop.
On a mixed farm, if possible, it is better to graze cattle, sheep and horses either together or in succession to provide a good measure of worm control. They have different grazing habits and preferences and different worm species so this is a livestock equivalent of crop rotation – a well proven method of disease control.
On a mixed farm, not too intensive, the above guidelines will keep your horses sufficiently free of intestinal worms that they will maintain their own immunity to your farm’s specific types.
If, however, you are a typical suburban horse keeper with too many horses kept on far too little ground, you will need to keep assaulting your horses’ livers with pharmaceuticals.
Many vets make more than a third of their profits from drug selling. Remember who is paying for that and why. This is one expense that you can avoid by good and careful management.
Stuart Pattison has farmed with horses for 30 years and runs training courses in Devon, England, specializing in organic farming and horse-powered weed control in cereals and row-crops.
