Horsing Around With Your Topsoil

One of the things I have noticed about the area we live in is the number of horse properties around us.  It seems like at least half the homeowners in this neighborhood use their acreage for equines -- with most folks pasturing their horses 365 days a year, or close to it.  

I like horses, and used to own one myself, before we moved here.  But that was back when we lived in the suburbs and I boarded my horse with some friends who lived in the country.  

Even there, I couldn't help but notice the place where the horses spent most of their time (which happened to be the riding arena at that establishment) was completely devoid of green growth of any kind.  That's because horses, more than almost any other farm animal, are hard on the land.  This was illustrated to me recently, when we got a flyer from our community services district reminding homeowners to place wattles (kind of like long sandbags filled with tightly-packed straw) at the bottom of their hills, where the exposed and loose dirt could be expected to run into the road when it rained.  

Keep the wrong size animal on the wrong amount of acreage, and, if it's a hillside, you can pretty much say goodbye to your hill, one gully-washer at a time.

We have a healthy crop of ground cover on our hillside right now, and no grazing animals, and therefore have no problems with erosion at this time. Wattles are unnecessary.  Our topsoil and native grasses seem to hold our downslope pasture together nicely. But when we do get some livestock, we will need to use a rotational grazing method much of the year and be really, really judicious in adding four-legged critters to our farm, because topsoil is black gold and I'm not going to lose ours.

And while I'd like to own horses, donkeys, goats, sheep, llamas, and pigs, unfortunately we don't have enough room to graze that many animals and keep our soil in one place when winter rains and summer winds come.  To keep that many animals we'd probably need at least 20 acres or more. 

So I'm guessing maybe one donkey or a couple of goats would be manageable for us, because the menagerie I often dream about having would strip every living piece of plant material off our hillside and eventually, even strip the very dirt from it.

Guess even paradise comes with some limitations.