Founder Valley
Sixth Year Anniversary: PART I
They are genetically programmed to eat grass. 18-20 hours a day. Their bodies must have it. Their hind gut must have it. But from the moment we landed in middle Tennessee, the warnings began to pour in from the locals. Your horses cannot be out 24/7 on the rich sugary grasses of middle Tennessee.
You’ve just moved into Founder Valley!
It freaked us out. Could grasses be that different? Why? What the heck was going on in middle Tennessee?? It was all prying at the edges of logic.
We were determined to have our horses live like God and Mother Nature intended. But what we were being told was scary, and didn’t make sense. Images from Ginger Kathrens’ wonderful PBS documentary series about the wild stallion Cloud and his herd in the Pryor Mountains of Montana came to mind (I’ve watched Episode 3 maybe 25 times. It is singularly the best film I’ve ever seen about wild horses).
The images that were assaulting me were of the beautiful rich green meadow at the top of the mountain where the herds spend every waking hour from mid-Spring through mid-fall. So why aren’t those horses foundering, I kept asking myself. How is that meadow different from the pastures in middle Tennessee?
By Joe Camp
myself. How is that meadow different from the pastures in middle Tennessee?
As it turns out it’s very different from the pastures in middle Tennessee. Astoundingly so. Why? Because of us! Humans! What we discovered is that most of these gorgeous white-fenced pastures around us contain a single species of genetically modified cool season grass, planted like a thick carpet and fertilized like crazy. Nary a weed, or bush, or bramble, or berry. And if there’s a tree around, it’s always fenced.
So? I bet it’s beautiful. To the human maybe. Not to the horses. How come? It turns out that choices are the single most important piece of the puzzle. When a horse has all the choices he or she might want or need their genetic makeup inherently knows how to balance itself. Like the wild horses do. And we now know that every horse on the planet, both wild and domestic, are genetically precisely the same.
But most of the pastures here in “Founder Valley” offer no choices. None. The horses’ only option is one species of cool season grass (like fescue, orchard, etc) which has way more sugar than warm season grasses (like Bermuda, Crab grass, etc) because cool season grasses generate fructan. Warm season grasses do not. A warm season grass will manufacture starch but when the gland storing the starch is full the process stops. Fructan in cool season grasses is manufactured indefinitely as long as there is sunshine.
Also pasture owners usually opt for a grass that has been genetically modified to grow earlier in the Spring and later in the fall to reduce the amount of hay fed during the winter. And according to researcher Katy Watts genetically modified grasses are always higher in sugar content than the same grass not genetically modified.