When the grass is tightly planted like a lawn the horses have to move substantially less to eat, and horses are genetically designed to move 8-20 miles a day. They need this movement for their body to function properly, both inside and out. In the wild horse meadows the grasses are patchy and scattered.
So far then the Tennessee horses are usually ingesting way more sugar with less movement than a wild horse on that meadow atop the Pryor Mountains in Montana who has many choices to balance his intake.
Then add the chemical fertilizers in Tennessee which of course don’t exist in the wild. When grass is stressed and needing water it sucks up potassium which acts as a magnet for attracting water. Potassium is the number one ingredient in most chemical fertilizers so during a period of stress on the grass a horse can wind up with up to 1000 times more potassium in his body than he needs. Not good.
And because there are no weeds, or brambles, or berries, or trees, or bushes in these Tennessee pastures, the horse has no choice but to eat what’s there, or go hungry.
Is it any wonder it’s called Founder Valley? But we didn’t know any of this when we purchased our new place. Thankfully there is a God who takes care of us even when we don’t know we need taking care of.
As we peeled back the layers of research we discovered our new pasture contained at least seven different kinds of native grasses that are split fairly evenly between high-sugar cool season grasses and low-sugar warm-season grasses now that we’ve added a bit of Bermuda to the mix. There are plenty of weeds, brambles, bushes, berries, and trees. And there has been no chemical fertilizer on it for at least 14 years. And no chemical pesticides or herbicides (whatever the label says it’s still poison that, over time, will cause problems. Would you ingest it?).
Joe Camp, film writer, producer, director, author, passionate speaker, and the man behind the canine superstar Benji believes that anything is possible if you work hard enough and trust in yourself. He was told by industry “experts” not to bother with the original Benji film; that it wouldn’t work. He proved the experts wrong and now, after five Benji movies, he’s at it again with his new best selling book The Soul of a Horse published by the Crown/Harmony imprint of Random House in 2008. A book that is already in its fourth printing, has climbed to #4 on The Dallas Morning News Non-Fiction Best Seller List, and is setting traditional thinking about horses on its ear.
Learn more about Joe and Kathleen Camp on their website: Soul of a Horse
Joe
Look for Part II in the November issue of the ACTHA Monthly
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