Testing alone won’t control parasites. Pasture and grazing management matters.
None of us want to end up in the situation where untreatable parasite burdens mean we can no longer keep horses on our land, but wormer resistance raises this as a very real possibility.
Good pasture management and animal husbandry techniques, that breaks the lifecycle of the worms is beneficial in reducing the parasite threat to horses and reduce your reliance on chemicals to control your horse’s worm burden. This protects your grazing environment and prolongs the life of worming drugs for all horse owners.
Worm larvae passed in droppings hatch and become mobile within seven days at which point they leave the dung piles to re-infect the pasture. The milder and wetter the weather the further and faster the larvae can travel. Collecting droppings twice a week, even through winter is a sound investment in your worm control programme and there are other good pasture management practices that will help reduce the parasite risk on grazing lands:
- Keep new horses separate until tested and treated accordingly to avoid them bringing unwanted passengers onto your grazing!
- Don’t worm and move; after worming ensure horses stay on the same pasture for a few days to help slow down resistance.
- Remove all droppings 24-48hrs after worming to reduce environmental contamination.
- Poo pick regularly to remove droppings from fields and tracks at least twice a week to reduce the number of infective larvae.
- If your paddock or track management allows it, try to leave some fresh dung piles to help dung beetles do their bit too!
- Place muckheaps at least three metres from adjacent grazing land as motile larvae can travel this far from droppings to re-infect grazing.
- Avoid overstocking paddocks as this increase the risk of worm exposure.
- Resting for at least 3 months and rotating grazing paddocks helps break the parasite lifecycle.
- Cross graze pasture with other species eg. sheep.
- Harrowing is only effective for parasite control when done during a spell of very hot, dry bright weather and within a system that includes resting and rotating grazing land.