Albrecht's Animals

Albrecht's Animals

Welcome! 

 

Albrecht’s Animals is an account of 30 years’ difficulties trying to grow healthy animals and vegetables on a little pocket farm outside Portland, Oregon and finally gathering enough clues from many sources to lead me to The Reason, if not The Solution.  Of course no one thing is ever the sole wellspring of animal (and human) well-being, but most illness can be traced to soil infertility, which results in poor nutrition.  Most of us know that.  Few of us are given the tools to use that knowing.  This weblog attempts to put that obscure phrase “soil infertility” into real-life terms.  When you know the enemy, you can defeat it.  What better way to understand the link between soil fertility and food nutrition than through animals that harvest their food at soil level?  Grass (and other plants amongst the grass) is the food – and sometimes the poison - of horses and because of this perfect simplicity, horses and other grass eaters are a perfect model of health of illness according to soil fertility for those of us whose diets are vastly more complex.  A hay analysis is almost to the soil like a blood panel is to a horse.  Healthy hay is a mirror image of healthy soil, which ultimately leads to healthy horses.

 

Perhaps you have come to visit here because your horse is suffering from a metabolic disorder.  There is no pretense to suggest that a cure is offered here.  There is nothing for sale. This weblog is about sharing our experience with the soil fertility science of a brilliant soil scientist, William A. Albrecht, Ph.D. Here you will discover why a grass species which has the potential to be a safe, low-sugar variety for horses will only live up to that potential when grown on soils that are sufficiently fertile to achieve that potential.  High sugar, high starch hay may be bred into many new varieties of grass, but in the grasses we expect to be able to safely feed our horses, high sugar and high starch may be a sign of metabolic derangement in the grass itself (yes, grass DOES have a metabolism!) which will lead to nutritional problems far beyond insulin resistance and other metabolic disorders in the horse.  You and I have the power to bring the grass to its potential as horse feed, by balancing the chemistry of the soil.  It can be done, and it isn’t rocket science, but it takes a lot of convincing sometimes, that we really are NOT out of control of a seemingly hopeless situation, as so many with something to gain from our suffering will have you believe.

 

My first order of business is to introduce you to Dr. Albrecht, and there is no better way for me to do that than to invite you to detour over to www.soilminerals.com. There is some brilliant stuff there and it provides a perfect understanding for some of my stories to make more sense.  The following will be much more relevant if you first gain a little knowledge of the man and his work.

 

The Road to Albrecht

 

We’ve had horses since long before we moved to our little pocket farm of ten acres outside of Oregon City, Oregon.  They’ve come and gone, none living to a ripe old age before going to different homes.  But consistently it seemed, we had a problem with late shedding, thyroid issues, a couple of unexplainable laminitis cases…but we had no particular way to link the problems together. 

 

Now, we have two “lifers”  - horses that will be with us ‘til death do us part.  One, a Morgan gelding, is 17 years old and has had curious fat slabs and late shedding as long as I can remember.  I’ve had him for 13 years.  The other is a 9-year-old Morgan mare, who is simply obese.  She was starved the first two years of her life, which may account for her thrifty metabolism.  Last year, in 2008, I felt strongly that the gelding was trying to tell me he felt very ill.  He got a hoof abscess, conjunctivitis, a skin condition, a stubborn winter coat, minor colics and a runny eye and just acted as though he felt terrible.  Thinking he might have Cushing’s disease, I called in the vet.  Let’s just say that presently he is being treated for Equine Metabolic Syndrome, and is on Pergolide, which is helping some of his problems.  The stubbornly obese Morgan mare presently has “only a thyroid problem.” 

 

Make no mistake; this blog is NOT about managing metabolic horses.  This blog is about PREVENTING metabolic horses.  It is hard to find any website, Internet list or equine professional who wants to talk prevention.  Conversations about prevention are commonly redirected back to symptom management, because so many of us have had to focus on management, not knowing, or perhaps not wanting to know, about prevention.  This is called the “Paradigm Effect.”  Entering uncharted territory is always uncomfortable and tends to make it hard to shift our focus.   I've gotten some tough knocks over my approach to equine metabolic disease, or rather the prevention thereof.   So I've started this blog as a way to organize my layman's grasp of Albrecht's principles of soil fertility and animal health into a format that may be useful to other horse owners, and presented in an atmosphere where I can maintain the focus on disease prevention through soil fertility, as opposed to constantly defending my management choices for my metabolic horses.  I hope to entirely avoid discussion of disease which is already present.  This is about eliminating equine metabolic disorders in the first place

 

Management of equine metabolic disease includes shoveling minerals– ground rocks – into the horse.  Too late.  The barn door is open and the cows are already gone.  

 

Sheep – The Canary in the Coal Mine

 

After having recreational horses on the property and generally ignoring good husbandry of the land for some 20 odd years, I took a fancy to a breed of exotic looking sheep called American Blackbellies.  Within days of bringing home the first of these “worry free” sheep, they began to scour.  No treatment stopped the scouring.  I had fecals done, I followed worming and coccidiosis advice.  The problem worsened.  The adult sheep that were scouring were beginning to waste away.  Their hair coats became brittle and broke between the fingers.  I consulted several vets.  The advice was always more chemicals.  There MUST be parasites even in the face of a lack of evidence.

 

Start of a New Paradigm

 

I doggedly continued to try to help the sheep but nothing I did would cure the scouring and wasting.  Then as if by Divine intervention, my dear friend Jean Terry sent me a book.  The little volume set me on a life-changing course.  The book is Natural Farming by Pat Coleby.  Ms. Coleby introduced me to the complex world of minerals in animal nutrition.  (Stop just a minute…this blog is NOT about feeding minerals to animals.)  Specifically she tied my sheep’s wasting disease to a deficiency of copper. 

 

Now copper is a tricky business for sheep.  It can be highly toxic for them.  And there is overwhelming conviction in the sheep community that if you feed copper to a sheep you are the equivalent of an ax murderer.  I had my hay analyzed.  The real murderer was revealed.  Not only was there a primary deficiency of copper, there was a secondary deficiency because of a particular imbalance of other minerals.  In the face of overwhelming opposition from others, I eventually had to buckle down to the cold facts presented by the analysis.  My sheep were going to continue dying if I didn’t get some copper into them.  Fortunately for me, Ms. Coleby prescribed a combination of minerals that act as buffers to straight copper sulphate and through trial and error, my sheep have been free of this problem for a few years now.

 

As an agreeable side benefit, the combination of minerals keeps the sheep (and horses) virtually free of parasites.

 

Persistent Problems

 

The sheep have not been particularly successful in other areas, such as reproduction and growth.  They’re not known for fast growth rates, but when they failed to do any better on $300/ton dairy alfalfa with carefully balanced (according to NRC tables) rations, I truly had to think about who was to blame for the growth problems.  Was it the gene pool or was it the feed?  Everything in my now considerable research was forcing me to quit blaming the sheep.  Every vet I had consulted on these animals had agreed that they were a “degraded” breed.  Nobody considered for a moment that they are a tropical breed trying to make a living in a Northwest forest clearcut.  Nobody, even me, ever considered that I might be trying to do the equivalent of raising saltwater fish in a freshwater tank.

 

By now I’d had many, many samples of hays and forage analyzed, and even though the expensive third cutting alfalfa should have been highly nutritious, for the most part the analysis was as much of a train wreck as any of the local unfertilized grass hays.  It just appeared to have more “crude protein.”  More on that later.

 

I was very interested in raising 100% grassfed lamb.  Because my pasture was anything but healthy through years, perhaps a century, of mismanagement, I knew that I was going to have to do something about it.  Most literature led me to believe that if there was enough calcium in the soil, the nutrients would start cycling and the pasture would right itself, becoming rich and nutritious.  So we applied lime enthusiastically according to various lab recommendations.  Over four years, nothing happened.  The pasture was infested with oxeye daisy, Queen Anne’s lace and spotted catsear, with nary a clover plant in sight.

 

I had become a devoted reader of Stockman Grass Farmer Magazine, and an article by Neal Kinsey about the application of lime – right and wrong – made me sit up and say, “Uh oh…”

 

 I think it must have been through Mr. Kinsey’s articles that I became extremely interested in the work of Dr. Albrecht.  I obtained a book by Dr. Albrecht, “Soil Fertility and Animal Health” and I knew I’d discovered The Rest of The Story.  I bought Mr. Kinsey’s book “Hands On Agronomy,” and I knew I’d found the roadmap for applying Dr. Albrecht’s teachings.  Dr. Albrecht is the science; Mr. Kinsey explains it. Kinsey Agricultural Service, Inc., has become our farm’s most important partner, analyzing our soil and making fertility recommendations according to the science of Dr. Albrecht.  But that is yet another chapter.

 

Rebalancing the Soil Minerals

 

After making some serious blunders in lime applications, we consulted Kinsey Agricultural Services in late 2007.  They analyzed a soil sample from the pasture and made recommendations for soil amendments based on Albrecht’s science.  We began our program of soil remineralization in January 2008.

 

I still had a few questions.  But consulting Neal’s book and learning the “why” of what we were doing quickly answered most of them.  We were unable to make some of the recommended applications in 2008.  Nevertheless, in mid-June, I was anxiously sampling every load of the natural mixed grass hay to come off the old pasture in several years.

 

The results of the hay sample were quite astonishing.  At the outset of the year, my aim had been to create a pasture of high enough energy to support the sheep without grain inputs.

 

Instead, what I got was very nearly perfect horse hay! (And ideal maintenance hay for dry ewes.)

 

Unbelievably, it was only at this point that I became acutely aware that what had been swiftly killing my sheep, was slowly killing my horses.

 

The circle was closed.  It was not until I received the hay analysis from the partially remineralized pasture, that I made the connection between my horses’ vague history of metabolic issues and the apparent inability of my land (and apparently most land in the state) to produce grass that was fit food for a horse. .  The new hay was good to excellent in nutritional content and balance in almost all of the most important categories.  For the horses with metabolic disease, the sugar and starch were negligible.  This is in stark contrast to the high sugar and starch content of virtually all previous forage/hay samples.  At around 10%, the protein content couldn’t have been better.  This as opposed to grass hay analyses generally running no more than 6%.

 

Dr. Albrecht’s science was proven.  When the grass plants had all the soil elements to fabricate protein from the products of photosynthesis (sugar and starch), the grass would become fit food for grazing animals.

 

As a further note, the ewes grazed the pasture for four months, received a small ration of grain and alfalfa, lambed uneventfully, went back to grazing two weeks after the hay was harvested and raised their lambs naturally with only a modest supply of extra protein and a small amount of grain for the required extra energy.  This is after all, now a “horse” pasture and not a “sheep” pasture.  It will be maintained as such. The yield from 5-6 acres was 13 tons – 534 bales.

 

I must make haste to note that applying the Albrecht principles is not necessarily about yield but about nutritional density.  The yield of the pasture goes well beyond the hay production.  The animals quickly responded to the increased nutrition.  The lambs have grown equally well – or better – on the mixed grass hay than on the alfalfa.  They receive only enough grain to carry the critical “Coleby mix” to meet their copper needs while the pasture is carefully stocked with the required copper.  They also receive trace mineral salt and free choice kelp meal.

 

There are still some imbalances to overcome, but one must expect to spend a few years fixing what it took nature and man combined millennia to wreak havoc on.  One notable problem, excessive iron in the hay, is a result of my having resisted the application of ferrous sulphate to the soil.  It would seem there was already an excess of iron to cause an excess in the hay.  What gives?  I have much more to say about that later.

 

Year Two

 

Today January 10, 2009 we have just begun the new growing season with the application of lime, dolomite and soft rock phosphate to an additional acre that we have decided to reclaim for grazing.  Following on will be other amendments to the new ground, the pasture, and our organic but very, very “sick” garden.  What makes the animals ill will make humans ill as well.  I’m not an avid gardener, but I have no intention of trusting my future nutrition to anyone else.  As Dr. Albrecht points out, humans and animals are ultimately a soil crop.  We thrive or fail according to the wealth in the soil.

 

The End of the Beginning

 

The rest of this blog will be devoted to anything I can think of that will persuade readers to look at the Albrecht science of soil fertility to produce forage crops that are nutritionally complete for horses, while reducing the risk of metabolic disorders that accompany forages grown on mineral deficient soils.  Soil Fertility and Animal Health is not an easy book to read.  But if you are one of those affected by the alarming epidemic of metabolic horse diseases, you almost can’t afford not to.  It may be too late for you to prevent metabolic disease, but it is never to late to prevent it in the unborn future generations.  And the tools may be there for you to assure that the forage your horse consumes from now on will not aggravate his symptoms.  Wouldn’t you love to not have to soak your hay?  The answer may well be right under your feet.

 

Respectfully,

Barb Lee

Grass: The Horse Food that Kills Horses

If you’re a member of a metabolic horse Internet list, you are probably being cautioned strongly about certain types of grasses as being higher in sugar than other types.  I am certain that many of you are desperately seeking exotic types of hay, such as Teff, because they are said to be lower in sugar than some other varieties.  Perhaps you are thinking about plowing up your pasture and planting some recommended variety of “horse-friendly” grass.

 

The former will in many cases be an exercise in frustration and the latter is an extraordinary step, somewhat equivalent to bombing a large population of innocent civilians and should only be considered as a last resort.

 

My intention here is ABSOLUTELY NOT to de-emphasize the critical importance of looking first at grass and hay varieties that are demonstrated to be better for metabolic horses on average.

 

The difficulty lies in the fact that these horse friendly grasses may still rocket off the sugar and starch scales if they lack the soil elements to maximize their horse-friendly capabilities.  That is what this article is about.  It in no way challenges the work of those who have painstakingly shared their knowledge of grass species.  I hope that the reader will ADD this list of possibilities to their possibilities data bank, not delete ANYTHING that they have learned previously.

 

Photosynthesis and Biosynthesis

 

First of all, what’s the problem with the horse’s natural food, grass, anyway?  Carbohydrates of course.  Too much sugar and starch.  Some grass plants produce more sugar than others.  News flash, the same species grown in northwest Oregon will not have the same nutritional analysis as the same species grown in Texas.  Why is that?

 

We are very focused on the contribution of these water soluble carbs to our horses’ metabolic diseases. But you should know that the WSC (or NSC) numbers on your hay analysis may actually be a symptom of a deeper plant metabolic illness, and not just a way to gauge the safeness of the hay for your horse.  The WSC figures on the hay analysis may be trumpeting the news that the grass hasn’t got the soil-derived nutrition it needs to finish the job of turning the carbs into amino acids.

 

Sugar and starch are the products of photosynthesis.  Those of us who aren’t particularly interested in plant metabolism generally stop at photosynthesis, which is why we’re all in trouble.  Photosynthesis makes sugar and starch.  Sunshine and air make sugar and starch.  So as long as the plant is only metabolizing the wealth of above ground resources, it’s about as nutritious as an air fern.  This is true for any grass plant, including the limited list of supposedly horse-safe grasses.

 

Of course a grass plant doesn’t live on air and sunshine alone.  It also grows underground.  Generally there is as much root mass underground as there is leaf and stem above ground.  We know that roots slurp up nutrients from the soil and anchor the plant.  We all are in despair over Declining Soil Fertility, but most of us don’t know WHY we’re in despair, other than it’s somehow related to declining nutrition in our hay and in our own food.  We’re given to believe that it’s an irreversible condition.  It seems to have become another way to make us feel helpless and out of control. 

 

By the way, “depleted soils” are not strictly human driven.  In many cases we’re trying to grow healthy grass-eating mammals on soil that if left to its own devices would prefer to grow pine trees.  Mother Nature has a big hand in that, as I’ll later explore.  Suffice to say, soil that’s good for making wood or sugar, isn’t necessarily suitable for making nutritious forage!

 

The reason to be worried about Declining Soil Fertility is because it means the minerals have gone missing or were never there to begin with.  Woe is us – now our horses are not getting their minerals AS WELL as eating high sugar hay.  We’ve created a paradigm in which we have separated the horse’s mineral deficiency as one problem, and the high sugar content in the grass as another.  We are advised to soak the sugar (and other nutrients) out of the hay, and feed the horse ground rocks to make up his mineral deficiency. 

 

Is there a problem here?  Sure there is.  The problem is that we have separated the horse’s metabolism from the grass’ metabolism.  They’re one and the same.  If the minerals are not available in balance to both organisms, the problems that result are identical for both of them; disease, parasitism, reproductive failure, compromised growth and tissue repair.  Of course the horse needs some of the basic minerals for its own body building blocks.  But the minerals that the grass plant confers on the horse have already performed some key nutrition biosynthesis of which the horse is not capable itself.  If those minerals were not available to the plant originally, some nutrient of vital importance to the horse exclusive of minerals will be dangerously missing in the grass as well.  Plants don’t go slurping up minerals from the soil and say, “Here horse, have some minerals.”  No, before the plant hands a mineral over to the horse, it has used that mineral itself!  The horse gets a double nutritional gift from the grass plant, an amino acid AND a mineral!

 

Returning to photosynthesis, let’s say we have a grass plant growing in depleted soil.  The sun’s energy is a reliable nutrient, so as long as the grass plant is adapted to depleted soil conditions it grew in, it will slog along like any half-starved dog, eking out a living in a deranged environment, growing a weak physical structure that is vulnerable to attack by parasites and foreign proteins (viruses and bacteria).  The only difference between the starving dog and the starving grass plant is that the starving dog has the ability to pick up and look for a new gig.  The plant is stuck in one place.  As Albrecht puts it, these parasites and foreign proteins attacking a malnourished organism are like nature’s pre-cleanup crew on a prospective cadaver.

 

The grass in a mineral starved environment will produce very little protein, very few vitamins, just lots of sugar.  It will have trouble setting seed and may be forced to reproduce by rhizomes, if at all.  It won’t be able to compete with “weeds” that are adapted to scavenge minerals, perhaps via taproot into the subsoil.  It will eventually die.

 

From the products of photosynthesis, the plant biosynthesizes amino acids, vitamins, and immune-protecting substances in the presence of balanced soil minerals.

 

Soil minerals, such as calcium, sulphur and magnesium, are vital to the biosynthesis of protein (I have news about protein in another article.) from the products of photosynthesis.  When the minerals are unavailable either by absence or imbalance or both, the plant suffers from a sort of arrested metabolism.

 

Now it’s important for you to understand that the grass plant doesn’t give a darn about creating nutrition for your horse.  Like all of us, it’s getting by as best it can for its own sake.  It makes proteins and vitamins and immune products for its own wellbeing.  The fact that it confers these blessings on the grass eater should stand out as clear evidence that the horse and the plant really share a kind of interconnected metabolism.  Because the plant confers the body building and protective substances on the horse that it makes for itself, it should be fairly clear that what goes for the grass goes for the horse.  Then, in a perfect world, the horse returns nutritional favors to the grass.

 

Grass plants are not some kind of straw from which horses sip soil minerals.  Hopefully by now you can see why getting the minerals into the horse via the grass is preferable to offering raw minerals as a supplement.  It must be done, but it must be done judiciously, with an awareness that some biological alchemy that produces nutrition was skipped between soil and horse.

 

Minerals play an active role as catalysts in creating some plant nutrients in which the mineral cannot then be detected in the nutrient.  They do their thing helping to create a nutrient and then they move on.  Kind of like a carpenter building a house.  The carpenter doesn’t move in with the new family, he leaves and builds a new house.  He may not have scrawled his name on the wall, but you know he was there because there wouldn’t be a house at all if there hadn’t been a carpenter.   No mineral catalysts, no protein.

 

So one might be tempted to believe that a certain plant nutrient has nothing whatever to do with a particular mineral.  In truth, without magnesium, without sulphur, without calcium, there is no fabrication of  amino acids, etc. for either the plant or the horse.  The fact that you can’t find a mineral in an certain plant nutrient doesn’t mean the mineral didn’t have a hand in building nutritious grass for the horse.

 

One might think that as long as you have adequate “protein” from other sources and can supplement minerals and vitamins, all is well.  Protein, as in “Crude Protein” on your hay analysis requires further inspection.  We’ll go there, but for now let’s return to soil minerals and grass species.

 

I’d like to give you some more food for thought if you’re still hungry, about the “averages” in tables of plant nutrients.

 

How many exciting new scientific studies have you read about in mainstream media that were subsequently proven bogus?  In light of what we’ve talked about so far, how many nutritional evaluations on grass species do you suppose have been conducted on plants grown in perfect conditions?  And how much similarity do you think there might be between a variety of grass plant studied in Iowa, land of King Corn (grass), and the same grass variety studied in Oregon, land of Douglas Fir (wood)?  Much of agriculture today is based on Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium – N-P-K – with lime thrown in to adjust the pH, and whatever else thrown in that produces tonnage.  Yield is what most producers want.  When was the last time you got an analysis along with your hay before you bought it?  Most of us are stuck buying hay and hoping for the best, then spending endless hours and thousands of gallons of water soaking the sugar out of yet another ton of hay after we pay for the analysis ourselves and find out the bright green stuff is another metabolic train wreck for our horses.  Maybe it was even a desirable variety of hay.

 

I have (or had) an article from Oregon State University on pasture management and it tends to discourage adding anything that hasn’t been shown to increase yield.  Like magnesium for instance?  Adding magnesium doesn’t increase tonnage.  So if grass tetany in your cattle is a problem, supplement them with magnesium.  The trouble is, magnesium is not only a key player in the production of amino acids, it has a profound effect on soil pH.  More than calcium!  So if the soil doesn’t contain the right amount of magnesium, your cows will not only get grass tetany, they’re likely to suffer a hidden hunger for some other missing nutrient.  Somewhere down the line, that hidden hunger will express itself in more ways than just grass tetany.  The trouble for us horse owners is, we expect our horses to live to a ripe old age and provide a service to us most of that time.  But suddenly it seems they’re all tanking metabolically at around age 15.  Cows go away as soon as they quit producing or go to the feedlot.  What reduces our horses to victims of degenerative disease in their later years may not have the same type of expression in a short-lived food animal, but cows and sheep have a whole litany of problems for themselves.  No doubt many of those problems could, if thoroughly examined, be linked to the same metabolic short-circuits in their feed that are killing our horses.  They, too, are children of the grass.

 

Some grass plants will grow in mineral deficient soil.  Whether or not they “persist” is another issue.  They will always be more nutritionally complete – relatively more protein, less sugar and starch – if they are grown on mineral-balanced soil.  We tend to say that certain plants “thrive” in certain conditions (for instance rhododendrons in acid soil) but the truth is, certain plants can “tolerate” poor soil better than others.  Just like some humans can smoke all their lives, eat Hostess Twinkies and drink a fifth of whiskey every day until they’re ninety, then die in a bungee jumping accident.  Doesn’t mean they were particularly noble individuals, just tough buggers.  As far as grass is concerned, just because it is Timothy or Orchard Grass or Teff doesn’t automatically confer the title of Horse Food on it unless it is grown in conditions that maximize its potential to be horse food

 

If the grass used in tests for nutritional content are not grown on soil that is replete in the necessary minerals, the data from the tests will be flawed.  The entire model is flawed.  The published information for that variety is very possibly inaccurate.

 

Yes, one variety of grass plant may yield more sugar than another, but that may only mean that that particular variety or sub-variety is adapted to grow in mineral deficient soil and have little to do with its ability to convert some of the sugar to protein.  Hybrid corn, a type of grass which is engineered to produce huge tonnages of starchy grain, is adapted to ever poorer growing conditions.  (Rent the DVD “King Corn” from Netflix.) In the decades since WWII, protein levels of corn and wheat both have tended to be in decline and the starch has risen, to the point where it’s hard to think of corn as food.  Even the local crows are reluctant to eat the cracked corn I throw out for them in winter.  If a plant breeder of high sugar grass is deliberately trying to sell his new variety based on scientific studies, what’s to prevent him manipulating the soil to enhance the sugar values for his advertising campaign?  All I’m trying to say is, that same grass may be a big sugar producer, because it’s bred to conform to the N-P-K model.  It may be an entirely different plant in a model of complete plant nutrition.  Who knows? I’m not saying this is so, I’m only throwing it out as a possibility.  And a lot of these hybrids don’t thrive in field conditions without lots of chemical pesticides, etc., because they are incapable of producing immune substances in the lifeless dirt that anchors their roots.  Oh…enter genetic tinkering.

 

Further, the forage species you seek to either to grow or purchase as hay may not be adapted to grow at all in your region!

 

So if you’re searching for Teff hay, which I believe comes from Africa, your search may be entirely in vain if Teff is not well adapted to grow in your soil or climate.  We have a bad habit of taking grass for granted.  Native grasses are said to be the most likely to produce good horse feed (why wouldn’t they – horses originated where native grasses once grew).  But even native grasses vary in nutritional content from north to south, east to west.  And just because a grass plant is “native” doesn’t mean it will grow on any part of the continent.  It is “adapted” to grow in certain conditions, and may only be tolerant of a narrow band of soil fertility and climate conditions to produce the kind of nutrition that once supported the thundering herds.  As the herds went, so went the grass up a narrow migratory path through the continent’s midsection.  Hopefully a picture is beginning to emerge.

 

The point is that grass is not necessarily good horse hay according to its pedigree.  I was told on a metabolic horse list that my low sugar hay this year was probably an accident.  That shows the extent to which the message of helplessness has become entrenched in the embattled metabolic horse community.  “Any good hay has got to be an accident.”  Ain’t so.  Grass can and will biosynthesize the products of photosynthesis (sugar and starch) into amino acids, vitamins and other body building/protecting compounds in the presence of adequate, balanced soil minerals.  To what extent for each species, I don’t know.  My pasture is a smorgasbord of species.  It all added up to pretty darn good hay after a lot of painstaking effort to make it so.

 

This overview is generally meant to show you why feeding animals out of a mineral box is, as Dr. Albrecht put it, “an act of desperation.”

 

Look to the soil before condemning the grass plant or tearing up your pasture.  And then begin to look at your horse as a soil crop.  Its metabolism is forever bound to the soil upon which its feed is grown, so if your grass is starving, your horse will also be afflicted with hidden hungers that no box of ground rocks will ever satisfy.

 

Organic or Conventional or Both?

One thing I refuse to do is discuss organic and conventional models in terms that provoke conflict.  No either/or, no one versus the other.  Conflict suggests that one is right and one is wrong.   In my experience, the decision is not so black and white.  To me, it isn’t so much that one method is somehow more intrinsically nourishing.  Being rigidly but unsystematically “Organic” has resulted in our making parts of our land every bit as toxic as using conventional inputs irresponsibly might have, as I shall explain.  If it’s only a matter of fossil fuel use and “sustainability,” even “organic” can come at a price to Sister Earth.

My leanings are entirely toward organic but with an emphasis on complete soil nutrition, which we were not able to achieve immediately on our marginal soil. We had made so many errors, trying to rely only on lime and manure, that we made a bigger mess than we started out with.  Many hay analyses that I have on file reveal that hay produced on nearby land that had only grazed cattle was so deficient of nutrition as to be virtually deadly to my stock. 

I would like to see my land one day become self-sustaining in a model where the nutrition extracted from the soil will be returned, and only those elements which are used by the crop or leached by rainfall will need to be replaced.  We have used some “conventional inputs” to bank the missing minerals in the soil, but we have been careful not to use those harsh inputs that would kill the soil biota, but rather feed it.  We are banking these elements to be used by the soil organisms to feed the plant.  When the soil is fully supplied, or even almost, I am confident it will generate its own energy and nutrition through natural means, which will in the end, complete our transition to organic.

We are not seeking organic certification because we are not trying to sell anything.  In other words, we are free to thumb our noses at the government’s version of organic and pursue nutrition on our own terms. 

Here are some thoughts on producing “pure” stands of horse-safe forage.  Clover is on the hit list for many horse owners.  If I don’t want clover in my horse hay because “it’s bad” then I must rely on an outside source of nitrogen for my grass plants.  If I want to use organic inputs, I still have an environmental price to pay.  What if I want to use blood meal?  What if I abhor factory farming and don’t want to support the factory farming industry that is probably the main source of blood?  And what amount of fossil fuel is required to convert blood into blood meal?  How many antibiotics, if any, are riding along in the blood to kill off my soil biota? What if I want to use feather meal?  Maybe I don’t want to support the factory farming of eggs and chickens from whence the feathers come.  And what amount of fossil fuel is required to convert chicken feathers in to fertilizer?  Chicken feathers are “hydrolyzed” I think.  What does that mean, and how much energy does it consume? How much arsenic might be present in the feathers?  Maybe none!  But I have to ask the question anyway!  If I want to use alfalfa meal, well, I don’t know what alchemy turns alfalfa into fertilizer, but how did it get processed and bagged, palletized, shrink-wrapped and trucked to the fertilizer company?    How about chicken manure, the waste product of factory farming?  It’s a “toxic byproduct” of the poultry industry until some farmer trucks it off for his crops?  (Wait a minute!  How did “toxic waste” suddenly become “plant food?” Read on.)  How about high levels of potassium and other hitch hikers?  Chilean nitrate?  Mined in Chile by children and transported a bazillion miles to Oregon.  Seabird and bat guano?  Harvested at heavy cost to the environment. Those questions don’t make me feel too good if I decide to use them without really understanding the full impact of the decision I am about to make.

Please note I am not presenting “facts”, I am just asking questions myself!

My objective is to use only organic materials on my pastures.  And with a little knowledge and some guidance, it’s a goal I can meet.  As with horse training, you never start with the goal.  You break the process of training down into small bits, ever building a foundation to eventually achieve your goal.  Our road to self-sustaining fertility began on a foundation of complete ignorance, way too many pat formulas for soil health, and grossly imbalanced, sorely depleted soil. 

****

The first evidence on the records of this fragment farm being occupied by white pilgrims is from the early 1900s.  So we have roughly a hundred years of people living here and millennia of leaching rainfall.  It’s at the foot of an extinct volcanic vent, perched on a ledge about 300 feet above the Abernethy Creek headwaters.  It is surrounded by Douglas fir forest and other smallholdings.  Few people raise food crops in this area, even gardens.  There is the odd steer, lots of horses eating junk hay (what I would call junk), some ornamental nurseries, lingering turf grass seed farms and Christmas trees.  Filbert orchards (wood) used to abound as did cane berries (sugar).  The practicality of farming in this foothill area is really dying out.  That should have been my first clue.  But we weren’t exactly looking to “farm” when we bought this place 30 years ago.  We had horses, and other agrarian practices were incidental.  Our first experience with raising cattle here was having a lovely registered Angus cow abort her calf.

The effort to remineralize such deficient soil has been financially painful.  We hope that within another two years (2011), our goal of self-sustaining fertility can be met, because the current expense of banking the missing minerals is not sustainable for a couple of retired geezers.  The moral is, if you are looking for land to raise your horses, hay and food on, start with good ground.  The soil here was not right for growing nutritious animal feed to begin with, and our ignorant stewardship of the land made it worse.  What we do seem to have though, is a soil that can be made fertile, through the painstaking process of remineralization.

The first year we consulted Kinsey Agricultural Services we sent only a pasture soil sample.  The recommendations came back in terms of “conventional” inputs.  It was time to grapple with my goal and my reality.  When I called and spoke to a consultant, the bad news was that the soil was so whupped, there was really no direct route to organic.  It seems that most organic inputs for one type of deficiency might well carry another element with them that would disrupt balance in another area.  In the first place we had dumped so much calcium carbonate on the land that we were looking at years of effectively tying up many elements that were already under threat of disappearance.  For instance, our phosphorus level was very low, but adding soft rock phosphate would have exacerbated the calcium problem.  Kinsey’s priority was to first help us undo the damage we had done by applying the excessive calcium, then start banking the missing minerals, and trying to overcome the excessive ones. 

This was about the time when I realized that judicious use of conventional inputs had its place.  We all want to be “organic” but for the grower, it’s just not always as simple as that.  And “organic hay” is not going to automatically guarantee an analysis that is well balanced and healthy for your horse.  Let me illuminate.

This year, having whipped myself into a frenzy over all this, I HAD to send in a sample from my languishing garden.  We have over the years put many organic inputs on the garden.  Some lime, much manure and compost, winter cover crops, fava beans plowed down, and many, many crops of buckwheat plowed under for biomass and the curious ability of buckwheat to scavenge phosphorus and convert it into plant-available form for other crops.

I also sent in a sample from an acre of ground that has been a “sacrifice area” for horses and sheep.  Thirty years of deliberate neglect.

The first stunning revelation was that the garden humus level, 5.2% was identical to the un-screwed-with soil in the old horse yard.  I can probably lay the lack of humus building to too much tillage in the garden, but it was just the first shakeup I got from the analysis of garden soil.  Please note the humus level is quite high for both, it’s just that the garden is not actually building any more humus through our additions than the old paddock.

The garden contains 995 pounds per acre phosphorus.  Now, I’ve had other soil tests done on the garden before and got a graphic back, with no explanation.  The graph might say “very high” phosphorus.  And of course an uninformed person like me might say, “Oh goody, my soil has lots of phosphorus!  I’m doing everything right!”

Here’s what Mr. Kinsey has to say about phosphorus in his book, “Hands On Agronomy:”

 “I like to see phosphate levels in the 500 to 750 range.  At 500 pounds per acre, the P level is considered excellent, but at more than 750 pounds, problems are coming down the pike on the other side…Above 1,000 per acre problems come in platoons.  I have seen trees in citrus orchards die because phosphate levels were above 1,000 pounds per acre on the test we use.  The conventional wisdom says nobody ever gets there.  There are many growers who use too much manure or compost and get there.”

There’s enough phosphorus in my garden to assassinate a citrus orchard.  I hang my head with The Albatross of Good Intentions dangling from my neck.

We’ve also got a fairly plant-toxic level of potassium and “platoons” of other problems in the garden soil.  For all the “goodness” I’ve put into the garden over the years, I can scarcely coax a crop of anything off it anymore.  We definitely need a soil doctor.

The salient point is that “organic” doesn’t automatically confer the blessing of good health on a hay crop.  I bought some frozen organic beef patties the other day because our local Safeway doesn’t carry a decent branded beef.  I gave my serving to the dog last night.  It was inedible.  What a billboard for organic anything…how could organic producers package that garbage and present it as food when they go to so much effort to earn their certification?  We tried some organic applesauce one time and it tasted like watery pulp.  Yet the lamb we grow on our emerging grass farm is startlingly delicious and growing better with each improvement in the soil, despite using a few evil conventional inputs. The minerals in the soil put minerals in the grass, which puts minerals into the meat, and the minerals in the meat put WOW in the flavor.  Flavor was invented to tell our tongue, sentinel of our digestive system, what is food and what is corruption.  When you get the taste of high fructose corn syrup out of your mouth, your tongue suddenly starts functioning normally again.  And remember, your tongue is an organ of your body.  It responds to good nutrition like every other organ.

Which by the way leads me to another point.  There is much controversy over whether an animal can differentiate between different minerals in boxes, versus just a simple trace mineral salt.  Many scoff at the idea.  Well, duh.  Why should a cow know how much copper or sulphur to eat?  She’s not designed to be a geologist.  She’s designed to know which plants she’s supposed to eat!  She’ll tell you where the nutrition is every time.  So don’t go blaming a cow for being as dumb as a box of rocks when it comes to her own nutrition.  Her nose and her tongue are organs designed perfectly to distinguish nutrition, not differentiate between boxes of ground rocks.

Let’s look at conventional fertilizer inputs.  For the purpose of this epistle, I will regard “conventional” hay to be more or less defined as a product of N-P-K fertility or over-fertility.  Most hay from around here already contains a whopping load of potassium.  I will be looking at whether that has partly to do with timing of cutting (potassium moving up into the plant for seed production) but I can’t say anything about that with any authority just yet.  Triple 16, which means 16 pounds nitrogen, 16 pounds phosphorus, 16 pounds potash per hundred pounds of fertilizer material, is usually the soup du jour for grass hay production around here.  Or just straight, guesstimated applications of urea.  The emerging favorite is biosolids, sewage sludge.  Ugh.  I don’t even WANT to know what the analysis is.  The hay it produces stinks and is a wicked gray green color.  Fooey. (Note – found the analysis on line, 4% nitrogen, a little phosphorus and about 25-ppm arsenic.)

This is husbandry with the blinders on.  It may produce tonnage, but it doesn’t guarantee nutrition.  Producers don’t as a rule focus on nutrition because they’re bottom line depends on production.  Most hay is not graded and sold according to its nutritional content.  It’s sold on its pedigree (alfalfa, timothy, orchard grass, etc.) and on its appearance.  Renegade N-P-K farming is a prescription for dying soil and too much nitrogen in hay, but a great way to sell bigger tractors because it takes more horse power to pull the plow through the concrete that used to be soil.  Reckless application of this type of chemical fertilizer is probably the reason why conventional inputs are universally condemned by organic adherents.  For me this would have been throwing the baby out with the bathwater.  I’d have had to give up this mad pursuit of imagined self-sufficiency, move the horses to a boarding stable and pay my mounting vet bills.  To me it’s a little like the mentality that drives the “cows are the source of global warming” sentiment, when cows pastured on functional grasslands are actually part of the solution to global warming. There’s a whole lot that most people don’t know about the potential of holistic management of cattle on living grasslands for bagging up all that CO2 and sending it to perdition.  It’s the management of the material or animal, not always the material or animal itself that makes it a bane or a boon.

The cow in a factory farm or feedlot and the well-managed grassfed cow on a pasture both produce manure.  One produces a toxic waste product and the other is a vital link in a self-sustaining grass agriculture or eco-system.  It’s the human management that determines the difference, at least most of the time.  You’ll never catch me speaking in absolutes.  There aren’t any villains or good guys in the Organic/Conventional controversy for me anymore, just intelligent, well informed choices.

Except perhaps when it comes to fertilizers that are derived from industrial waste.

A source of sobering truth about this subject can be studied in the book “Fateful Harvest” by Duff Wilson.  As a result of his investigative reporting, Washington State created a website that lists every fertility product for sale in the state which includes an analysis of its heavy metal content and whether it was derived from industrial waste.  That website is http://agr.wa.gov/PestFert/Fertilizers/FertDB/Product1.asp .  Oregon now has a similar database, http://www.aapfco.org/metals.htm

Organic inputs do not automatically guarantee against hitch hiking heavy metals.  Soft rock phosphate, coming right straight out of the earth, carries a load of heavy metals with it.

The grassfed industry has done a lot of research on creating high-energy pastures for ruminants, so that they can meet the needs of pregnant/lactating/finishing animals without the dreaded grain inputs.  Out of their research come some important perspectives.  One of them is that earthworms and other soil biota can survive applications of no more than 40 pounds per acre of actual nitrogen.  And common sense says that nitrogen should never be applied in amounts higher than the crop will use in a season.  If it doesn’t volatilize and go to heaven, it’s going to run off into the streams and lakes and oceans.

The organic route to adequate nitrogen for a hungry crop of grass is not without its environmental costs, as I’ve tried to illuminate.  Metabolic horse owners are told to stay away from clover.  If you forbid your producer or yourself from using clover in a self-sustaining stand of grass, you confine him or yourself to the above list of organic nitrogen choices.  If you are now a little less comfortable about any of the organic nitrogen options I’ve suggested, what do you think about a little-and-often applied source of commercial nitrogen that the Washington database says is free of heavy metals or industrial waste?  Say, just enough to pop the crop but not enough to harm the earthworms?  Not enough to run into the river, just enough for one season’s production, and not enough to end up as non-nutritive nitrogen in the plants, but real, actual amino acids…does it seem so awful now?    I am not selling commercial fertilizer.  I’m just trying to take the holistic view.  Agriculture at best is a collection of least-bad-impact decisions.  The only way we can avoid them is to go back to being a hunter/gatherer society and try not to kill off all the game.

Not much can be said, really about the Organic/Commercial status of basic inputs like ground limestone and dolomite.  They come from the earth (correction, I discovered after the fact that the dolomite we applied this year was from a cement kiln…fortunately, pretty clean.  The above websites are good for checking such things before buying).  But they aren’t sustainable for a lot of regions, like ours.  I think our aglime comes from British Columbia.  I can’t hop over to a natural lime deposit on the farm and shovel up a load for pasture application.  It expends fossil fuel to mine, bag, palletize, shrink-wrap it and transport it and for me to apply it, but fundamentally, it’s “organic.”  The same goes for dolomite and gypsum.  The trace elements we apply may or may not have been “commercialized” in some way, I don’t know, but there is no point in putting them on if the plant can’t use them in an unavailable form.  Case in point:  We live in “Redland” home of red clay soil, chockablock full of iron oxide.  Why on earth would I add another 400 pounds of “ferrous sulphate” to my soil for heaven’s sake!  I don’t know what happens to iron to make it “ferrous sulphate” or “ferric sulphate” or “ferrous oxide” and it’s not necessary for me to know the science behind that manipulation (which no doubt involves fossil fuel somewhere).  All I need to know is that plants can’t USE iron oxide.  So is ferrous sulphate “organic” if it’s been manipulated in a commercial fertilizer factory?  I’d have to specifically ask a certifying agency.  What would that get me?  Somebody has it on a list somewhere of “acceptable” and “unacceptable” materials.  Acceptable to whom, the government or the plants? That’s just not good enough anymore.  If I don’t use the ferrous sulphate to overcome my manganese excess, my grass plants will suffer a metabolic arrest somewhere and deliver grass to the animals with too much unmetabolized iron in it, contributing the plant’s screwed up metabolism to the horse’s screwed up metabolism.  Bottom line, the plant and the horse both have a screwed up metabolism for the same reason.  It started in the soil.  You can take the horse out of the grass, but you can’t take the grass out of the horse.

And you thought hay with too much iron in it was just a function of growing in dirt with too much iron in it…

I’ve waffled on long enough. I just wanted to recount my experience of learning not to take anything at face value, but to take the holistic approach; try to determine the best course of action, and then assume that any decision I have made may be wrong.  It keeps the mind open to explore all known possibilities when it becomes clear that things aren’t working they way I thought they should.

 

Nitrogen and Protein

Nitrogen occurs in a number of ways and in a number of forms.  For the plant to be able to use it, it has to be in “plant available form.”  Grass gets some nitrogen from the air, some from humus, some compliments of a generous nearby legume plant such as clover, which is more capable of “fixing” nitrogen from the air than a grass plant.  But needless to say, the clover isn’t deliberately sharing its hoard of nitrogen with the grass plants.  If there’s enough legumes amongst the grass, say 30% of the plant community in the pasture (known as the “sward”), then there’s usually enough nitrogen from air, legumes and humus to feed the lucky grass plants as well.  My understanding is that the grass receives the most benefit from the legumes when the clover or whatever is sheared (bitten or mowed) whereupon it sheds some roots and root nodules, thereby releasing more nitrogen into the soil.

 

But people with metabolic horses are warned against clover.  A 30-40% legume pasture is frequently high enough in energy to rear cattle and sheep, but it may be off the charts in energy, and possibly poison for a horse.

 

We have a community of clover appearing spontaneously in our pasture now that the growing conditions (rich in minerals) favor germination of seeds.  I can control the mix of legumes and grass through management without using herbicides.  But I still need to provide adequate nitrogen.

 

So if my soil analysis says I’m shy of nitrogen I first need to decide whether this is a “tonnage” issue versus an “adequate nutrition” issue.  Of course as producers of feed for our own animals, our priority is nutrition for the animals, robust health for the pasture and its community of microbes and earthworms, conservative enough not to contaminate ground water and ultimately, be self-sustaining.  This is vaguely in keeping with Allan Savory’s concept of holistic management.  You don’t want to just blast a crop out of the ground. The decision of what type of, and how much nitrogen to use on the crop has broader implications.

 

A couple of other critical considerations in “how much nitrogen” are as follows.  First, if you don’t have that bank of minerals in the soil that biosynthesize the nitrogen into protein, you’ll likely end up with a lot of lush growth without a shred of real nutrition in it.  Lots of photosynthesis products – sugar and starch, but nothing in the way of meaningful protein, vitamins and immune-enhancing nutrients.

 

The other consideration may be more important.  I recently ran across a perfectly fantastic article by Jerry Brunetti of Agri-Dynamics, and published in Acres USA magazine.  The link to the article is http://www.acresusa.com/toolbox/reprints/Brunetti_Protein.pdf

This article is a MUST READ.  In the article Jerry explains the difference between “True Protein” as in amino acids, and “Funny Protein” which is nothing but non-nutritive nitrogen.  The importance to you here is that the Crude Protein value on your hay analysis includes BOTH!  Remember Melamine?  How can we forget!  If you think that the Crude Protein means nutritious amino acids – which is what protein is – you are misled and if you read Jerry’s article, you may discover that there is a hidden health threat to a metabolic horse in this number.

 

Jerry explains that protein on average contains 16% nitrogen.  Based on that average, labs measure only the NITROGEN content of your hay, run it through a simple mathematical calculation and come up with a “Crude Protein” value for your hay report.  Jerry’s article also provides a simple mathematical calculation for estimating what fraction of your crude protein value is protein, and which is non-nutritive nitrogen.  Basically it is a ratio of the recalculated crude protein to the sulphur content on your analysis.  Anything above a 10:1 ratio is “funny protein,” non-nutritive nitrogen. 

 

Our recent hay test was very slightly over 10:1.  This may guide my calculation of how much nitrogen the crop needs this year to meet my holistic goal.  It looks like a little less nitrogen than last year would be ideal.   

 

I’ve run the calculation on some other analyses I have on file.  The dairy alfalfa that my lambs weren’t impressed with was 17:1. 

 

Here’s a little fallout from the non-nutritive nitrogen in forage.  As I understand it, excessive nitrogen can convert to a substance called Blood Urea Nitrogen, or BUN.  BUN can depress magnesium in the blood.  There’s a whole lot more about this in Brunetti’s article, but this should be enough to gobsmack any metabolic horse owner, since we all know that magnesium is a key player in the complex suite of problems called Equine Metabolic Syndrome.

Brunetti stresses throughout the article that the source of this mischief is mineral imbalance in the soil and refers back to Albrecht to correct the problems.  It also clearly lays out the excessive nitrate situation that we know may compound the horse’s problems.

 

As to organic versus conventional inputs for the soil, no matter what form of nitrogen we put on the grass, it’s either going to have to arrive in plant available form or it’s going to have to undergo a reconstruction by soil microbes and chemical reactions to become plant available.  The only sensible way for me to direct you to more information about this is to read about it in Neal Kinsey’s book, “Hands on Agronomy.”

 

If we choose the organic route, the amendments we put on are going to have to go through a deconstruction process to become plant available, because we’ve sort of reversed the process; we’re putting protein on the pasture in many instances to provide nitrogen for the plant.  If you put blood meal on, that’s protein (and of course other blood constituents).  The grass plants aren’t going to descend on blood meal like a pack of coyotes and have a blood fest.  The blood meal is going to have to undergo a transformation to become plant food, and that is going to make it a slow release nitrogen.  One way or another, the nitrogen is only going to end up in the plant in “plant available” form.  It will get there slowly via a sort of digestion process of organic type inputs, or it might get there quickly in a “conventional” input, such as ammonium nitrate.

 

Keep in mind the “digestion” of the blood meal for the use by the grass plant is going to require a voracious community of microbes and earthworms.  Just as with horses and plants and humans and fish and all living creatures, microbes and earthworms die out in the absence of soil minerals.  So if the soil isn’t throbbing underfoot with life by literally tons per square acre, your blood meal, along with all other organic material on the surface, will probably decompose into abnormal materials that may be more toxic than nutritive.

 

As Kinsey explains, there is a head-whirling variety of nitrogen forms available, if you chose the conventional route.  Some are “plant feeders,” some are “microbe feeders” some are slower release, some faster, some volatilize almost instantly, and some stay put.

 

I don’t know everything about “chemical fertilizer” (soil is a collection of chemical, electrical and biological processes, as is all life) and while we are in this soil reconstruction phase, I’ve decided that the soil life needs nitrogen as much as the grass, and having rounded up as much input as I can absorb for the present, I’ve decided a conservative application of a soil-feeding, long acting chemical nitrogen is in my best interest.  As we go along, I will monitor the soil humus level, to make sure the microbes aren’t partying too heavily on the nitrogen and burning up organic matter faster than it’s building or maintaining, and also the legume levels, which are slowly multiplying.  For the life of me, I am not convinced I am doing anything destructive as a result of this decision and my Crude Protein calculation according to Brunetti indicates that the grass plants are pretty much converting all the nitrogen they receive into protein.

 

We each have to make decisions within a frame of reference, and I believe my decision will eventually lead to my holistic goal of fully nutritious horse hay, thrumming soil community, least negative impact and self-sustaining, when the pasture is able to maintain its own nitrogen level without ANY inputs of nitrogen, organic or otherwise.

 

 

Hungry Hollow

My farrier's just paid me a visit, and as usual, the conversation included a good deal about how our pasture "renovation" is coming along.  He's lived in this area since birth, about a half mile away as the crow flies.

 

This morning he told me that the old timers of his childhood used to call the little valley below us where he lives "Hungry Hollow." 

 

It wouldn't grow anything edible.  Said the soil was so poor, “It wouldn’t raise hell with two six-shooters and a bottle of whiskey.”

 

Crunching the Crude Protein/Sulphur Numbers

 

I thought I’d look at some of my previous hay/forage analyses, run them through Brunetti’s formula and post the nitrogen:sulphur ratios.  Unfortunately, several of my earlier analyses did not report sulphur.

 

The equation is Crude Protein divided by 6.25 = Nitrogen x .10 = Desired Sulphur Level

The desired ratio of Nitrogen to Sulphur is  a maximum of 10:1

 

7/1/08 Homegrown Mixed Grass Hay, 1^st Year Remineralization

 

CP = 9.8%

S = .15

Desirable S = .1568

Ratio = 10.45:1

 

4/30/07 Grass Pasture (Green Forage) Lime only, from Same Field as Above

 

CP = 17.08

S = .19

Desirable S = .19

Ratio = l3.84:1

 

(Note the CP appears “lower” in the hay, but the ratio has improved so the mineralized hay has proportionately less non-nutritive nitrogen and possibly more amino acids.  This is a pretty graphic illustration of how the numbers on the analysis can fool you.)

 

12/28/07 Purchased Grass Hay, Source Unknown

 

CP = 9.31

S = .26

Desirable S = .15

Ratio = 5.73:1

 

(Note the MAXIMUM desirable ratio is 10:1)

 

12/20/06 Purchased Grass Hay, Wilsonville/North Willamette Valley

 

CP = 8.29

S = .13

Desirable S = .11

Ratio = 12.06:1

 

11/30/07 Purchased Alfalfa (3^rd Cutting)

 

CP = 18.53

S = .11

Desirable S = .17

Ratio = 17.47:1

 

 

 

 

 

Clay

Horse people hate clay.  As far as horse people are concerned, clay is right up there with ticks and chiggers.  When it gets wet, it sucks your boots off and makes you fall face first in the mud.  It sticks to our Friesians’ and Clydesdales glorious feathers and turns into brick balls that have to be cracked off the hair with pliers.

 

Rejoice Horse People.  I’ve found a use for clay.

 

The smallest particles of clay are called the “clay colloid.”  These particles are sort of plate shaped and have a negative electrical charge.

 

Visualize a Wal-Mart parking lot; angular and with a surface covered in parking spaces.  That’s a clay particle, a microscopic Wal-Mart.  Only on clay, the parking spaces are called “exchange sites.”  When there are no shoppers, or minerals, all the parking spaces, or exchange sites, are occupied by hydrogen.  Hydrogen is non-nutritive and has a positive charge.  That’s why it was attracted to the clay. When it’s hogging all the exchange sites, it makes your soil acid and nutrient deficient.  That’s what soil acidity, or low pH is all about – too much hydrogen.

 

Wal-Mart clay is having a sale and the early bird shopper, Calcium, shows up.  Calcium has a strong positive electrical charge and bullies some of the parking spaces away from weaker hydrogen. 

 

The next positive mineral to arrive is Magnesium.  It bumps some more hydrogen out of the parking spaces. 

 

Hey look, here comes positively charged Potassium.  So long Hydrogen.  Next comes Sodium.  A few other positively charged elements straggle in.

 

Calcium however, has called in all its relatives and the parking lot is getting really jammed!  Calcium pulls out is superior positive electrical charge and starts bullying the weaker charged elements right out of the parking lot!  When more Potassium starts showing up a fight breaks out and other elements begin to scatter. 

 

This is the beginning of soil imbalance, and sometimes, similar scenarios result in wars between nations, with about the same results only on an invisible scale.  But it’s massive, if viewed on a global scale.  Modern Agriculture doesn’t pay much attention anymore. 

 

These positively charged minerals are called cations.  They are some of the heaviest hitters in both animal and plant nutrition.  Calcium for the soil was once thought of as only a means to modify soil pH, but Albrecht established it as the premier nutrient because of its profound importance in so many metabolic activities.

 

The positively charged cations tend to “persist” or stay put in soil and resist leaching because the negative clay component of the soil attracts and holds them.  But as you well know, competition at Wal-Mart can lead to shootings and fatal stampedes.  Too much of any one cation is at the expense of the others.

 

Albrecht devised a method for assuring that the cations are present in balance on the soil colloid – that is not too much or not to little of any one of them.  This method is called the Cation Exchange Capacity, or CEC.  The CEC of any given soil varies, and so the ratio of cations to one another varies from soil to soil.  Some Wal-Marts have bigger parking lots than others.

 

The relevance of the CEC, from one perspective is that if your soil CEC indicates your soil can only handle say, 400 pounds of additional calcium per acre, and your extension agent tells you to put on 2000 pounds “to correct the pH,” all heck’s going to break out in the parking lot.  The clay will get choked up with calcium at the expense of other cations, and the end result will likely be a shock to your hay analysis.  That could come in disguised as a copper deficiency, for too much calcium ties up copper and other elements.  If you didn’t know about this stuff and your hay report said not enough copper, you might be tempted to add more copper to the pasture next round and supplement the horses with copper sulphate in the meantime.  Yes, the horses need the copper, but you’re adding fuel to a thousand fires if you don’t address the real source of the copper deficiency in the pasture, because the copper is out there fabricating some other nutrient in the grass for your horse. The grass’ metabolism is short circuited, and that’s cheating your horse out of balanced nutrition.

 

Maybe your copper imbalance didn’t come from too much lime, but a bad copper to molybdenum ratio.  What do you do – add more copper to overcome the moly? Or add some other mineral that’s deficient whose addition will also bring the excess moly to heel?  Too little copper in the grass plants will short circuit the grass’ immune system, inviting in all sorts of bugs and diseases to attack its weak cell walls, and so if you’ve got a valuable crop out there, prepare to drag out the toxic chemical rescue.  Copper has limitless activity in your horse as well, including strengthening the gut lining, so if he’s getting adequate copper, he may be able to quit taking the ulcer medicine – hottest new thing on the market.  Is it really “heliobacter,” or is a weak gut lining caused by a hidden hunger?

 

Then you’ve got the drifters, the negatively charged minerals that don’t hang around the clay Wal-Mart in the presence of a lot of rainfall or irrigation.  But since they’re negatively charged, a positive cation might like the anion better than the clay and latch onto it  like a one night stand and party down…down into the subsoil and out of reach of the plant roots.  Sulphur, phosphorus and nitrogen are anions.  That’s one way of correcting an over abundance of some element like calcium or potassium in the soil.

 

Anions will almost always have to be replenished on a regular basis, in the face of crop use, rainfall and irrigation.

 

I’m not up to speed on positives and negatives in the mysterious world of trace elements, but some of them leach, like boron, and some of them persist.

 

Like the population of a complex metropolis, minerals interact with one another and the rest of the soil life web, forming compounds, changing with the seasons, either being contributing citizens of the soil community or perpetrating “crimes” in impoverished soil, the equivalent of a plant slum.  A certain level of one element may be necessary, too much can be toxic to plants.  Too many police on the payroll is the cost of too many gang fights in the community.  When everything is in harmony, the rest of the community is free to do its good work without disruption.

 

Does this sound familiar?  Haven’t you heard pretty much the same story when it comes to horse nutrition?  The minerals have to be there and they have to be in balance, otherwise, the exquisitely complex metropolis of living organisms called your horse will have much civil unrest.  If the horse is ingesting the grass equivalent of war refugees, the displaced population is soon going to grow to the point where the horse’s resources are overwhelmed.

 

The science that governs the interactions between minerals, clay, water, air, humus and living soil organisms is to me, as complex as the workings of the universe and I don’t pretend to have the least grasp of it.  This section is only meant to sprinkle a scant bit of entertainment on the subject, but at the same time, encourage people to begin thinking about soil mineral balance in the role of producing nutritious hay for horses.  The practice of giving supplemental minerals to horses is probably unavoidable, but hopefully you are beginning to see the “trickle-up” effect of putting the minerals where they’ll do the greatest good, at the very beginning of nutrition fabrication.

 

For the next few posts, I’ll probably tinker with drawing comparisons between some soil samples and hay samples. 

 

Boron

 

If I were follow a macro mineral-to trace mineral continuum, boron, an ultra-trace would be at the bottom of the list.  Instead, let’s start with Most Relevant to Metabolic Horse Owners First.  Boron is very much a mineral of interest.

 

I have sufficient evidence to suggest that boron is up at the top of the list of Things to Know about Hay for the Metabolic Horse Crowd (hereinafter referred to as the MHC).

 

I know there’s a little chitchat amongst the MHC about boron.  But if you’re already considering supplementation, you are going to have a devil of a time buying a supplement with boron in it or trying to figure out how much to give, or even where to obtain it.  That’s because there is no recommended daily allowance (RDA) of dietary boron for man or beast.

 

It’s not a question of whether boron is a necessary human and animal nutrient. That fact has been established. I think the only creature that hasn’t been shown to need boron is some sort of insect.  The problem is that boron is very difficult for researchers to find when it’s hanging out in combination with other nutrients.

 

USDA studies performed by Dr. Curtiss Hunt, research biologist  have proved that 3 mg. of dietary boron in humans will prevent the excretion of magnesium through the urine.  I’ll include all the links I’ve got on boron so you can do some decision making for yourself.  If you’re in the osteoporosis risk gang like me, you might be thinking about taking some yourself after you’ve read the links.

 

The only in-your-face information I know of about supplementing boron to animals is in Pat Coleby’s book, “Natural Farming.”  She uses it as a cure/prevention for arthritis in her sheep and horses.  It stops joint clicking in horses. 

 

Dr. Hunt has linked boron to proper insulin metabolism in human and animal models.  Isn’t that enough to make you think about its implications for metabolic horses? 

 

In plants, Neal Kinsey says, “Boron increases nitrogen availability to the plant.  It has several other functions in the plant as well, including a roll in cell division, pollination, fruit seed and seed development.  Boron carries the starch from the leaf to the grain or fruit.  So when available boron runs out, production suffers.  Boron also helps in the nodulation of legumes.”

 

Remember that article by Jerry Brunetti about Nitrogen and “Funny Protein?”  In it he says, “Voisin suggests that not only does the extra tryptophan mean higher quality protein for the animal, but since tryptophan is very similar to indoleacetic acid, a growth hormone for plants, it also produces a higher yield of forage.

 

“Another trial measured the influence of Boron on tryptophan content of alfalfa.  The tryptophan levels actually doubled when boron concentrates in the nutrient solution were increased from .22 ppm to l.08 ppm.”  Less nitrogen, more amino acids. 

 

William Albrecht says that tryptophane (there appears to be two different spellings) and methionine are the first two amino acids to go missing in forage from unbalanced soil.

 

Have we also got some attitude and shelly hoof problems in our herd?  Keep in mind, when you provide a dietary supplement and you see a result, tryptophan for calming nerves, methionine for better hooves, you are relieving a hidden hunger.

 

Boron can be extremely toxic to plants and so it’s usually recommended with considerable caution by crop experts, and usually for high value crops like alfalfa.  For humans and animals, boron toxicity is “of the lowest order.”  You should be able to find that quote somewhere in one of the articles I’ll be linking you to.  So who’d bother to use it on soil for plain old hay? 

 

Maybe someone who wants to pack some boron into their horse’s lunchbox.  Besides the known benefits to plants, there may be prodigious benefits to the horse’s metabolism.

 

You just watch; as soon as an RDA is established, somebody will be packaging common borax up as the Great Metabolic Horse Cure and selling it to you for around $60 for a month’s supply.  You can buy a $3 box of 20-Mule-Team Borax in the laundry section of the grocery store and it’ll probably last you a year.

 

In the meantime, what to do for the horse?  I follow Pat Coleby’s advice and give the horses a quarter to a half teaspoon a day of plain old grocery store 20 Mule Team Borax.  It’s 100% pure mined Borax, containing somewhere between 11% and 14% boron.  If I read the chemicalese correctly, it’s in the 14% range.

 

I haven’t seen a visual result in the horses after a couple months of supplementing, and that fact has been stuck in my face, but that’s like expecting to see an external expression of what calcium is doing for my bones.  It’s just added insurance.  Maybe a new blood test will show a cumulative improvement for all the things I’m doing in a few months from now.

 

In the meantime, boron is only to be added to the soil on the advice of an agronomist.  That expert may instead suggest a foliar application.

 

How do we know if our horses are getting enough boron in their forage?  Well we don’t.  But we can find out if the crop is.  What’s good for the grass is probably good for the horse.  The usual labs don’t test for boron in a horse hay sample, but Texas A & M will.  A good grass hay will contain around 5-10 ppm boron, clover 20 ppm and alfalfa around 30 ppm between bud and 1/10 bloom stage (Penn State). 

 

Our first year Albrecht grass hay contains 11 ppm boron.  We have orders from Kinsey to apply more to the soil.  Boron is a Wayward Mineral (WM) and needs to be kept topped up. 

 

As far as boron goes in balance with other minerals, boron appears to be most active in a pH range of about 5.0 to 7.0 (More acid to Neutral.) Too much of the pH-influencing minerals such as calcium and magnesium will impact its availability to plants.

 

For more reading on Boron:

http://www.ars.usda.gov/research/publications/Publications.htm?seq_no_115=166092

http://www.earthclinic.com/Remedies/borax_questions.html

http://www.dcnutrition.com/minerals/Detail.CFM?RecordNumber=47

http://www.borax.com/agriculture/files/an203.pdf

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10026&page=510

http://soiltesting.tamu.edu/files/Forageweb2.pdf

 

And of course, “Hands on Agronomy” and “Soil Fertility and Animal Health”

 

Nitrates

 

I

 

I don’t know as much about the subject of nitrates in forage or in water as a lot of folks in the MHC, so I thought I’d see how I could tie the subject into soil fertility.  My thought was to draw parallels between how plants and animals obtain nitrogen and what they do with it, but then I sort of went off on another trail.

 

Apparently plants and animals get their nitrogen pretty much through the same methods, from the air they breath and the things they eat.  And they pretty much do the same thing with nitrogen in the presence of all the playing pieces; they make protein.  Plants make proteins that animals can’t make, but that they need, so if nitrogen in the plant isn’t getting processed into protein, the animal suffers.

 

On to nitrates.  I ran across an interesting read in the form of a book online entitled “Equine Clinical Nutrition” by Lon D. Lewes, 1995. 

 

Nitrogen, in the form of nitrate is what the plant converts into protein.  (By now you recognizes this statement as grossly incomplete. Protein only contains 16% nitrogen!!!) Anything that increases its uptake or decreases its conversion to protein increases the plant’s nitrate content.  Stress can include drought, hot weather, early frost, hail damage or long periods of cloudy weather. 

 

Not a whisper about missing minerals.

 

Sudden changes in growing conditions cause plants to take up nitrate faster than they can convert it to protein.  These plants at this time as well as stubble remaining after harvest may be high in nitrate, especially if it begins to grow, and thus takes up nitrate, then has its growth stopped by a frost or sudden decrease in temperature before it has had a chance to convert nitrate to protein.

 

Under adverse weather conditions, stalks of fescue and particularly Sudan grasses can contain high levels of nitrate.

 

Alfalfa, timothy, legumes, and brome grass probably never accumulate enough nitrate to be toxic to either horses or ruminants.

 

That statement ought to raise an eyebrow or two in the MHC.

 

I’m SO pleased to have shared this information after I told you how to calculate the “funny protein” in your Crude Protein report.  The 17:1 nitrogen/sulphur in my alfalfa may not have caused “toxicity” but it may have been doing a lot of mischief that isn’t classified “toxicity.”  Be sure to read Brunetti’s information about Blood Urea Nitrogen and also Milk Urea Nitrogen – MUN if you are interested in making ewe’s milk cheese.

Chlorophyll, Minerals, Structural Carbs and Sugar

“…plants compound their own carbohydrates from the elements carbon, hydrogen and oxygen (taken from air and water) by means of the enzyme chlorophyll.  This accelerator of chemical reactions is itself a combination of both the inorganic and the organic.  It is composed of an inorganic atom of magnesium (soil origin) around which protein-like and vitamin-like compounds are arranged.  Yet we consider it an organic compound.  The plant builds carbohydrates first as an anatomical structure (MHC talk is “structural carbs”) (a) of roots going down into the soil to take the necessary inorganic elements from there; and (b) of its branches and leaves going up for carbon dioxide from the air and for sunshine, giving the energy required for photosynthesis.  Some carbohydrates, e.g. sugars are the starter compounds for their own conversion into proteins.  Part of the carbohydrate supply is the energy material serving to bring that conversion about.  This activity is a metabolic performance by the life processes within the plant.  Protein production is, then, a biosynthesis, a synthesis by life itself, and not one brought about so directly by the sun’s energy as in photosynthesis.

 

“…plants are thus the compounders of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen into carbohydrates and proteins…by the help of all the elements which the plants take as fertility from the soil…The plant is spending its physiological activities in using thirteen known essential inorganic elements from the soil as the means of converting four from the air and water into organic matter…those same essential inorganic elements from the soil and via the plant are then in control also of the nutrition, and thereby of the health, of the animals fed by the plants.”

 

--William A. Albrecht, Ph.D, “Soil Fertility and Animal Health”

 

Most of the emphasis is mine.