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

Comments

[Barb Lee]

Hi Leigh, I think that you would find Pat's "Natural Farming" to be quite repetitive with your goat raising book, so until you find a used copy I am sure you have most of the good advice she has to offer!

[Leigh]

I have found myself on this exact same path, except with Pat Coleby's Natural Goat Care and (of course) goats. I'm currently reading Neal Kinsey's book and waiting on the results of our soil test from his service. Dr. Albrecht's book is next on my list. Also discovered the Acres U.S.A. magazine. Would love to get my hands on Pat Coleby's Natural Farming but apparently it's no longer in print here and quite pricey. All of this is so much an answer to a prayer.

[Plumbing]

Very informative, Thanks for posting and i really find your blogs interesting. I'll be looking forward for your next post.

[kiralık devremülkler]

thank you. i love to read this type of information posts. again thank you...

[Hoteles Valencia]

Interesting point of view that you brought us here, I have a good time looking at your blog and the truth is right.

[Barb Lee]

Michelle, There's nothing I enjoy more than talking about pasture and critters! I credit Pat Coleby's inspiration for saving my sheep, and starting me on an amazing journey of discovery. Let's talk, sounds like we have a lot in common!

Barb

[Michelle Canfield]

Barb, thanks for these posts, I'm glad I found them. I have Katahdin sheep up in WA state and am headed down this same road, trying to follow Pat Coleby's advice to resolve some chronic issues in my sheep, and tackle fixing our graze for the longer term. I would love to ask you some questions about this, if you are available to discuss!

[Val Littfin]

Barb,
I have your blog bookmarked and am reading with great interest. I live in NE Minnesota, USA, and my horses are slowly reclaiming a mostly apsen forest. Soon I will need to think about seeding and maintaining thier yard so they do have a bit of grass and to prevent erosion.
Your experience may help me.
Val