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Originally Posted by Paul mabbott  Don't know and don't have any statistical evidence but had noticed that ragwort did tend to grow best in horse pastures .... but that's anecdotal not scientific ... and certainly doesn't seem to apply this year.
I suppose that my casual observations would suggest that horse grazing encourages ragwort growth either by selectively destroying competitors of ragwort or by partially eating it while totally consuming competitors? Should be fairly easy to run some scientific studies ....
Cheers, Paul  |
Another aspect of how different animals impact on flora relates to how the size of individuals of a species of grazer, the size of herd that is grazed and the seasonality of grazing pattern employed, affects the sward.
In very broad terms th effects can be broken down into two characteristics - mechanical damage caused by animals walking on the sward, and a selective effect dependenant on the closeness of a species grazing habit.
Sheep grazing is very imortant precisely because it favours a consistent grassland environment which supports a relatively stable sward community. Even where the sheep 'paths' break the sward surface, the size of the animals and the shape of the foot rarely causes deep intrusions into the soil.
By comparison, cattle, particularly when kept at a high herd density on wet soils can destroy an existing sward within a few weeks. Horses are rarely kept at the densities seen with cattle, however they are frequently kept on pastures which are heavily degraded because the pasture itself is not used as the primary food source for the horse. In these circumstances the sward is broken in many places providing opportunities for seeds of non sward plants to take hold. Ragwort is very much an opportunist plant and might be expected to be a pioneer of any 'puddled' area of pasture.
CM