What a Drag

So how do you drag a horse pasture if you don’t own a tractor? Simple, you make a drag and use your truck as the tractor.

Were we board our horse, the owner keeps the grass cut, but with four horses, an occasional goat, a few cats, and a gaggle of wild geese, the manure in the field adds up rather quickly. A horse will poop, like 6-10 times a day and they are rather efficient as they break down the grass and hay to mostly seed and indigestible roughage. The seed from the manure helps to keep grass growing in the field. If you aren’t aware, a horse unlike most animals, will either graze grass by biting it very close to the roots or pulling it out root and all. Animals like cows graze the grass at a much higher level.

Since grazing the grass super short or pulling out the roots, either kills the grass or it takes a few weeks for it to grow back to a decent height. This is why spreading the manure is so important to keeping your pastures green.

We don’t own a tractor or a drag (which is a device that you drag behind the tractor), but we made a drag out of a section of chain link fence, a wooden pole, and some rope and we then put a heavy pallet on it for the weight (if the grass is tall we add more weight). We then connect it to the truck hitch and drag the field. It works very well actually and I enjoy driving through the fields. The really fun part is doing donuts in the large piles of hay that the horses leave at the end of the bale. Our spoiled little children won’t eat the bottom of the hay bale, leaving a small pile on the ground. We move the hay rounder each time so we don’t wear out the grass in one spot. I drag over this several times and spots that won’t break up, I apply a little extra force (donuts), and bingo, it is all broken up.