Herbs and Horses Farm

27/10/2025

I've only watched half of this but it's all making sense.

Join Chris Irwin — internationally recognized horseman, author, and co-founder of Mind Your Horse — for this full-length lecture at Utrecht University in the...

26/10/2025

This is a lovely way to work on separation anxiety ☺️

One at a time.

08/10/2025

I'm considering adding a truly seasoned lesson horse to my herd. Let me know if you know of a prospect. 🤩

The horses are barefoot, on a track system 24/7 they are fed 100% forage and ration balancer as needed, and everyone gets vaccinated for Lyme twice a year (if they're responsive to the vaccine).

Open to a free lease or board trade arrangement. Looking for something at least 15 hands high.

16/09/2025

Look how cute we are! Let's go play!
.. Sorry guys, I have to work. We'll play later!

16/09/2025

This is so true for me!

📸 Using photos is invaluable for helping riders understand that what they feel isn’t always what’s actually happening.

This rider felt the photo on the left was neutral – it’s how she sits in the saddle, it’s where her pelvis naturally goes. After some pelvic tilting, I asked her to actually put weight into her seat bones. The stool is perfect for this – a flat, hard surface gives instant feedback.

When she saw the photo her first thought was: “But I thought that was a posterior tilt.”

👉 Relative to where she started, yes.
👉 But when we asked her to actually sit in posterior tilt while keeping shoulder–hip alignment, she couldn’t. The only way she could get there was by curving her whole spine into a “C.”

This is common. Riders who live in anterior tilt often think neutral feels like posterior – and can’t reach and isolated posterior tilt because of stiffness, weakness, or lack of control. Yet that ability to move through the range is what we need in riding.

One comment I often get is: “But we don’t want to hold ourselves in one position when riding.”
💯 Correct – we don’t. But if you can’t even find neutral and maintain it at rest, how do you expect to stabilise and move with the horse while giving independent aids?

And here’s the controversial bit…
👉 We’ve normalised anterior tilt so much it looks “correct” to so many riders.
👉 Some even promote 3-point contact – loading the p***c arch as well as the seat bones. But no evidence supports this as a healthy or effective weight-bearing strategy. The seat bones evolved for sitting – the p***c arch didn’t.

Yes, saddle fit matters (seat size, femur length, balance). But a saddle is not the answer. It can’t give you neutral – it can only nudge you one way or another.

The responsibility is on the rider. Neutral isn’t about holding still – it’s your starting point. From there you need pelvic, hip, and spinal mobility and control so you can follow the horse and give truly independent aids.

👉 The saddle can support you. But it won’t do the job for you.
👉 Riders have to take responsibility for their posture, mobility, and awareness if they want true balance.

🔗www.pegasusphysio.co.uk

13/09/2025

Cute little c**n prints on the track.

09/09/2025

Last week both of my horses successfully traveled to a nearby farm and back. We still have more work to do to make loading faster, but there were no big eventful moments! Looking forward to the next trip!

29/08/2025

This is so helpful to see!

Raising The Bar

The bars end at the widest part of the foot. Overgrown bar migrates out from the collateral grooves and forward toward the toe. The raised part that sometimes forms around the tip of the frog is often called bar. Some say it’s sole. I call it “toe bar”. It grows from the semi lunar line on the pedal bone. The semi lunar line is a slight ridge where the peripheral edge of the sole meets the insertion of the ddft. The semi lunar line also extends from the bars which are an inward extension of the wall. While this is interesting, it doesn’t change the fact that I trim or roll the wall, bar, and toe bar to the peripheral edge of the calloused live sole to keep the weight bearing on the pillars so the coffin bone remains suspended and the internal arch builds…as long as the majority of the weight bearing is evenly over the heels.

Addressing Over Grown Bars At A Set Up Trim

If you trim over grown bars and you don’t trim the over grown frog, you’re just taking weight off of the bars. That weight bearing has to go somewhere else. Horses don’t like excess frog pressure so they just load their toes more to prevent that. Toe loading causes Laminitis/Founder.

The whole foot needs to be trimmed properly to establish proper weight distribution over all the solar structures.

When the trim is frequent and correct you can get away with cherry picking structures to trim without causing internal damage. When a foot gets this over grown, you’ve lost the opportunity for cherry picking.
This horse was in training at the time of this trim. He was being ridden before the trim and directly after. He never missed a ride for being sore from any other trim for the following year of rehab and he never needed boots.

29/08/2025

Trailer training PROGRESS!!

This girl has had a few bad experiences, so all four feet in the trailer is a great big milestone. Maybe we will be traveling next week!

27/08/2025

Mucking isn't so bad with a view like this!

25/08/2025

This is so real.

Ad-lib loose hay and ad-lib hay in slow feeders are two very different things.

Over the years I've had to chop and change my hay situation a few times. Running a track, it can be hard to meet all the individual needs but fundamentally I've always aimed to ensure horses aren't running out of forage.

A few years ago I switched to using round bales double netted and then two rounds of haynets twice a day. This worked for a while, but then over the last two years I'd noticed a small weight gain pattern in alot of our horses also around the time I switched to wrapped hay (we get our herds weighed every 3 months in line with f***l egg count). Although it tests not much different in sugar and starch levels, they find some of the wrapped hay (the ones with a higher moisture content) much more palatable than unwrapped, so they lost motivation to move off the bales rather than them being back up when the haynets ran out as intended.

The bales where just causing them to park up and scoff, reducing movement and also meaning the higher ranking horses (when it comes to resources) where getting fatter, and lower ranking horses where struggling (as they got kicked off the bales unless I had loads of bales out, making the situation worse for the higher ranking horses). Switching back to unwrapped hay isn't an option due to horses here than have equine asthma (wrapped hay has much MUCH less dust) so I needed another solution.

About 2 months ago I bit the bullet and removed our bales and went back to just haynets, much to mine and staffs dismay, meaning an additional 20 haynets to fill a day.

However, straight away I could see a difference in movement, and the parking up stopped. The higher ranking horses couldn't hog such a large feed source anymore, and the lower ranking horses had a better chance. There are still the anomalies, such as my own horse Buck who always seems to maintain his "slightly over weight" pretty well whatever the situation, but across the board horses that were thinner are managing better, and horses who had a bit of extra weight are looking slimmer, others who look well are maintaining that within a 5kg weight range.

It was a bit of trial and error for how many nets to put out, but we've found a number that means there's always dregs left in the nets when we come to replenish them so we know they're not going hungry, and I am using double nets for at least half the number of nets that go out overnight, meaning they last double the time. Horses that need extra have loose hay time still have that am and pm too.

There's always learning with horses and even if you've written the book on track systems it doesn't mean you have it all figured out, and you're always still trying to improve and making changes to better improve the horses.

I do also have a theory that last year because it rained for our whole spring and summer that the hay was more palatable than normal, as normally they wouldn't be so keen to park up at a double netted bale and would want the haynets instead, so I wonder if now we've had a dry year it'll mean the hay is less palatable and I might be able to use bales again.

I'm potentially planning to reintroduce the bales from Dec - Feb when the weather is rubbish to make our lives a bit easier, but only if we have a cold winter. But if it's super mild we may stick to nets...! It all depends on the horses!