How-To Library

Summertime is here, and with it, an impending battle on the front lines of the lawn. Drought! Bugs! Disease! Each awaiting their chance to wreak havoc and devastate the beautiful green turf you prepped over the winter and nurtured during the spring. With a cunning strategy and quick action, these tips will keep your grass looking lovely and luscious for the summer season.

When it comes to choosing the right fence for your horse farm, there are no hard and fast rules. As fencing is one of the most important investments a farm owner will make, take care to evaluate which type of fencing is right for your horses, location, situation and budget. Other things to consider include horse safety, containment, maintenance and aesthetics.

Did you know the average 1,000 pound horse at rest drinks 8 to 10 gallons of water a day? Follow these DIY tips from Southern States’ Equine Experts to keep your horse hydrated this summer.

With advances in nutrition and preventive health care, today's horses can expect to have longer and more productive lives than ever before. Many horses are living well into their late twenties and thirties, with a good quality of life.

Developing a nutritional feeding program for your foal from birth until weaning is an important step to insuring the healthcare of your horse.

In a perfect world, a barn management plan would be in place prior to the first hooves stepping on your property. Luckily it's never too late to improve your barn's management practices. Remember, the better managed your barn is, the healthier and happier all horses and humans involved will be.

Training a horse to perform at high levels takes a lot of time, effort, patience and resources. Regardless of the discipline, from racing to reining, endurance to eventing and hunters/jumpers to polo ponies, all horses actively in a training regiment for competition are considered to be performance horses.

Laminitis is a debilitating and costly disease that can affect any horse, and is the most common cause of death due to euthanasia that ranks third in the list behind colic and old age. While we still don’t understand the exact events that lead to laminitis, we know more about the causes of laminitis than ever before, and prevention is the key. There are three areas in feeding horses that we need to focus on for prevention of laminitis.

I believe natural temperament can make a difference, but in many ways, good training is the cornerstone.

Following are some feeding tips that can help to decrease your horse’s heat load and increase the stamina and health of the show and performance horse during hot weather.

Your horse is bleeding. What do you do? First, assess the situation by following these DVM’s tips. Identify & provide basic treatment for horse puncture wounds, lacerations, abrasions and how to put together a basic horse wound emergency kit.

Disasters cannot be scheduled on a calendar, but the damage may be mitigated with advance planning. The American Red Cross suggests developing an emergency farm, barn and animal evacuation plan.