This is part 2 of my conversation with Marla Foreman. Marla Foreman is a veterinarian, a horse trainer and a riding instructor. She’s also a good friend so it was fun for us to get together for a Horses for Future podcast. I particularly wanted to interview Marla because she grew up on a ranch in New Mexico. From there she moved to Washington state, but not to the temperate coastal area. She lived on the other side of the state where rain was scarce and the amount of land she had was a mere postage stamp compared to the acreage she grew up on in New Mexico. And now she’s living on the east coast near Boston.

So she’s learned how to manage horses in very different climates, and very different acreage. What she has learned is smart design. The goal is healthy horses and healthy pastures. Growing up in New Mexico she saw how well horses maintained themselves when they could move. How to you encourage movement on smaller acreage? And how do you design your farm so you are spending your time enjoying your horses and not just doing chores? The answer is smart design. Hopefully, you’ll get some ideas for your own farm so you can meet everyone’s needs well - yours, the horses, and the land you care for.

Horse people can make a difference in the climate change crisis. Together we’re learning how.

Marla Foreman is a veterinarian, a horse trainer and a riding instructor. She’s also a good friend so it was fun for us to get together for a Horses for Future podcast. I particularly wanted to interview Marla because she grew up on a ranch in New Mexico. From there she moved to Washington state, but not to the temperate coastal area. She lived on the other side of the state where rain was scarce and the amount of land she had was a mere postage stamp compared to the acreage she grew up on in New Mexico. And now she’s living on the east coast near Boston.

So she’s learned how to manage horses in very different climates and that’s what I wanted to ask her about - that and the O2 composter she had in Washington state. It turns out it doesn’t matter where you are living - the concepts that guide your decisions around pasture management and horse care are the same no matter how much or how little rain you get, or how many acres you have.

We begin in New Mexico and travel with Marla through years of experience managing horses. Included in the conversation is a discussion of O2 composters.

It’s been a summer filled with swallows for me. It’s also been a summer in which I experienced my own climate change disaster. Listen to the podcast to discover the connection.

This is part 3 of my conversation with Navona Gallegos. We are talking about compost. Unless you keep your horses out on pasture 24/7 12 months out of the year, you have a manure pile. So what can you do with all that manure to help build up beautiful, organic rich soil?

That’s what we’ll be talking about as we explore the Johnson-Su Bioreactor, O2 composters and some composting do’s and don’t’s.

This is Part 2 of my conversation with Navona Gallegos. We begin this episode with a discussion of what happens in the soil when the farmers in my area till their fields in preparation for planting this year’s corn crop. I’m not a farmer. I’m not trying to teach farmers how to farm. That would be like someone who has never ridden telling me how I should ride a horse. But there are things I can learn from this discussion that I will help me with the decisions I make for the land I care for. I hope it does the same for you.

This week I’m visiting with Navona Gallegos. Navona is a rider, an ecologist, and a farmer. She is passionate about soil - not dirt. We’ll discuss the difference in the podcast. She lives in New Mexico, so she’s in a very beautiful landscape but one that is completely different from what I am used to. So I was really looking forward to learning how she manages horses in a climate that is so very different from my own.

We began not with the soil but with horses. Navona grew up on a ranch so part of her childhood experience was riding out on the range. But she also fell in love with jumping. She competed in Europe so talk about contrast - ranch raised horse to show horses whose turnout is tiny paddock. That’s the starting point of a conversation that takes us from the high pressure world of show jumping to the role our horses play in connecting us back to the land.

Recently I’ve been visiting around the planet to see what some of my friends have been doing with their land.

When I began my world tour of what horse people are doing to restore biodiversity and ecosystem functionality to their land, I knew I wanted to visit with Manda Scott. Manda is a vet, an author, a shamanic teacher, a climate crisis activist, a podcast host, a horse owner, and a frequent contributor to this podcast. It had been a while since we had talked. So we finally picked a date and settled in for a long catch up. The first hour was gone before we knew it. That’s because we were talking about horses.

Manda has a couple of young ponies who are presenting yearling horse training puzzles so we talked training for an hour. But this podcast is not about horse training so I am going to jump past that part of our conversation. For those of you who follow me when I am wearing my horse trainer’s hat, I can hear the protests. “No, don’t skip that part. We want to hear everything!”

But I am going to resist. Instead I’m going to jump into the middle where we began to steer the ship in the direction of climate change and land stewardship. We began by discussing Bill Gates book: “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster”

In 2020 Sarah Owings bought fifteen acres in northern California. She's now learning from the land to figure out how best to be a good caretaker of that land. She has to deal with invasives, including foxtails. She wants to plant natives but always there are possible unintended consequences.

There is a lot to be learned from someone who is a skilled learner. Sarah is good at asking questions. What do we need to consider? What can seem like a good idea may end up having more of an environmental cost that benefit. Sarah helps to form the questions we all need to be considering.

This week I zoomed off to Northern California for a visit with Sarah Owings. Sarah is a dog trainer. She’s a member of the Clicker Expo faculty and she’s an eager learner. Over the years Sarah and I have had many great conversations about training. Now we get to talk about how best to manage our land. Sarah is very much in a fire zone so any planting decisions she makes has to take that into consideration. She may be dealing with a very different climate from mine, but I still learned a lot that will help my spring planning during our conversation.

Many of you listening to this podcast bought your land to give your horses more freedom. Sarah bought her fifteen acres to give her dogs more freedom. She bought her property in 2020 so she is just beginning to figure out what she wants to do with it. That’s a great time to check in to see what her beginning steps have been. Often when you take on a new property, it can be overwhelming. Where do you begin?

Sarah is great at doing her homework. Recently that homework has included incorporating the work of Dr. Doug Tallamy and his Homegrown national park conservation initiative.

This is part 3 of a conversation with Jane Jackson. Jane and her husband live in northern Vermont. Jane has her horses and her husband raises sheep and cattle. Which means that together they have been learning how to be better grass farmers.

This week Jane starts us out by talking about silvopasture.