I think we can all get a bit too precious about this. Grass is not “sour” . I dislike that word because it indicates that it can’t be eaten and or is wasted and useless. It can be eaten and it is a first class resource for our microbiome. Spreading the poo around avoids growing sugary stressed low nutrition grass. It is truely magical. The trick is to rest it and top it so it rots down and adds to the biome. I cannot stress this enough, we need to be self sustaining. These are the principles of rotational grazing at their finest.
The alternative is to grow our grass in dirt with little nutritional value. We need organic matter to grow healthy grass, whether fresh or composted. If we can’t compost it, which is gold standard, leave it be for the dung beetles, then Harrow or kick it about or throw it onto eaten parts and section those eaten parts off.
I would much prefer to see a field with muck spread and kicked around, rested, topped and grazed, than what I currently see on many properties which is land owners who are growing grass in compacted dirt where the horse owner picks up the lack of nutrition in bagged sprayed feed and supplements ...
Roughs, which are areas mainly that have been used heavily as latrines are normally pee areas, we can’t collect pee from our fields. Instead, it is far better to use natural roughs to feed poorer grass by topping and allowing all the beautiful microorganisms to rot it down for us.
The only reason the word “sour”came into the equation is due to poor rotational grazing practices. And due to livery yard culture where the horses were packed on so that rotational practices couldn’t happen. When rotational grazing can’t happen, or rest can’t occur , or in over stocking, only then must land be poo picked with it being taken away. Now with increased knowledge about what rotational grazing means and tracks too, where we can rest our pastures effectively, we really shouldn’t be using the word “sour”, we are way past that in terms of our practise. Sour is only used in relation to the word “sweet”, remember.
When I was a kid, we weren’t allowed to poo pick, our farmer would put horses where he needed to grow good grass and tell us to kick it about if we could be bothered, or he’d Harrow them quickly or put some non milking cows on for the day to kick the poo about. Each small paddock was on a six to eight weekly rotational cycle, with sheep moved on in week three into each paddock. Sheep would then also be used for parasite control as we didn’t have the worming knowledge or medication and counts in those days that we have now. The sheep would also clear the roughs, now for those who don’t have sheep, we have the wonderful opportunity to use the roughs as our own natural fertiliser. Lovely jubbly.
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