The Drought takes hold of Horse Ownership in Sydney
November 4th 2006 15:03
Owning a horse in the concrete jungle no longer removes the worry of drought conditions
This week I sat on two bales of straw I purchased staring at the two bales of Lucerne hay I had also purchased and realised that the creeping skirt of the drought was affecting me in more ways than water shortages.
Horse ownership in Sydney is padded with luxury. There is no need to monitor dam levels or lose sleep over the lack of grazing. The cost of stabling remains stagnant for 12 months and it doesn’t matter if it rains from one day to the next. Someone else brings in the feed and bedding and that’s where it ends, because someone else does the worrying.
It wasn’t the climbing cost of hay however that made me file through the feed bills this week. In August the cost of one bale of NSW Lucerne hay was $17.88 including tax. This week I paid $19.64. In August the cost of a 25kg bag of wheaten chaff was $19.80. Two weeks ago I paid $21.34. Wheaten straw for bedding costs me $8.09 a bale at the moment, a figure that remains strangely unchanged since August. In fact, it was the changing expressions of the feed merchants around me that pulled out the stats on horse feed this week.
In the last two days I have called many agistment properties offering rest accommodation for horses and have found none that can offer even reasonable grazing at the moment. Not one could provide paddocks that were so sufficient horses didn’t need to be hand fed. Is there no grass left in NSW?
There are 190 stables in the CBD complex where my horse lives. If I count the intake of my own chestnut and multiply that by every other horse in the vicinity, I wonder how many paddocks of Lucerne it takes to feed just this collection of animals over a month. The feed merchant’s silo is stocked to the ceiling with hay that owners are paying dearly for, but are paying willingly.
I am thankful for the environmental reminder, because as much as water shortages are a worry the taps and showers continue to run when we turn them on, removing the alarm that there is actually no water. But sunburnt hay, days of shortage and climbing feed prices have been my aide memoire that drought is now firmly in my back yard.
For owners interested in managing their horses during drought conditions the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation (RIRDC) in collusion with the Australian Government have produced an essential report on this issue. It may be viewed in PDF format at the RIRDC website
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