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Go green with your farm to make your horses healthier, the environment cleaner, and even improve the neighbors’ opinion of your place.

There’s a lot of buzz about “going green” these days. From installing energy-efficient fluorescent bulbs to carrying reusable grocery bags, we’ve made steps in our households toward impacting the environment less and improving the global climate. Managing horses is generally not forgiving to the environment (visualize brownish streams coming down the hillside from the manure pile in the rain, and fly spray chemicals rinsing down the wash stall drain). In this article we offer ways we can adjust our management to be more environmentally friendly.

Water Quality

Alayne Blickle, program director for Horses for Clean Water, says reducing nonpoint source pollution should be horse owners’ first goal when they go green. Nonpoint source pollution is caused by runoff during rainfall or snowmelt that picks up and carries away natural (urine and manure, for example) and human-made (i.e., pesticides) pollutants, depositing them into natural bodies of water and ground water.

“The bottom line is protecting water quality,” she says. “Drinking water and surface water really are our number one issue in the world today