Australian Horse Keeping Conference 2012
Living Legends Melbourne 12 /13 Nov 2012
Horse owners talk about weeds, dust, mud and emerging diseases. Scientists and natural resource managers talk about water quality, biodiversity and climate impacts. Yet we are all talking about the same thing.
The aim of this event is to bring a variety of people together to exchange knowledge about sustainable horse keeping practices from the researcher “down” and grass roots “up”!
MB Equine Services will be hosting a presentation on forages and enrichment for horses.
Confirmed Speakers:
Alayne Blickle (USA) http://www.horsesforcleanwater.com/
Jane Myers http://www.equiculture.com.au/
Dr Gary Muscatello http://piarn.org.au / http://sydney.edu.au/vetscience/about/staff/profiles/gary.muscatello.276.php
Mariette van den Berg www.mberg.com.au
Dr Kirrilly Thompson http://tinyurl.com/kirrilly-thompson
Dr Andrew Clarke www.livinglegends.com.au
Target Audiences: Horse owners, horse property managers, NRM & Local Government Officers. Educators, lecturers, coaches, equine & racing students & LandCare leaders involved with typical peri-urban small horse keeping properties or commercial horse keeping enterprises.
Day 1: will feature all speakers. Day 2: Alayne Blickle
$110 per day including catering / $88 per day for Horse SA members
Monday night optional gourmet BBQ tea & 2.5 hr. drinks package avail. Guests of delegates welcome to BBQ. Includes tour of Living Legends property.
REGISTER HERE: http://www.trybooking.com/BCDX
Sponsorship and promotional opportunities are available: Enq. horsesa@horsesa.asn.au or hw@senet.com.au
Thank you to the following sponsors for assisting this important event to be put on:
Primary Industries Adaptation Research Network
Central Queensland University Appleton Institute
New Logo!
MB Equine Services has a new logo!
In March we launched our new website and we also found that it was time for a new logo.
The logo was designed by BenB Creative – a design company based in Fyshwich ACT. Thanks.
Curious horses
This week we started the forage pilot study, which is part of a honours students practical research work. Its only a small preference trial, but it will provide us with some valuable information for our later studies.
For this trial the student has to visit a number of horse properties and this week we started with the first two properties. The weather had been dry for the last 6 weeks but on the day that we wanted to start the trial – of course they predicted rain! So day 2 of the trial we spend most of the time in the rain with the horses. Nevertheless, the horses preformed even in the rain and showed their normal curiosity to all the visitors and foods we brought in!
PhD Equine Nutrition Project
Browsing – An overlooked aspect in horse management?
Throughout my Animal Management & Science degrees I have been involved in a number of animal nutrition studies- but I had a particular passion for equine nutrition! My last research project was for my Master Degree, which I conducted at the Massey University in New Zealand from 2005 to 2006. I studied the effect of abrupt dietary changes from pasture to confinement and concentrate feeding and vice versa on the faecal pH and microbiology of Thoroughbred horses. In 2006 I travel to Australia to present this work at the Australian Equine Science Symposium – which was a great opportunity to meet other new and renowned equine science and nutrition researchers. Since then I have been interested in continuing my research work in equine nutrition, but it has been very difficult to get something started (in Netherlands, Australia or New Zealand) – as equine nutrition is a topic that doesn’t generally get a lot of priority (it depends also on the topic within equine nutrition). Doing research with horses is also very expensive and there are not a lot of horse industry bodies with enough research funding – so I was not able to continue right away! However, being practically involved with the horse industry for the last 6 years has been a great experience and actually gave me more motivation to research a topic that can be applied to today’s horse management needs and that can improve the welfare of horses.
So in February of this year – I was able to finally start my PhD project on Equine Nutrition. The primary focus of the study is on forage enrichment for domesticated horses in Australia. I am particular interested in browsing behaviour and alternative forages. Although I am not able to give all the results during my research – I would like to keep our clients, readers and horse owners up to date with the progress and research events. On our MB Equine Services website I will regularly post some news about all the things that happen in the research field. So keep checking our website and facebook page or subscribe to our RSS feed!
We have published some educational articles in horse magazines that relate to this research topic. So if you would like to read those – visit our article database page.
Come back to read our next research update!
Welcome to the New Website of MB Equine Services
Welcome to the new website of MB Equine Services. We found that it was time to update our website and make it more interactive for horse owners. We publish on a regular basis educational articles on horse nutrition, property design and pasture management in a number of horse magazines and we would like to notify our readers and new visitors/horse owners about our new releases. In addition, we have started our blog, which will feature information about our upcoming events (e.g. seminars, workshops, clinic etc) and in the field results and observations from our services. We will also publish regular posts on the progress of Mariette’s PhD equine nutrition project. More information about this interesting study will follow soon.
We hope that this website is more user friendly and we will do our best to keep improving it. Happy browsing!
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