How my horses help me feed soil throughout the winter
Channel: Zwartbles Ireland Suzanna Crampton
Date: 24/03/2023

To feed soil a healthy nutrient rich diet with plenty of manure and fibre.

Artificial fertiliser is like feeding plants a vacuous diet an equivalent of pure sugar water energy. It does nothing but deplete soil’s nutritional components. Which is why it now takes an increasing amount to grow tillage crops as well as monoculture rye grass for grazing.
If you take a car for example, it can only run on specific energy for which its components can function from and only that because it’s mechanical. Soil isn’t a machine there’s a much higher nuance to what makes a healthy soil biome.
If as a human you just drank sugar water and vitamins potentially you’d be ingesting what is generally thought to enable you to function. Problem is many multiples of nutrients and micro nutrients would be missing.
Soil needs a broad spectrum of biological elements to function. 



Zwartbles Ireland is a small company run from a farm in County Kilkenny in Ireland. We are a regenerative farm which means restoring soils health and regenerating its natural carbon and nutrient cycle with biodiversity of pasture sward with grasses, legumes, forbs and herbs. This also means we farm with nature. Healthy soils are important for healthy environment. So we encourage all life from the microbial to dung beetles, ants, pollinators to flora biodiversity, birds, hare, hedgehogs, rabbits, fox, badger as well as our livestock. This mean we farm in a style of mob grazing and giving fields long rest times between grazings. We have seen a huge increase and return of wildlife including woodcock and snipe in winter months foraging for dung beetle larvae, red squirrel, wood peckers and pine martens. We also have the rare natter bat and previously thought extinct Tawny Mining bees.
We sell, Zwartbles sheep, Zwartbles blankets and yarn made from the sheep, and calendars featuring Inca the World's Smallest Sheepdog and her coworkers. We also sell alpaca yarn spun for our own alpaca. Our yarns are 100 percent natural, grown by our sheep which grazing our small green Irish fields. This wool is naturally sequestered carbon which you can then knit into warm environmental friendly clothing.