Developing Landscape-adapted Small Ruminants
I’ve presented a version of this small ruminant talk at multiple conferences over the last few years, and I keep adding new data and findings. I presented the linked version at the annual GrassWorks Grazing Conference in La Crosse, WI on January 24th, 2026. If you’re interested in sheep and/or goats, and producing them more profitably, this presentation may have some useful information for you.
Management of Horse Grazing for Horse Health and Land Health
Here are some educational materials that I’ve put out there related to management of land for horses. I’ve written a bunch of posts on Facebook over time about forage quality, horse grazing and managing efficient breeds like Fjords on pasture. I was posting about managing forage quality, not limiting quantity, when I first joined Facebook in 2016. Multi-species grazing can be done with horses, and in this 2019 post I’m showing horses with goats and sheep, and in 2019 we were leading with grass-finishing beef ahead of the horses. This post is from April 2024, showing what I look for and how I manage turning the herd out to spring grazing. This post from July 2021 focuses on leaf number, not grass height for horse grazing suitability. Horses are capable of balancing the N:C ratio of their diet if given the opportunity with available hay, and despite what some claim, horses don’t eat constantly when they are grazed 24/7 and not restricted in forage access. I’ve hosted formal educational pasture walks, and this post was about the 2020 horse grazing pasture walk. You can learn more about our grazing management approach by listening to this Humble Hoof podcast and watching a webinar I gave through the University of Maine on easy-keeper equine management. Here is a podcast about the management of horses, goats, sheep and LGDs in our system, in a Grazing Grass podcast, episode 172, which showcases regenerative ag stories, by Cal Hardage. My presentation on choosing the right livestock for the landscape, presented at the Savanna Institute’s Perennial Farm Gathering, turned into a podcast can be found at that link. Clay Nelson, a horse farm design consultant, interviewed me for an Equine Wellness magazine article. Have a read here if you’re considering small ruminants as part of your equine pasture management approach, and here’s a facebook link with supporting videos and photos.
Wisconsin Sheep and Wool Festival Presentations
I was invited to contribute to the educational content of the 2025 WI Sheep & Wool Festival this year, on 3 topics. Click on these topics below to download a pdf of the presentation that I gave.
Small Ruminants in Silvopasture
Breeding for Parasite Resistance
Protecting Small Ruminants with LGDs
Dung Beetles
I studied parasites of grazing livestock for my doctoral research, and in the process learned about the value of a low level of parasite infection for healthy immune system function, and how dung beetles can naturally help manage low levels of parasites in pasture systems where manure is not removed or disturbed. There are many more benefits too. I collected the dung beetles that naturally migrated to our farm due to our organic management of our animals, and sent them for speciation to Dr Hayes Goosey at Montana State University. I put together a presentation showing the findings in 2020 and have updated it over time as I’ve found more beetle species and research on the topic. Click here to view the 2025 dung beetle presentation, and here for a recorded pasture walk from one of the early versions of the presentation.
Saddle Fitting Model Article
I attended a few workshops where I learned a great approach to finding a saddle to fit the variety of back shapes that are present in the Fjord breed. This applies to any other breed of horse too. The article I wrote was published in the Fjord Herald magazine, Issue 149, Winter 2023. By following the instructions in this article, anybody can make an inexpensive model of their horse’s back to take to tack stores to see if a saddle would be a good fit for their horse, or send to a custom saddle maker for a custom build. There is a video on how to make a model of your horse’s back for saddle fitting too.
Predicting Fjord Mature Height
The string test and multiple other approaches to predicting Fjord final height from foal measurements is of interest to many Fjord owners and buyers who are considering what youngsters to purchase. In this article, which was published in the Fjord Herald magazine, Fall 2020, Issue 137, I use data that I collected from Fjords and analyzed for statistical prediction of height. The available tools are designed for Quarter Horses, and are not calibrated for Fjords, so the predictions aren’t accurate when Fjords are measured with those methods.
Hauling Horses Article
I have hauled my horses since I was a teenager, and have learned how to do it in a way that is healthier for the horse, and less expensive for me! I wrote an article about this for the Fjord Herald, Issue 136, Fall 2020.
Fjord Breed Genetic Diversity Preservation
In 2022 I wrote an article on preservation of Fjord genetic diversity in closed populations, like we have in Fjords. It was published in the Fjord Herald, Summer 2022, Issue 143. The limitations of using pedigree information to determine coefficients of inbreeding can be overcome by using genomic testing and applying the SPARKS process to the genomic SNP data. This isn’t being done in horses much, but it is common in other livestock and endangered wildlife in zoos. In my role as a Board member for Fjord Horse International, I learned that the Fjord horses in Norway are experiencing a steep coefficient of inbreeding rise, based on pedigree COI analysis. This needs to be assessed at the genomic level, rather than the pedigree level, and breeding practices implemented that aim to preserve genomic heterogeneity. An explanation of the SPARKS sheets and an example stallion report can be seen in these links.
Fjord Breed Statistics
I was curious about whether there were factors that influenced production of a colt or a filly in NFHR registered Fjords. If the sire was the older parent, or the dam was the older parent, did this make a difference in the sex of the foal? Is the sex ratio of the foals different between parents of different ages? I also was curious about how many older maiden mares were recorded in the breed, the color variations in the breed over time, and other statistics that I could summarize from the records in the NFHR database. The resulting summary was published in the NFHR’s quarterly breed magazine, the Fjord Herald, Issue 134, Spring 2020. The editors chose to not publish it in color, so the color version as a PDF is here.
Fjord Color Genetics
I have studied color genetics in Fjords since the early 2000’s, writing many articles for the Fjord Herald publication, and putting together a presentation that I’ve delivered to the Midwest Fjord Horse Club at their 2025 spring clinic, and to the Canadian Fjord Horse Association at their Annual General Meeting. The PDF of the CFHA presentation is here.
Fjord Health Conditions that are Testable
People who are new to Fjords are always asking if Fjords have health problems like many other breeds of horses. While the breed is very healthy, there are some recessive genetic conditions that have been found in Fjords. None of them result in health issues that cannot be managed by environmental conditions, so these genetic conditions are not such a big deal as the truly detrimental conditions that occur in many other breeds of horses. I spent $6,500 and worked with Etalon Diagnostics to collect data on the Fjord samples in their database to produce this educational article, which was published in the Fjord Herald magazine, Issue 145, Winter 2022.
White Marks in Fjords
In 2022, I compiled over a decade of my personal records of Fjords with white marks, combined those data with a set of recorded white marks from the NFHR database that I cleaned up, and sent those to Dr. Rebecca Bellone, the head of the genetics lab at UC-Davis. This is where all the NFHR Fjord hair samples are sent for DNA parentage verification, so the lab has all the samples it needs to test this population of Fjords to find the source of the undesirable white marks that occasionally occur on registered Fjords. The lab tested the 90 samples that I identified as white-marked and determined that the common cause of white marks in most breeds, the W20 allele, was found in all breeds except Icelandic, Arabian, Fjord. A different set of genes or variants is responsible for the white marks we see in Fjords. They also reported that Dun is estimated to be homozygous and fixed in the registered population of Fjords in the NFHR database. No nd1 (primitive marks but not diluted in body color), and nd2 (no primitive marks and no dilution) alleles are present in the tested population of registered Fjords. The open source publication can be read here. UC Davis also wrote a less technical article about this study, which can be read here. We still don’t know what genes cause the white marks we see in Fjords.
Goat browsing for brush management in oak savanna restoration
I conducted my Master’s Degree research at the Yellowstone Lake Wildlife Area in Blanchardville, WI, studying the impacts goats make on the environment, and their health and growth performance when applied for brush management. My 2019 thesis defense presentation can be viewed in the linked PDF, and the approved thesis is found on the UW-Madison CIAS website. If that link doesn’t work, the approved thesis pdf is also here.
Using LGDs to protect pastured livestock
I’ve given many versions of this talk over the decades that I’ve had and used LGDs for all types of livestock. My first use of them was to protect pastured poultry, and I’ve since used them for protecting nearly all of the common livestock species. A recent version of the presentation was from the 2025 Heart of Wisconsin Grazing Conference and can be downloaded at this link.
Egg yolk antibodies for coccidia and gastrointestinal parasites of goats and cattle
My doctoral research in the Animal and Dairy Sciences department at UW-Madison focused on producing and testing a patented egg-based antibody product for inducing an immune-system protection from coccidia and gastrointestinal helminth parasites of goats, dairy calves and beef cattle. Parasites use IL-10 to hide from the host immune system, so my PhD research was to use antibodies against an IL-10 peptide to help the host see the parasites and develop an effective immune response. I presented a poster on the vaccine and production of the antibody at a conference in 2020. I presented a poster on the effects of the antibody compared to an essential oil treatment and a treatment with a common ionophore at a conference in 2020. Another poster showed the health of recently transported dairy calves when fed egg antibody and other treatments. I presented about IL-10 in the graduate student seminar, presented my research to my committee in 2020 and passed my entrance exam, thus gaining dissertator status. The patented approach was created by my advisor, Dr Mark Cook, and this paper shows egg antibodies applied against cryptosporidium in calves. Here is a popular article with the same basic approach, but using a different peptide for the antibody production. There is an organic approach to producing customized antibodies, which has been used by organic dairy farmers to treat scouring calves long before modern coccidiostats and antibiotics were available.
Portable Goat Shelters
I designed and completed a couple of USDA NCR-SARE research projects on portable inexpensive shelters for goats. They are a hoop house of stock panels, covered in silage plastic (cheap and durable), over a plywood floor on a used boat trailer. You can pull them down a highway and park them wherever you need to provide shelter. The final report on the shelter design options and goat preferences is at that link. I also tested goat preferences for density per shelter. I presented the goat shelter research, and the statistics in an Animal Welfare and Behavior course at UW-Madison in 2015.
Virtual Fence Collar Testing for Goat Management in the Driftless Area
I was part of the first trialing of NoFence virtual fence collars in the USA. I helped write the proposal to USDA NCR-SARE, designed the treatments and data collection, advised the farmers who were running their goats with these collars for this project (The Munch Bunch, LLC), conducted the data analysis and summarized it up for the final report.
I’ve produced a lot more educational materials and will slowly be adding them here in the future.