Heritage Dartmoor ponies are skilled land managers. The National Trust, Norfolk Wildlife Trust, Suffolk Wildlife Trust and RSPB have already worked with us to bring ponies to their reserves.

Why heritage Dartmoor ponies are so good at conservation grazing

Heritage ponies are small and hardy with a calm, well-mannered temperament, making them ideal for conservation grazing. They’re available for sale or lease through our conservation grazing scheme. 

Because cattle, sheep and ponies have different mouths they graze in different ways. Ponies have two sets of incisors, can nibble and bite, and also grind vegetation with their powerful molars. They thrive on a varied diet, are happy outdoors all year, and need little or no supplementary feeding.

Quickly reducing young scrub, seedlings and rank grasses to allow a wider variety of flora to flourish, they stamp on old stems of gorse to make it easier to eat, relishing the young shoots.

They trample the bracken, nibble dense bramble and push into areas other animals won’t go. They even graze the invasive purple Molinia moor grass that cattle and sheep avoid, stopping it from turning the landscape into a straw-coloured, dense place unsuitable for other grazers. The ponies eat the sweeter grass all year round and in winter and early spring, when nourishment is harder to find, they eat the Molinia.

All this activity, along with the ponies’ dung and constant movement, opens up paths to let in more light and allow plants to grow. Even their hoof prints play a role, creating micro pools for ground-level plant colonisation and expansion, and maintaining vital patches of bare earth to support invertebrates and ground-feeding birds.

Because they’re not classed as livestock, heritage Dartmoor ponies come with much less administration around movement and identification. They don’t need to be tested for TB. And under some Agri Agreements, they’re eligible for the Rare Breed Supplementary payment or NBAR.