understanding your land: identify your grass

A practical, beginner-friendly Grass ID course for horse owners. 

Forage makes up around 90% of your horse’s diet — but most of us aren’t fully sure what’s actually growing in our fields or present in our hay.

This short, practical course helps you build the confidence to recognise common UK pasture grasses, understand the features used to identify them, and start thinking about what the grasses in your field might tell you about your pasture, soil and management.

Inside the course you'll get:

• Field walkover videos showing common grass species in situ
• A practical approach to identifying grasses, starting with flower heads and key visual features
• Parts of a grass plant explained simply, including spikelets, ligules, culms, nodes, roots, rhizomes and stolons
•  A Grass ID Guide to refer back to
• Quizzes to test your understanding and practise identification
• Species guides covering perennial ryegrass, Yorkshire fog, sweet vernal-grass, bent grasses, crested dog’s-tail, timothy, cocksfoot, tufted hair-grass and meadow foxtail
• A short section on seed mixes and choosing wisely
• A 1-Minute Soil Signal Refresh to help you start thinking about what your pasture is telling you
• A simple field homework exercise to keep building your identification skills
• Lifetime access, including future course updates

This course is for you if...

You've ever looked across your pasture and thought:

“I know that's grass... but what grass?”

You don't need a botanical background or previous grass-identification experience. The course focuses on recognising useful features and developing a practical identification method, rather than trying to memorise an entire flora.

This isn't an exhaustive botanical guide. It's a practical starting point for horse owners who want to understand the grasses growing in their pasture and become more confident identifying them.