Since we moved we have been IDing all the trees on our property and other than a ton of large pine trees we seem to have a lot of box elder.
Googling has showed that these trees are linked to fatal neurological conditions in horses in the midwest and canada. We live in the South East.
Can someone out there shed some light on how concerned we need to be and what precautions we should take? These are huge mature shade trees, and it would be a shame to cut them down, but if we have to we will.
TIA
From what I’ve read, they need to go. Seems like only a little bit needs to be ingested to do significant harm. Hopefully someone with more conclusive evidence will ring in.
Remove them, location is not the issue, the seed pods are very hard to control and rake up. I would remove the trees and replace them with something horse friendly.
If the horse(s) ingested any of the seed pods (which can blow very far away.) Then you’d likely have large vet bills and heartbreak that could be saved by having the trees cut down.
Also, there are some lumber companies that will pay you for the trees and they will come out and cut them down, but you’ll have to do some searching to find a company that will do this. My aunt had this done when she needed some pine and oaks removed, it wasn’t much, but she didn’t have to pay them to remove the trees either.
Have you talked with your County Extension Agent?
Also Univ. of Fl. had a pretty thorough website about toxic plants and farm animals.
It is not possible for all of them to go, there are a lot of them. Right now the horses are dry lotted with access to a round bale, the two HUGE trees by the barn are both Box Elder Maples. I know that they are not classed as hardwood so no one around here would want them. We can take down one but not the other, the rest of the property has several mature box elder maples as well.
We can remove them from the one dry lot, but it would be impossible to remove them from the entire property. Is there any way other than clear cutting the property to deal with this?
I had never even heard of it before.
they are a weed tree just like poplar and willows- grow fast and die young. Manitoba maple aka box elder is comprised of soft, weak wood that goes down in high winds and under snow-load and they are messy things so get rid of them for those reasons if nothing else. I have seen them go over in a wind and take down parts of buildings, and had one split right in half with a late snowfall. Also, never, ever park a vehicle under one as the constantly dripping sap will eat the paint off the vehicle. Oh and they also attract colourful swarms of the rather stinky box elder bugs.
The only plus is apparently one can tap them like a hard maple and boil down the sap for syrup.
We had box elders all over in Washington. In the pastures, all over. I never once heard of a horse ingesting and having an issue from them. Even in winter, when grass was scarce.
They must taste bad, or you have to eat a lot. And by all over, I mean all over. Everywhere. Main trees on the property. So personally, I wouldn’t worry about them. Of course, it’s still possible, I have also read the study and freaked out for a bit when it first came out.
Oh, and yes i know they aren’t native to Washington. A neighboring city decided they were beautiful and introduced them to the parks. They spread like wildfire and now there is a large population in the Issaquah/Sammamish/Redmond area. Just another reason why not to plant nonnative plants 
Here’s a resource from the University that first identified Box Elder Trees/hypoglycin A toxicity a few years ago. It takes a risk-factor approach to managing or removing trees.
http://www.cvm.umn.edu/umec/lab/SPM/BEandSPM/home.html
My understanding is that it IS, obviously, a risk, but many, many horses have lived on pastures with box elder trees without issues. It is also a pretty horrible toxicity when it does happen, so you want to take steps to mitigate the risk as appropriate for your situation, which may or may not involve cutting down trees.
SO our Ag person didn’t know anything about it and seeing as we cannot completely deforest the whole plot of land here are our proposed steps.
Remove the 2 large trees that screen the sacrifice are and replace with something friendly - would love suggestions for a fast growing tree that tolerates clay soil well.
We have several 30+ year old tree on the property that we will gradually take down as warranted by age and condition.
I will continue cleaning their small sacrifice (and preferred hang out) completely - right now I pick up oops daily then ‘scrape’ the surface with the fork to get up loose hay, mud clumps, and small rocks.
The horses are both fed in stalls in the AM and PM and get good hay (alfalfa) inside and a round bale (orchard) outside.
Does this sound reasonable?
I will also be starting a separate post about getting horses to leave the barn/ overhang - they just want to be inside 27/7.
That sounds good.
You could also look into pruning some of the branches back on some of the more accessible trees.
As for replacement trees it would depend on what is native to your area and non-toxic to the horses. What you could do is find a list of native trees that fit your bill and then compare them to a list of toxic trees and select one that works the best for you.
So long as you stay on top of the seed pods it shouldn’t be a problem.
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