What About Horse Nutrition

While you may think this is an easy move to make – feed your horse – you’d be surprised at the number of horse owners that don’t know about the basics. There is no real rule of thumb for feeding, as each horse’s nutritional needs will vary depending on age, weight and level of activity.

To start with, your horse naturally uses forage as a primary component of their diets. It is among the MAJOR prerequisites for a correctly working bowels. When we speak of forage, we usually mean natural pasture and cut hay.

Mature horses usually eat about two to 2. 5 pc of their body weight in feed each day. So an one thousand pound pony will eat approximately twenty to twenty-five pounds of feed every day. This means high quality feed, not low quality high fiber feed (which can interfere with proper digestion).

In an ideal pasture world, your pony should eat at least one pc of his body weight in hay / pasture forage daily. If your horse doesn’t do much work, they will do nicely on strictly forage, with no grain thrown in. From another viewpoint, growing, breeding, or working horses must have additions as well as forage – like grain or a supplement concentrate. Consider it this way, forages should ideally provide 1 half or even more of the total weight of the feed eaten daily for perfect development and growth.

Before you can feed a balanced “meal” to your horse, you have to know the nutrient content and quality of your forage. Once you know that, you can figure out the right amounts of each to meet nutrient requirements.

The best source, and the least expensive one for summer feed is your pasture. And, in most cases good pasture by itself can provide all the nutritional requirements your horse needs. How do you figure out how much pasture is needed to feed a horse? Here’s a coarse tenet to help : ( employing a weight of one thousand – 1,200 pounds )

Mare and foal 1.75 to two acres.

Yearlings 1.5 to 2 acre.

Weanlings 0.5 to 1 acre.

Winter feed of course would be cut hay, and again, high quality if you can provide it. It should be cut early, be leafy and green colored and as free as practicable of dust, moulds, weeds and stubble. This feed is usually rich in protein, minerals and vitamins.

Yes, you may use alfalfa hay, but take care about the higher protein content if you’re feeding to young growing horses, as it may contain an exorbitant quantity of calcium in relationship to phosphorus. Too much calcium is bad for growing horses. If you aren’t sure about hay quality, have it investigated.