Some Basic Horse Nutrition
While you may believe this is an easy thing to do – feed your horse – you’d be surprised at the amount of horse owners that don’t know about the fundamental principles. There is no real rule of thumb for feeding, as all horse’s nutrition requires will vary depending on age, size and level of activity. Grass is the most fundamental part of a horse diet. Being one of the most essential factors to keep its digestive system to function optimally, grass ordinarily means natural pasture and cut hay.
big horses usually eat about 2 to 2.5 % of their body weight in food each day so a 1,000 pound horse will consume roughly twenty to twenty five pounds of food per day. Horses require good nutrition so this means high quality food, not low quality high fiber food (which can interfere with correct digestion). In fact, a horse would be happy if you fed him with a feed of hay/pasture forage amounting to one percent of his body weight.
If your horse doesn’t do much work, they will do nicely on strictly forage, with no grain thrown in. On the other hand, horses which are active, or at the growing or breeding stage, need extra secondary feeds over and above the forage like grains or concentrate supplements. Thus, for optimizing growth and development of the animal, foraging should make up for at least half or more of the body weight, as part of his daily diet.
The nutrient content and the quality of the forage are crucial considerations when you are planning to give your horse a stable diet. When you are aware of this, you can easily figure out the correct amounts of nutrients that would meet his specific needs. One of the best and most affordable sources of summer feed is pasture, which if it is good quality, can satisfy all the nutrition requisites of the horse.
The best source and the least expensive one for summer feed is your grass fields and, in most cases good pasture by itself can provide all the nutrition requisites your horse needs. But how do you come to know how much pasture is right for your horse? Using a weight of 1000 to 1200 pounds, here is a rough guideline. This means that a mare and foal 1.75 to 2 acres – yearlings 1.5 to 2 acre and weanlings 0.5 to 1 acre.
Winter feed of course would be cut hay, and again, high quality if you can provide it. Ensure that the hay is leafy and green in colored and cut in a systematic way, free of dust, moulds weeds or stubble. There are plenty of proteins, vitamins and minerals contained in this feed.
Alfalfa hay is great for horses in a developing phase as it is protein enriched by there could be abnormal calcium content in relation to phosphorus. Too much calcium is not good for developing horses so if you’re not sure about hay quality, have it analyzed.
