FeedXL: How Does FeedXL Work?: Pastures

Important source of nutrients

Pasture is an important source of nutrients and forms the base of many horse diets so it is important that it is taken into consideration when assessing your horse's diet. You can include pasture in your horse's diets in FeedXL either by using one of our "typical" pastures, or by using your own pasture analysis. See the Custom Feeds & Pastures page for more information.

FeedXL does the hard work

Just tell FeedXL the type and quality of pasture your horse grazes and how many hours your horse has access to the pasture and FeedXL will calculate how much your horse will typically eat in a day. This amount is then adjusted according to how much supplementary feed and hay you give your horse each day to give you a best estimate of your horse's pasture intake. FeedXL does all this automatically for you to save you trying to work it all out.

Grasses, legumes, natives and more

Our list of generic pasture types isn't exhaustive but we do try to have a broad selection for you to get started with. Choose from grasses, legumes, native grasses, and annual pastures like barley or oat forages at excellent, good, average and poor quality levels. Use them as they are or mix'n'match them to be more like your own pastures.

Our "pasture builder" lets you specify what percent of each plant type and quality makes up your pasture. So for example you could create a pasture that is 60% good quality temperate grass, 20% excellent quality legume (clover) and 20% average quality native grass.

Managing Oxalates

For those of you with horses grazing high oxalate sub-tropical pastures like buffel grass, kikuyu and setaria, FeedXL keeps track of your horse's oxalate intake and warns you if your horse's dietary calcium to oxalate ratio is too low and putting your horse at risk of bighead. A newsletter about Avoiding Bighead is available to our FeedXL members online

Don't know what type of pasture you have?

It isn't easy identifying pasture types, so if you are not sure what type of pasture or what quality your pasture is, you can simply post a photo on our Members Forum and we can help you identify the grass type and suggest which quality level you should use. Easy as that.