A. No. And in fact it would be impossible to create a diet that met exactly 100% of your horse’s requirements for every nutrient shown here. Q. So if not 100%, where should the nutrient levels be sitting? And what is normal? Because some of the amounts on this graph look really high?! Isn’t that […]
We recently had a member of our nutrition forum ask ‘Can one balanced diet be better than another, or is the key point that it is balanced?’ This is probably the best question I have ever been asked! And the answer is absolutely YES! One balanced diet can be better than another! BUT, before I […]
Pasture or hay is all a horse needs! Or is it? This is something I often hear… and 99% of the time it is WRONG! Forages are (almost) always too low in trace minerals to meet a horse’s requirements and leaving them unsupplemented on forage only diets usually results in problems with their hooves, joints, […]
If you are looking at your foal’s diet in FeedXL it is crucial you include mum’s milk. It is a goldmine of nutrients for your foal and must be taken into account. Forget the milk and you will end up overfeeding, which will then cause problems with growth that is too fast. OK you say, […]
Did you know you can add your own hay with complete data to FeedXL? The easiest way to do this is to upload an Equi-Analytical XML forage analysis file and FeedXL will add all the data for you. To learn about Equi-Analytical and their forage analyses, visit their website here. We recommend either the (601) Equi-Tech […]
Have you ever got the results back from a pasture or hay analysis and been left scratching your head trying to figure out what the numbers mean? Frustrating isn’t it!? That is unless you have a tool (like FeedXL) to interpret the numbers for you. Let me show you what I (Nerida) mean. The analysis below shows the […]
Do you have a horse that has water that runs out of the anus before, during or after he poos? This condition now has a name! Free Fecal Water, or FFW. And also, happily it now has some research behind what may cause it as well as a potential treatment. If it is something you […]
Anaerobic Fungi! These little critters live in our horses’ hindguts! And they are responsible for an estimated 30 to 40% of the fibre fermentation that occurs in there! So as well as thinking about how diet might affect our horse’s hindgut bacterial populations we also need to think about how it might affect their anaerobic […]
Dietary iron is thought by some to contribute to the incidence of laminitis in horses, with serum ferritin starting to be used as the measure of iron status. I (Nerida) don’t know if this is the case, but in reading human literature, it seems the relationship between serum ferritin and inflammation is a bit of […]
I personally love grazing muzzles. A muzzle means my horses can be out grazing 23+ hours per day. Without them they would be strip grazed (trashing my natives pastures in the process) or locked up for extended periods, which for gut and mental health is not ideal either. But they come with their challenges. They […]
