Building Your Horse’s Diet: The Easy Way
Horse Diets Made Simple: Build a Balanced Diet for Your Horse
Do you want to build a balanced diet for your horse the easy way in FeedXL? This post will walk you through the 4 simple steps to follow to make your life a little easier, and your feeding regime simpler!
Step 1: Enter ALL Forage
First enter ALL of your forage; including pasture, hay, haylage, chaff, and forage pellets or cubes. Now check the diet results. Ignore all of the vitamins and minerals for now (many of these will be low). Just look at Digestible Energy. If this is lower than you would like, move on to step 2. If you are happy with Digestible Energy go to step 3.
Step 2: Top Up Digestible Energy (If Needed)
To top up Digestible Energy you should go back to the Create Diet step and add your preferred high energy feeds. You can either use your own combination of ingredients (like high energy fibres, oils oilseeds, legumes, grains and co-products) or you can choose to use fortified/premixed/complete/commercial feeds. Keep checking the diet results until you arrive at the level of Digestible Energy you are happy with.
Step 3: Balance Vitamins and Minerals
Once you are happy with Digestible Energy levels, it is time to balance vitamins and minerals. To do this, simply click the big button that says ‘Find Supplements to Fix This Diet’. The supplement finder will search the entire supplements database for you and find products that will meet all of your horse’s requirements. Simply choose the one you like best!
Step 4: Meet Sodium Requirements
Add salt to meet any remaining sodium and chloride requirements. Ordinary table or plain salt is simply sodium chloride so it is perfect for meeting sodium requirements.
And that’s it! Keep following these steps each time you build a diet and it will keep the process logical and simple and give you the best chance of creating balanced diets that are also cost effective.
Do you have a question or comment? Do you need help with feeding?
We would love to welcome you to our FeedXL Horse Nutrition Facebook Group. Ask questions and have them answered by PhD and Masters qualified equine nutritionists and spend time with like-minded horse owners. It’s free!
Click here to join the FeedXL Horse Nutrition Facebook Group
