Frequently Asked Questions
What to feed a horse with loose manure?
Your horse’s manure is an insight to its gut health, so if your horse has loose, watery manure or diarrhea, that’s an indication that something is amiss. If your horse has loose manure, you should first speak with your veterinarian. Once any major problems have been ruled out, you can start to look at feeding and management changes that can help your horse have healthier manure. Sand or dirt accumulation can be one cause of diarrhea. If your horse is turned out or fed in a sandy or dirty area, you can follow our protocol on psyllium to help clear this from the gut. Click here to learn more about psyllium husks. Hindgut acidosis, often caused by feeding unprocessed grains like wheat, corn, or barley to horses, can be another cause of soft manure. Always feed cooked grains in small portions (no more than 1kg/meal for a 500 kg horse) and only feed grains when necessary. Another cause of loose manure is too little fiber in the diet. When there’s not enough effective (indigestible) fibre in the diet, there’s not enough fiber to hold onto water in the hindgut, which leads to soft manure. FeedXL can help you calculate how much fiber your horse is getting and how much it needs.
How much does it cost to feed a horse?
The cost of feeding a horse depends on many different factors. Your horse’s individual needs, such as age, activity level, health conditions, and breed all need to be taken into consideration when feeding your horse and can impact the overall cost. Access to grazing and pasture will affect your bottom line as this will determine how much additional forage you might have to purchase for your horse. Location and time of year can also make a difference, as these can greatly change the cost and need for forage, as well as supplements such as electrolytes.
The best way to understand the cost of feeding your horse is to utilize FeedXL. FeedXL makes calculating and comparing feed costs simple by allowing you to quickly and easily input costs for all of the feeds, forages, and supplements you are using and calculating the daily, monthly, and yearly costs. This lets you try multiple combinations of feeds and supplements to find one that works beautifully for your horse without breaking your budget. FeedXL can also help you save money by balancing your horse’s diet and eliminating any unnecessary supplements. Find out how much it costs to feed your horse with FeedXL and see how much you could save.
How much grain should I feed my horse per day?
Grains should be fed at a minimum, as high-grain diets can have many complications, including colic, hindgut problems, stomach ulcers, excitable or “hot” behavior, and more. Instead, look to balance your horse’s diet with quality forage and healthy sources of protein and fat. Ration balancers or concentrates are another good option. FeedXL can help you build your horse’s diet without feeding excessive amounts of grain.
When feeding grain to horses, it’s best to feed in small, frequent meals. It’s recommended to feed no more than 1kg/meal for a 500kg horse (or 2lbs/meal for a 1000lb horse). Because horses have only one stomach and their digestive system was designed to be grazing constantly, feeding in these small, regular intervals serves to mimic this and to avoid an empty stomach full of acid, which can cause ulcers.
How should I feed a horse with gastric ulcers?
If your horse has gastric ulcers, there are three main feeding management practices that may help reduce the incidence of squamous ulcers.
Don’t exercise horses on an empty stomach – providing 1-2kg of lucerne/alfalfa hay prior to exercise helps to prevent the acidic contents from the lower region of the stomach from splashing up onto the unprotected upper region where it can cause ulcers. The saliva created while chewing the hay also helps to buffer the acidity in the stomach. Lucerne hay has the extra benefit due to the buffering effect from the high content of protein and calcium, but other hay will also work for this.
Provide constant access to pasture or hay – Allowing the horse to feed continuously during the day and night will help to reduce the likelihood of gastric ulcers developing. Horses need to be consuming at least 1.5-2% of their body weight in forage per day.
Reduce starch in feeds – Aim for no more than 1 gram of starch per kilogram of body weight per meal should be fed, with a maximum of 2 grams of starch per kilogram of body weight per day.
FeedXL can help quickly and easily calculate your horse’s forage and starch intake and analyze your horse’s overall diet.
How should I feed a horse with laminitis?
Horses with laminitis, or founder, can be successfully managed with a few key feeding and management guidelines.
- A low non-structural carbohydrate (NSC) forage should make up most of the diet. Feed hays that are typically low in NSC, such as Rhodes grass hay or stemmy/weathered lucerne/alfalfa hay, or soak hay to reduce NSC levels. Use tools like a grazing muzzle to reduce your horse’s pasture intake.
- Never feed grain, grain by-products, or molasses. FeedXL will help you select suitable feeds that do not contain these ingredients by highlighting all unsuitable feeds for laminitic horses.
- Make sure the diet is balanced for vitamins and minerals. Meeting the laminitic horse’s requirements for protein, amino acids, vitamins, and minerals will help them recover from any previous bouts of laminitis and help keep them in good overall health with a strong immune system.
- Fine tune the diet to account for any necessary weight changes that might need to be made.
- Assist with hoof repair. If your horse’s hooves are taking a long time to respond to a well-balanced, low NSC diet, you may find the addition of biotin is helpful.
FeedXL is a great tool for managing laminitic horses as it can calculate NSC, find suitable feeds, balance vitamin and mineral ratios, assist with weight management, and more. Read more about feeding the laminitic horse here: https://feedxl.com/12-feeding-the-laminitic-horse/
What are the best grain-free feeds for my horse?
Did you know that many “grain-free” feeds actually contain grain by-products that are derived 100% from grain and still have many of the same characteristics (same proteins, still high in starch, etc) as the whole grains themselves? Calling feeds with wheat mids or rice brain “grain-free” would be like saying soybean meal is “soybean free” just because it no longer contains whole soybeans.
FeedXL can help you choose the best grain-free feed for your horse because when you click “grain intolerance” in FeedXL, you will be able to see which feeds and supplements are truly grain free and which are not.
Learn more about grain-free horse feeds here: https://feedxl.com/grain-free-horse-feed-what-does-it-actually-mean/
What are the best feeds for weight gain?
The best things to feed your horse to help it gain weight are free choice forage, lucerne/alfalfa hay, and high-energy feeds.
The best place to start is with free choice forage. You can do this by either giving your horse 24-hour access to pasture or by feeind just enough hay that a little is leftover each day.
Lucerne hay (also known as alfalfa) is a high-calorie forage and will also provide your horse with good quality protein to facilitate muscle development. This is particularly important if your horse suffered muscle wastage during the weight loss.
If the desired weight gain is not achieved after the steps above, your horse still requires additional calories over and above that provided by the pastuer and hay being fed. Consider adding high-calorie feeds such as:
- High-energy fibres – like soybean hulls, copra meal, and sugarbeet pulp. These are similar to pasture and hay, however the fiber they contain is more readily digested by the bacteria in the hindgut meaning they contain a similar amount of calories as cereal grains. These feeds are particularly well-suited to horses that become excitable when fed grain-based feeds.
- Cereal grains and grain-based feeds – While these are well known to be useful in the diet of horses that need to gain weight, some are more suitable than others from a weight-gain perspective. Select grains or grain-based feeds that have been cooked (such as via extrusion process) to ensure the starch is properly digested in the small intestine.
- High fat feeds or oils – These are very calorie-dense, which makes them helpful for horses that won’t eat large meals. The second advantage is that they don’t tend to make a horse as hyperactive on the same quantity of energy supplied in the form of cereal grains and do not carry the risk of digestive upsets that accompany cereal grains. Look for feeds that include rice brain, copra meal, and any of the full-fat oilseeds such as soybean and sunflower.
The correct balance of these feeds will depend on the individual needs of your horse. (Hint: this is where FeedXL comes in!)
