How Much Should You Feed Your Horse in a Day?
How much grain should I feed my horse in a 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.
Sometimes feeding more gives your horse less
When we exceed about 2.5 to 3% of a horse’s bodyweight in feed per day (so 12.5 to 15 kg for a 500 kg horse) the feed starts to move really quickly through the gut. Problem is, digestion, and particularly fiber digestion takes time. Fiber is digested via fermentation in the hindgut (more on how that works here) and fiber fermentation is a slow process. So feed needs to just have the time to hang about in the hindgut for a fair while (like 24 to 48 hours).
When we feed too much, feed gets pushed through the gut really quickly (essentially as it comes in the front end it gets shoved out the back) and it will only be partially digested… so you may be feeding a lot, but your horse doesn’t have full opportunity to digest it.
Think about it like this…
If you had a pool noodle, one of the ones with a hole in it, and were told to keep it perfectly flat/horizontal and then push a small bucket of marbles through the noodle one by one… you would poke them in one end (and assuming it’s flat so they don’t just roll out) they would only start coming out the other end once the entire noodle was full and as you pushed one in, one should come out… make sense?
Now suppose you were told to take 10 minutes to put all of the marbles through the noodle… you would need to take your time in poking one in so they didn’t come out too fast.
Now, if you had a bucket of marbles 3 times the size of the original bucket and told to push all of these through the pool noodle in 10 minutes you would have to do it three times as fast to get them all done in time. When you feed too much this is what happens, feed goes in one end and comes out the other too fast and only partially digested.
In a lot of cases, less is more!
Feeding less gives the feed time to sit around and move slowly through the gut, allowing it to be fully digested. Not much sense making expensive manure right?!
Take a look at your feed program and feed amounts and see if this might apply… often when we try to push for weight gain we get stuck in this trap of feeding too much and it doesn’t seem logical to feed less to get more weight gain.
Do you have a question or comment? Do you need help with feeding?
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