Forage isn’t just an optional extra in your horse’s diet—it is the foundation. At FeedXL, the number one reason a diet fails to meet a horse’s nutritional needs is a lack of sufficient forage. Time and time again, when we analyse diets that are causing issues—whether it’s poor condition, behavioural problems, or digestive upset—the root cause is not enough hay, pasture, or other roughage. So why is forage so critical?
To answer that, we need to go back—way back—to the horse’s origins.
Horses: Built to Forage
Horses evolved as grazing foragers. In their natural environment, wild horses would roam up to 30 kilometres each day in search of a continuous supply of grass and shrubs. This slow, near-constant foraging served two key purposes:
It kept their digestive system working as it was designed to—constantly processing small amounts of high-fibre food, slowly and steadily.
It matched their energy needs with a low-calorie, high-fibre intake spread across the entire day.
This evolutionary background means the horse’s entire digestive tract—from their sensitive stomach to the complex microbial fermentation in their hindgut—is built around processing large amounts of fibrous forage.
Fast forward to today, and we see a dramatically different picture. Domestic horses are typically confined to smaller paddocks, or stabled, fed concentrated meals twice a day, and often rely heavily on high-energy feeds or supplements. While modern feeding practices allow us to meet specific energy and nutrient demands (especially in performance horses), they often overlook one critical fact: forage must come first.
Why Forage First?
At FeedXL, we always start a diet with forage. Why? Because when you get the forage right, you’re solving 80–90% of the nutritional equation. Forage provides:
The bulk of a horse’s energy (calories), especially for those in light to moderate work.
The essential fibre that keeps the digestive system moving and prevents issues like colic, gastric ulcers, and behavioural changes.
A wide array of nutrients, from protein and minerals to vitamins and water (particularly in lush pasture).
Satiety and psychological wellbeing, mimicking the horse’s natural grazing patterns and reducing boredom or anxiety.
Even the most perfectly balanced supplement can’t replace the need for good-quality forage.
Common Problems Caused by Inadequate Forage
When horses aren’t getting enough forage—or the quality is too poor—issues can snowball quickly. Some of the most common signs we see include:
Weight loss or failure to maintain condition despite high-grain diets.
Colic and other digestive upsets caused by lack of gut motility or microbial imbalance.
Gastric ulcers, particularly in stabled or performance horses.
Stereotypic behaviours like cribbing, weaving, or excessive chewing.
Nutritional imbalances, especially if the base diet is made up of hard feeds rather than fibre-rich forages.
In FeedXL, these problems often show up clearly in the analysis—low fibre intake, poor calcium to phosphorus ratios, insufficient vitamin and mineral coverage. Almost always, the first recommendation is to go back to the basics and boost forage levels.
FeedXL’s Approach: Forage First, Then Balance
When you create a diet in FeedXL, you’ll notice the very first step is selecting and inputting your horse’s forage—hay, pasture, haylage, or chaff. Everything else is built on top of that. Why? Because:
Forage sets the foundation of the diet, supplying most of the horse’s daily energy, fibre, and bulk nutrients.
Accurate assessment of forage quality and quantity allows us to see what’s missing and where a supplement or concentrate might be genuinely needed.
It avoids over-supplementation, which can be harmful or just plain expensive.
This forage-first method ensures we’re not using expensive feeds to solve a problem that could be fixed with a simple increase in hay or adjustment to grazing time.
Forage is the foundation of your horse’s diet.
How Much Forage Is Enough?
As a general rule, horses should be fed at least 1.5% to 2.0% of their bodyweight in forage per day. For a 500 kg horse, that’s a minimum of 7.5 kg of hay or pasture dry matter daily—and often more. For horses in light work or on a forage-only diet, the figure may be closer to 10–12 kg/day depending on quality.
When entering a diet into FeedXL, pay close attention to your forage weight estimates. If you’re unsure how much your horse is actually eating—whether pasture intake or hay—take the time to weigh hay nets, monitor grazing, or use a pasture intake calculator to get it right.
In Summary: The Forage Rule
At FeedXL, our golden rule is simple: Don’t build a diet—build a forage base. Only once the horse’s fibre and forage needs are met do we look at layering in concentrates, grains, or supplements – only if they are required. This approach respects the horse’s natural biology, supports gut health, and leads to far better long-term outcomes—physically, mentally, and nutritionally.
If your horse’s diet isn’t quite working, start by asking: Is there enough forage?
Chances are, the answer lies in the forage, not the feed. Need help figuring out your horse’s forage intake or if your hay is providing enough nutrition?
Log in to your FeedXL account and let us do the hard work for you—starting with forage, as the base.
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Equine Gastric Ulcers: Feeding management strategies to reduce the risk for your horse
Equine gastric ulcer syndrome (EGUS) is a major equine health problem worldwide. Multiple studies have reported an incidence of ulcers in performance horses in excess of 90% of horses training.
Ulcers negatively – and sometimes severely – affect a horse’s ability to perform. They cause pain and discomfort. They may reduce a horse’s appetite which in turn limits its capacity to maintain bodyweight. Gastric ulcers can also possibly lead to the development of vices including windsucking and crib biting.
While gastric ulcers in horses have long been recognised as a major health concern, there is an evident lack of understanding in the horse community about what causes them and how they can be prevented.
Continue reading to find out a little bit more about what gastric ulcers are, how your horse’s stomach functions, and a few little things you can do that will dramatically reduce the risk of your horse’s stomach developing this painful condition.
What are Gastric Ulcers?
Gastric ulcers are lesions that are found in the stomach of horses. The horse’s stomach is made up of 2 major regions, the upper ‘squamous’ area and the lower ‘glandular’ area. Gastric ulcers are categorised by their location in the stomach being either squamous gastric ulcers or glandular gastric ulcers – these are two distinct diseases with different risk factors.
Why do gastric ulcers occur in the squamous or upper section of the stomach?
The horse evolved as a grazing animal and, when left to their own devices, will eat for 17 hours or more per day. This means they are constantly chewing and salivating, and their stomach is always full. Because of this pattern of eating, their stomach never developed an on-off-switch for gastric acid production. The equine stomach secretes gastric acid 24-hours a day, regardless of whether they are actually eating or not.
When you think about this from the perspective of our modern-day horses, it is not an ideal situation. Many horses are now stabled with limited access to free choice forage, or they work, compete, and travel, leaving them in situations where they go for extended periods of time without feed.
When a horse eats it produces saliva and one of saliva’s roles is to buffer the gastric acid in the stomach. So, when they aren’t eating, they aren’t salivating. BUT they are still secreting gastric acid. This results in a pool of unbuffered (and therefore very acidic) gastric fluid accumulating in the lower section of the horse’s now empty stomach.
The lower part of the horse’s stomach was smart enough to protect itself from gastric acids, and, provided it is well-nourished, is able to produce enough sticky mucous to protect itself from its own acid secretions. BUT, the upper part of the stomach doesn’t have this same protection. In a grazing horse, the stomach is always full, so the top of the stomach was never exposed to gastric acid simply because the forage a horse ate stopped the acid from ever splashing up there. However, in modern-day, meal-fed horses, the stomach is often empty and the upper section of the stomach is left totally exposed to the highly acidic fluids that are allowed to accumulate in empty stomachs.
When a horse with an empty stomach trots, canters, gallops, or even simply tenses up its abdominal muscles the gastric fluids are splashed or squeezed up onto the unprotected upper section of the stomach. Simply put, the acid starts to burn holes in the stomach wall lining. If you allow this to occur repeatedly, the horse will eventually develop ulcers. This can happen in just a matter of days.
What major factors influence the risk of squamous gastric ulcers?
The following situations have been identified as factors that can influence the risk of squamous gastric ulcers:
Low forage intake – Not having free access to forage and not being provided with additional forage increases the risk of squamous ulcers (Gehlen et al., 2019).
Feeding Frequency – Feed deprivation such as might occur during transport and long periods between meals lowers the pH in the equine stomach and allows the stomach to empty, both of which will increase the risk of gastric ulceration (Murray, 1994).
High starch diet – Horses receiving large proportions of grain (or starch) in their diets are at increased risk of squamous ulcers (Gehlen et al., 2019). One study shows that a reduction in dietary starch resulted in a decrease in squamous ulcers (Böhm et al., 2018).
Exercise – As a horse exercises, the pressure inside the stomach increases, which forces the highly acidic gastric contents from the glandular area up into the unprotected squamous area (Lorenzo-Figueras et al. 2002). Horses in training are known to have a higher incidence and also more severe gastric ulceration than horses not in work. Similarly, the intensity of long-duration exercise also increases the risk and severity of squamous ulcers in both Thoroughbred racehorses (Murray et al., 1996) and endurance horses (Tamzali et al., 2011).
How can feeding management reduce the risk of squamous ulcers?
Some feeding management practices that may help reduce the incidence of squamous ulcers are:
Don’t exercise horses on an empty stomach – Providing 1-2kg of lucerne hay prior to exercise helps to prevent acidic contents from the lower region of the stomach from splashing up onto the upper region where it can cause squamous ulcers. The saliva created while chewing the hay also helps to buffer the acidity in the stomach. Using lucerne hay has the extra positive benefit with the buffering effect from the high content of protein and calcium in lucerne itself. If you don’t have or feed alfalfa (lucerne) hay, then your horse’s regular hay will also work well.
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 squamous gastric ulcers developing. However, free access to forage does not always guarantee your horse is eating enough forage. For example, overgrazed pasture (<2.5cm or 1 inch in height) does not provide adequate amounts of fibre to protect the stomach. Likewise, providing free access to a round bale does not guarantee your horse is consuming adequate amounts. This may be due palatability of the hay or an already depressed appetite from gastric ulcers. Horses need to be consuming at least 1.5 to 2% bodyweight in forage per day. Providing supplementary hay to horses on pasture and feeding a set amount of hay per day is the easiest way to ensure adequate intake.The importance of constant access to adequate amounts of forage ensures good amounts of saliva being produced by chewing, which has a buffering effect on stomach acid, and fibre’s ability to create a ‘ball’ in the stomach to limit acid splashing. If horses need to go periods without access to forage or having a feed, this should be limited to no more than 5 hours.If you are travelling long distances with your horse, and it is safe to do so, providing hay in a hay net during travel will provide the horse with an opportunity to continue eating during transport. If this is not possible, take regular breaks and provide small forage meals during the trip.
Reduce starch in feeds – Reducing the amount of starch in the diet by reducing or removing grain-based concentrate from feeds is recommended. Due to the different starch content of various grains and feeds, maximum intakes are based off starch intake. No more than 1 gram of starch per kilogram of bodyweight per meal should be fed and maximum of 2 grams of starch per kilogram of bodyweight per day. For example, barley contains on average 60% starch. For a 500kg horse, the maximum amount of barley which should be fed is 800g per meal or 1.6kg per day split over two meals, which is the equivalent of 480g of starch per meal.For horses requiring a high energy diet, grain-based feeds can be substituted with a combination of high energy fibre such as alfalfa pellets, chaff or alike, beet pulp, soybean hulls, and high fat ingredients such as oilseeds and oils.
What about Glandular ulcers?
The following situations have been identified as potential risk factors for glandular ulcers:
Exercising more than 4 days per week – Exercising 5 or more days per week was a key risk factor for glandular ulcers in Thoroughbred racehorses (Sykes et al., 2019). Another study showed that increased days in work (up to 6 days per week) and actively competing are risk factors in Warmblood showjumpers (Pedersen et al., 2018). The prevalence of glandular ulcers doubles in in endurance horses during competition season (Tamzali et al., 2011). It’s not clear why exercising for 5 or more days per weeks increases the risk of glandular ulcers, although it is hypothesised that during exercise there is a decrease in blood flow to the stomach (Rendle et al., 2018).
Stress – an increased prevalence has been observed in domesticated horses compared with feral horses (Ward et al., 2015). This suggests that intensive management plays a role in the increased risk of glandular ulcers in horses. Stabling or confinement, lack of contact with other horses (individually paddocked), and having multiple handlers or riders can all increase risk.
How can feeding management reducing the risk of glandular ulcers?
Diet does not appear to a key risk factor but does form part of the management of horses at risk of glandular ulcers. One study looking at the effect of diet composition on glandular ulcers does support this (Julliand et al., 2023). Some of the key findings of this study were:
Horses allocated to the non-ulcerated group had a higher daily intake of simple sugars in their pre-Day 0 diet (same diet for 4 weeks prior to Day 0) than horses in the ulcerated group.
Horses which remained on the full rate of grain concentrate did not show improvement in glandular scores over the 42-day study period. In fact, the number of horses with glandular ulcers greater than 2, increased over the study period.
Five out of six horses that had half their grain concentrate substituted with alfalfa pellets showed improvement in their glandular scores from greater than 2 to scores of 0-1.
Some feeding management practices that may help reduce the incidence and severity of glandular ulcers are:
Reduce starch in feeds – This is beneficial for reducing the fermentation products in the gastric contents which, when combined with a very acidic environment, cause damage to the glandular mucosa. For horses requiring a high energy diet, this can be achieved by substituting grain-based feeds with a combination of high energy fibre feeds like beet pulp, soybean hulls, etc and high fat ingredients such as oilseeds and oils.
Include alfalfa (lucerne) in feeds – Inclusion of alfalfa (lucerne) pellets, chaff or alike with grain concentrate can provide a buffering effect within the stomach to maintain a higher pH, reducing harmful effects of short chain fatty acids on gastric mucosa.
In the above-mentioned study, horses receiving approximately 5-6kg of grain concentrate per day transitioned to a diet of approximately 3kg grain concentrate and 2.8kg of alfalfa pellets per day. As a guide, inclusion of 2-2.5kg of alfalfa (lucerne) pellets or alike to feeds may be beneficial.
If your horse already has gastric ulcers, you must treat them
While one study has shown that feeding lucerne hay can reduce the severity of ulcers already present in horses and long periods of pasture turnout will sometimes allow a horse to resolve gastric ulcer issues, if your horse already has gastric ulcers, treating them with veterinary prescribed medication is important for a quick resolution. Talk to your veterinarian about the best treatment regime for your horse.
Finally …
Gastric ulcers are a serious and common health problem in horses that will affect their overall wellbeing and performance. While we still don’t have a full understanding of how and why they occur with such a high incidence, using the feeding and management strategies outlined above will help to reduce your horse’s risk of developing gastric ulceration.
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!
Is your horse on a dry lot, sandy soil or on a paddock with virtually bare dirt?
These horses are likely to consume more sand and dirt than other horses, putting them at a higher risk of sand colic. If your horse is in drought conditions, kept in a dry lot, or on very sandy ground, the accumulated dirt and sand can cause irritation and pain. You may even see signs of bloating, diarrhea, or colic.
How to use psyllium husks
In order to help get all of that accumulated dirt and sand out of your horse’s gut, feed 50 grams per 100kg of bodyweight (or 2 ox per 250 lb) for 4 days in every month. Add it to a feed your horse really likes, and just damp it down ever so slightly to make it stick to the feed. Pro tip: don’t thoroughly wet it! It will become a gooey mess that most horses don’t like to eat.
Simply put it in your diary, calendar, or phone to have a reminder to feed psyllium to your horse once a month and your horse’s gut (and your vet) will thank you!
Get more with FeedXL
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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!
While it’s maybe not the most refined subject, your horse’s manure can tell you a lot. How watery, soft, formed, unformed or hard it is can give you some insight into what is going on inside that gut!
One question that we get a lot is asking what to feed your horse if they have 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.
Use our quick check guide to assess your horse’s manure and see if it is telling you all is well… Or if there is something not right within the gut. Note that the color of the manure will change as what the horse is eating changes. So don’t be too distracted by colour, look instead at the form.
Score 1 – watery diarrhea
Is this normal?
Something is seriously wrong in your horse’s gut. You need to contact your veterinarian immediately!
What causes this?
There are many causes of watery diarrhea. Please work with your veterinarian to achieve a sound diagnosis
How to fix it:
Follow directions from your veterinarian.
Score 2 – diarrhea
Is this normal?
Not normal! Like watery diarrhea, there are many causes of diarrhea in horses. Please work with your veterinarian to isolate the cause.
What causes this?
You should work with your veterinarian to diagnose the cause of your horse’s diarrhea.
How to fix it:
Follow directions from your veterinarian.
Sand and dirt accumulation in the gut is a common cause of diarrhea in horses. If this is the diagnosis, you can follow our protocol for using psyllium to clear this from the gut. Click here to learn more about our psyllium husk protocol.
Score 3 – soft, unformed
Is this normal?
This is a not a normal consistency for horse manure and indicates that something is not right in the gut, particularly the hindgut. The ratio of water to fibre is too high in the manure.
What causes this?
There are many possible causes, including:
hindgut acidosis. If your horse is being fed unprocessed grains like wheat, corn (maize) or barley, large amounts of starch will be fermented in the hindgut. Or your horse may have large amounts of fructan entering the hindgut from ryegrass or cereal (oat, wheat barley) forages. The fermenting starch and/or fructan upsets microbial balance and large amounts of acid accumulate. The acid damages the gut wall, good, fibre fermenting bacteria die and overall health is compromised. Soft manure is a common symptom. You may or may not see whole grains still present in the manure.
sand or dirt accumulation. Sand/dirt irritates the gut wall. A common symptom is soft manure.
too little fibre. When there is not enough effective (indigestible) fibre in the diet, there is not enough fibre to hold onto water in the hindgut, leading to soft manure.
high moisture, low fibre pasture. Lush, young pasture is high in water and low in fibre. Horses will often have soft manure on these pastures due to the high water and low fibre intake. Horses may also eat bark, chew on fence posts or other objects to try and increase fibre intake.
How to fix it:
The solution here depends on the cause.
hindgut acidosis, if grains must be fed, use only cooked grains. Feed grains in small meals (no more than 1 kg/meal for a 500 kg horse; 2lb/meal for an 1100 lb horse). Only use grains when absolutely necessary!
sand or dirt, use psyllium husk to remove from the hindgut. Follow our protocol here.
too little fibre, reassess your horse’s diet and make sure you are feeding a minimum of 1.5% of BW per day in quality forage, preferably as long stem hay, haylage or pasture. For optimum gut health, aim for 2% BW in forage per day.
high moisture, low fibre pasture. If your horse is grazing lush pasture, provide free choice access to a high fibre hay to allow your horse to choose how much fibre to consume.
Score 4 – soft, formed
Is this normal?
This is a normal consistency for manure and indicates your horse is well hydrated and consuming sufficient fibre in the diet. This soft, formed consistency is normally seen when some green pasture is available daily.
Score 5 – firm, formed
Is this normal?
This is a normal consistency for manure and indicates your horse is well hydrated and consuming sufficient fibre in the diet. This firm, formed consistency is common when horses have access to hay or dry pasture.
Score 6 – hard, dry
Is this normal?
This is a not a normal consistency for horse manure and indicates that this horses water intake is low and dehydration may be present. Or it indicates that indigestible fibre intake is too high.
What causes this?
Reduced water intake may be due to:
water that is too cold
dirty, unpalatable water
unfamiliar water (common when traveling)
electrolyte (particularly sodium) deficiency. When sodium levels drop in the blood horses reduce water intake.
water placed in an area the horse does not feel safe drinking (e.g. at the back of a pasture or stall)
stress/anxiety, common when competing or travelling
excessive indigestible fibre intake may be seen when horses have access to straw or other similar mature forage like old, dry pasture as their major forage source.
How to fix it:
Increase water intake and reduce indigestible fibre intake.
Ways to do this are:
use water warmers
keep water so clean that you would drink it yourself
take familiar water or a familiar flavour with you when traveling
add more salt to your horses feed (use FeedXL to work out a sensible amount)
place water in a place your horse feels safe
keep your horse with a buddy who drinks well to reduce stress/anxiety
feed limited amounts of straw or similar forage (limiting to 1% of bodyweight where hard manure is an issue). Use more digestible forage to provide the remainder of your horses required forage intake.
Ready to give your horse the best? Try FeedXL today!
Get EVEN MORE practical and personalised feeding guidance when you sign up to FEEDXL.
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!
The gut health of our equines plays a significant role in determining how healthy or unhealthy our horses will be. The equine digestive tract is a large and relatively complex system. Your horse’s health depends on how well you look after this digestive system and importantly, how well the microbial population within it remains “balanced”.
We are really only just beginning to understand how important your horse’s digestive health is to his overall health and wellbeing. But we know that it is so important! So, if there is one area of equine nutrition you should devote your time to in order to improve your horse’s overall health, it is this one!
The following article gives you an introduction to equine gut health. It looks at the structure and function of the gut and the digestive process, how the way we feed horses impacts on the equine digestive system and it’s microbial population, and briefly covers some of the diseases and disorders that can occur when we feed in a way that doesn’t support digestive health.
Understanding How Horses Digest Food
Your horse’s digestive system is comprised primarily of the stomach and small intestine, cecum and colon. For a detailed description of the horse’s gastrointestinal tract, please see https://feedxl.com/31-the-gastrointestinal-tract/
The digestive tract’s most important function is breaking down food. The equine digestive process occurs in every section of the horse’s gut. The digestive process is simply “big things being broken into small things”. Once nutrients are broken down into small enough parts, they can be absorbed into the bloodstream.
The digestion and absorption occurs the entire length of the animal’s digestive system. But the way it happens in each section is different.
The Stomach
The stomach’s primary role is to hold food and then pass it slowly to the small intestine where it will be at least partially digested. The start of the digestive process does, however, occur in the stomach.
In the stomach, the horse uses hydrochloric acid and digestive enzymes to begin the protein digestion process. Stomach acid is required to activate the digestive enzymes. There is also a resident population of bacteria here and some microbial fermentation does take place. As far as we know, the stomach does not absorb nutrients.
The Small Intestine
The small intestine digests and absorbs fats, protein, sugars, and starch. Digestive enzymes (which are like small scissors whose job is to cut up food) as well as bile from the liver cut these nutrients into small pieces so that they can be absorbed into the bloodstream.
The rate of passage through the small intestine is quite fast. It speeds up if you feed your horse large meals, as the stomach then loses its ability to slowly release food to the small intestine. When rate of passage is too fast, nutrient absorption is reduced as the small intestine doesn’t have time to do its work.
The Hindgut
The cecum and colon (made up of the dorsal colon and ventral colon) are collectively known as the hindgut. The hindgut is the centre for structural carbohydrate digestion. Structural carbohydrates, also known commonly as fibre, are digested in a process of microbial digestion. The hindgut is, in essence, a large fermentation vat. Your horse’s resident population of “good” fibre fermenting bacteria ferment the fibre from your horse’s feed to produce volatile fatty acids (VFAs). Your horse then absorbs these VFAs and uses them as a source of energy (calories).
The good bacteria in your horse’s cecum and colon play many roles in maintaining equine health. Plus the hindgut is also responsible for water and electrolyte absorption, which needs to be working properly to allow your horse to form normal fecal balls. For more detailed information on feeding for hindgut health please see https://feedxl.com/15-keeping-the-hindgut-healthy/
How is this related to equine health?
Well, in EVERY way! If you mess up your horse’s digestion, you really mess up your horse’s health. Colic in horses is the number one killer of horses worldwide. More than 90% of horses in some disciplines have gastric ulcers. Our studies found that almost 30% of horses in race training had hindgut acidosis, which is a severe imbalance of the bacteria in the cecum and colon.
As riders we also all struggle at some level with our horse’s behaviour. Science is starting to show us how shifts in gut microbial populations is tightly linked to behaviour.
All of these conditions affect the health and wellbeing of your horse plus they will cause problems like loss of appetite, weight loss, and poor hoof quality.
It is so important that we understand that the way we feed horses has a huge impact on the risk of these diseases and disorders. The most effective way of reducing the risk is by understanding the horse digestive process, and by feeding in a way that supports digestive health, rather than destroying it.
How does what and how we feed affect gut health?
When we feed our horses we need to take into account what the horse’s nutrient requirements are so that the feeds provided actually give your horse what he needs (and this is what FeedXL is designed to help you with!).
BUT, equally important is to consider how what you choose to feed will affect your horse’s digestive process, microbial population, and overall gut health.
Here are some of the ways what and how you feed can affect your horse’s digestive health:
Long periods of time without feed – if you are feeding your horse in meals, and there are long periods (more than four hours) where he goes without something to eat, his stomach will empty and strong hydrochloric acid will start to accumulate. With an empty, highly acidic stomach, your horse is at increased risk of gastric ulcers (see https://feedxl.com/8-avoiding-gastric-ulcers/).
Too much starch – starch is the main component of cereal grains. Research has shown that if you feed too much starch per meal or per day, the risk of gastric ulcers is increased (see https://feedxl.com/starch-ulcers-whats-the-deal/).
Indigestible starch – if you feed cereal grains that have not been cooked prior to feeding, the starch is very difficult for a horse to digest in the small intestine. This means a majority of the starch from these ingredients will end up in the hindgut and can cause hindgut acidosis (see https://feedxl.com/18-feed-cooked-grains/).
Not enough fibre – If you are not feeding your horse enough fibre, the good, fibre fermenting bacteria in the hindgut won’t have enough food to maintain a healthy microbial population. With fewer fibre fermenting bacteria, your horse can suffer from vitamin deficiency, loss of appetite, weight loss, diarrhea, poor hoof quality (increasing his need for specialized hoof care) and changes in behaviour. Low fibre diets are also a major cause of colic in horses. Low fibre intake also reduces saliva production which can increase the risk of gastric ulcers (see https://feedxl.com/38-the-importance-of-fibre/).
Top Five Tips for Feeding to Promote Digestive Health
Feeding in a way that properly supports the equine digestive process is not difficult. Here are the top five things you can do to keep your horse’s gut as healthy as possible:
Tip 1 – Feed Lots of Long Stem Fibre!
Long stem fibre, in the form of forages like pasture, hay, or haylage will encourage a lot of chewing and salivation, which will support the health of your horse’s stomach (reducing the risk of gastric ulcers). As long stem forages take longer for your horse to eat, they maximize the amount of time your horse will spend eating. This again reduces the risk of gastric ulcers.
The fibre will also feed the microbial populations of good bacteria in the hindgut to keep them healthy, and it will keep the hindgut full, reducing the risk of colic in horses.
Tip 2 – Feed in Small Meals
The rate of passage through a horse’s digestive tract is naturally quite fast. BUT, horses are trickle feeders. So they eat small amounts of feed, consistently over a 24-hour period. This means even though feed is moving relatively quickly, there are only small amounts of it passing through the small intestine at any one time to give it the best chance of digestion and absorption.
However, when we feed horses in large meals, twice per day, we suddenly create a situation where large amounts of feed are moving quickly through the small intestine. When this happens, less is digested and absorbed. So your horse becomes inefficient and needs to be fed larger amounts of feed to maintain weight. AND with components of the feed like starch ending up in the hindgut, gut health and microbial populations are also compromised.
The solution here is to feed in many small meals throughout a day. As a rule of thumb, horses should have constant access to forage. Any “hard feed”, particularly high starch feeds (>15% starch), should be fed at no more than 200 grams per 100 kg BW (0.2 lb per 100 lb bodyweight) per meal. Your horse’s feed label may specify starch content. If you are unsure you should contact the manufacturer.
Tip 3 – Minimise Starch
Feeding too much starch puts your horse at increased risk of gastric ulcers and hindgut acidosis. Plus high starch diets tend to be lower in fiber and may compromise the health and balance of bacteria in the hindgut.
My rule is if you can achieve calorie intake with fibre alone (i.e. hay, haylage, chaff, pasture and high energy fibres like beet pulp) you should do so. Grains should only be used where the horse can’t physically eat enough fibre to meet calorie requirements (as is sometimes the case if your horse is a broodmare or performance horse). Or where the horse has a large requirement for muscle glycogen to compete (which often only applies to racing thoroughbreds).
But remember, forage only will NOT be a complete diet. Always use FeedXL to check which nutrients (vitamins and minerals) are missing and top these up with a supplement or balancer pellet.
Tip 4 – Feed Cooked Starch
If you are going to feed starch from cereal grains like wheat, barley, corn (maize), and rice or any by-product ingredients like rice bran and wheat midds (bran/pollard) that come from these grains, you should make sure the grains are well cooked prior to feeding. Grains and grain-based feeds that are extruded, micronized, steam flaked, or boiled will contain starch that can actually be digested in your horse’s small intestine.
Feeding cooked grains will maintain your horse’s digestive health by keeping starch out of the hindgut, preventing hindgut acidosis, and supporting the good fibre fermenting microbial population.
Tip 5 – Watch Water Intake
Water is an essential component of the equine digestive process. When your horse doesn’t drink enough, the contents of your horse’s gut can become too high in dry matter and they’re at risk of deveoping impaction colic.
Dirty, foul tasting water, cold water, hot water, water in a place where the horse doesn’t feel safe (e.g. the back of a stable) or unfamiliar water can all discourage your horse from drinking enough water.
To ensure your horse is drinking enough, keep the water clean (if you wouldn’t drink it yourself then it’s not clean enough), keep the temperature moderate where possible and be prepared when you are traveling to keep familiar sources of water with you or have a familiar way of flavouring the water to keep your horse drinking when he is not at home. If you are concerned your horse is not drinking enough water, add some salt to his feed and this will increase water intake.
Healthy Gut, Healthy Horse
When feeding your horse, you must always consider the impact of what you are feeding and your feeding management on the digestive process. Such a huge part of equine health is determined by the health of the gut!
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Stress – did you know how it affects your horse’s gut health, and that it can do so in pretty dramatic ways?
Professor John Pluske presented a talk at an animal nutrition conference looking at the effect of stress on weanling pigs and, believe it or not, we can learn a lot about the effects of stress on a horse’s gut from this. Check out a sneak peek of his slides below.
Pigs have a very similar gastrointestinal tract to horses, so vets can look at pig data when trying to solve problems where there is not enough horse-specific information to base their research on.
Professor Pluske showed that stress negatively affects a weanling pig’s gut by damaging its ability to repair itself as well as its effectiveness as a barrier between the gut and the body. Essentially, when a piglet is stressed the gut gets damaged, and starts to leak as it can’t fix itself.
How is this relevant to horses? With the similarities in gut physiology, it seems only logical that we see similar effects of stress on gut health in horses. This means that we need to be really aware of how we feed and how that impacts gut health, especially during times of stress.
Three things that are really important:
Feeding a fully balanced diet that meets all nutrient requirements so the gut has the nutrients it needs to remain intact
Feeding lots of forage – Forage is high in fibre and supports the population of good bacteria in your horse’s gut. These bacteria are very involved in maintaining overall gut health.
Feeding high quality protein – The gut has huge requirements for specific essential amino acids. These amino acids are used by the gut to repair itself and to produce protective mucus. TO provide optimum levels of these amino acids, you need to feed ingredients with high quality protein. Protein quality is so important for many reasons. To learn more, read our post our post ‘Understanding Protein Quality’.
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Anaerobic fungi live in our horses’ hindguts and they are responsible for an estimated 30-40% of the fibre fermentation that occurs there. 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 fungal populations.
The problem is that we know so little about them that we don’t know what is good and not so good for the anaerobic fungi in our horses. Information on what we know so far was presented at EEHNC by Dr. Joan Edwards. Dr. Edwards described the fungi as having potent fibre-degrading enzymes, giving them an important role in a horse’s digestion process.
These anaerobic fungi can survive outside of the horse’s gut, too, and are seemingly resistant to both oxygen (which kills many anaerobic bacteria that live in the hindgut) and desiccation (drying out).
One theory is that by looking after the bacteria in a horse’s hindgut, you will also look after the fungi. So keep your horse’s diet high in low fructan forage, keep grain and starch out of the hindgut by feeding only well-cooked grains where necessary and in as small meals as possible, and by making changes to the diet slowly.
Interested in learning more about the ongoing research in the exciting area of anaerobic fungi in horses? Read more below.
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!
Question: Does gastric ulcer medication reduce nutrient digestion in horses?
Answer: Yes
Research shows that starch from grains that were exposed to equine stomach fluid before being digested by small intestinal enzymes was between 17% (extruded rice) and 104% (cracked triticale) more digested than starch that wasn’t exposed to the stomach fluid.
While the research can’t say how much of this increased starch digestion was due to the stomach acid and how much was due to the protein digesting enzymes that are present in the stomach fluid, the stomach fluid was having a definite positive influence on the digestion of starch.
It’s important to remember that the protein digesting enzymes in a horse’s stomach fluid rely on the stomach acid to activate them, so regardless of whether the improved digestion was due to the avid itself or the protein digesting enzymes, if you stop acid production using ulcer medications you will lose both the acid and the enzymes.
If you use gastric ulcer medications for horses like ranitidine and omneprazole to reduce gastric acid secretion, you are very likely reducing the digestion of at least some nutrients further down the gastrointestinal tract.
What should you do about this?
If your horse has ulcers, treating and getting rid of the ulcers as quickly and effectively as possible is by far the most important consideration. However, once the ulcers are gone, it is recommended to use good management practices to keep your horses chewing, their stomachs full and buffered with saliva, and their minds calm instead of constantly using medication to prevent ulcers. This way allows their gastrointestinal tract to function the way it was designed and allows the digestion process to be as effective as possible.
For more info on feeding to prevent ulcers, read our article ‘Avoiding Gastric Ulcers’ here.
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From experienced horsemen to attendees at educational seminars, many equine enthusiasts don’t actually know how a horse’s gut works and why forage is so important for horse health.
Did you know that the equine stomach never stops secreting gastric acid? So even when your horse is not eating, it is filling the lower part of its stomach up with acidic gastric juices. While the stomach is full, this isn’t an issue as the dense mat of fibre in the gut will stop the acid from splashing around and burning the unprotected lining of the upper section of the stomach.
Problems start when horses are off feed for long periods of time and end up with a pool of acid and an empty stomach. Combine that with the movement of being ridden and you get acid splashing up and quite literally burning holes, causing ulcers, in the top part of the stomach.
What can you do to help prevent this?
Don’t exercise horses on an empty stomach – Provide a small meal of alfalfa (lucerne) hay before and after exercise.
Provide regular small meals and constant access to hay, especially during times of stress such as trailering
Provide turnout and grazing time as often as possible
Help us to educate people on how a horse’s stomach works so they can understand why forage and horse health go hand-in-hand, plus some very simple things they can do to keep their horse’s stomach healthy. Share this article on Avoiding Gastric Ulcers with them and have them understand that a horse’s stomach should never be empty and that as much as is practical you should never work a horse on an empty stomach.
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!
The pros and cons of proton pump inhibitors in horses
Proton pump inhibitors (like omeprazole) are a common and effective way to manage gastric ulcers in horses. However, have you ever thought about the potential side effects of long-term use on your horse’s gut bacteria?
Omeprazole in humans – is there a correlation?
This is an interesting read on the impact of proton pump inhibitors (PPI) like Omeprazole (the major drug we use to treat equine gastric ulcer syndrome) on the gut bacteria in humans: https://gut.bmj.com/content/65/5/740.
The research on horses
While these drugs are a huge help in setting up an environment in the equine stomach where ulcers can heal, they are overused in many horses (some racehorses are never taken off these drugs) to prevent ulcers in place of management systems that will reduce a horse’s risk of ulcers (like feeding a forage meal to fill the stomach prior to work).
What are PPIs doing to the equine gut bacterial populations? One study (https://beva.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/eve.07_12792) shows no impact on equine fecal bacterial populations, but use of omeprazole in these horses was only short term and the study doesn’t specify the dose used. The fecal microbiota also aren’t necessarily reflective of what is happening further up the gastrointestinal tract.
Something to keep in mind if you have a horse on a PPI medication long-term. More research is needed.
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!
