Frequently Asked Questions About Feeding Horses
Have a burning question about feeding horses? In this guide, we answer all the most frequently asked questions on this all-important topic. After all, we all want to know we’re feeding our steeds correctly. So, if you do have a question about feeding your horse, we hope you’ll find the answer here.
How can I ensure my horse receives all the necessary nutrients while on a budget?
Focus on good-quality hay. Explore alternative forage sources. Optimise feed rations with respect to nutrient content and balance, particularly minerals. Keep it simple and don’t feed dozens of different products for the sake of it. You’ll almost certainly be wasting money.
For example, a small simple hard feed with essential minerals added plus hay or grazing is a far more cost effective, and beneficial way of feeding horses.
Can I substitute hay with other forage options for feeding horses?
While hay is a primary source of forage for feeding horses, you can supplement or replace it with fresh pasture turnout, some types of grain hulls, fibre pellets, beet pulp etc. Consult with an equine nutritionist to ensure you maintain a well-rounded diet for your horse.
Are there any potential risks in buying horse feed in bulk?
Buying in bulk can be a cost-effective solution, but proper storage is crucial. Store it in a cool, dry place. Protect it from pests and moisture to maintain its nutritional value.
Can I rely solely on pasture for my horse’s nutrition?
Pasture can provide excellent nutrition, but it depends on the quality and availability of the pasture. Consider rotational grazing and supplementing with hay if necessary to ensure your horse’s nutritional needs are met. Also note that some soils in Australia are deficient in certain minerals i.e. selenium. Therefore, pastures growing on these soils may also be deficient unless regularly fertilised to address these deficiencies. It’s also a good idea to ensure your horse has access to a loose lick mineral supplement to help address imbalances in the pasture.
When feeding horses, is it OK for horses to just eat grass?
See above.
Should I get my pasture analysed?
It’s always a good idea to have the soil in your paddock tested if possible. This will provide you with a good idea of what minerals may be lacking, and therefore need to be supplemented.
What is the best way to feed horses?
Little but often is ideal when feeding horses. They are trickle feeders and should have access to forage for at least 20 hours a day. If they are stabled or yarded for part of the day, or night, putting hay in a slow-feeder hay net will help meet this requirement. Avoid feeding large hard feeds (grains, pellets etc) in one go; split them up into several smaller feeds instead. This allows the horse to process and digest the nutrients more effectively.
What should I feed my horse daily?
Hay, hay, and more hay. Or similar sources of bulk forage, or good pasture! Concentrates should never make up the major portion of your horse’s daily diet.
At a bare minimum, your horse requires 2% of its bodyweight in feed daily, and that’s dry weight! The bulk of this should be forage, or roughage (hay, chaff, pasture). In fact, horses survive very well on forage alone with just a small feed to provide essential minerals.
Is it OK to feed a horse once a day?
It’s OK to feed your horse once a day so long as:
- It has access to a paddock with enough grazing, and the feed in question is just a small hard feed, or
- You can supply an entire day’s worth of forage in a way that replicates natural trickle feeding. This may mean putting the hay in a couple of slow feeder hay nets (or 1 large one that can take the quantity of hay needed for the day) or providing access to a hay roll in either a hay ring, hay hut, or a hay roll feeder net (to prevent gorging).
What is the best time to feed a horse?
The best time to feed a horse depends on your routine and how your horse lives but typically most owners feed in the morning, and at night. If your horse is paddocked 24/7 it doesn’t matter when you feed because it will have a natural eating routine but… you should try and be consistent with whatever time you do feed.
Horses stabled or yarded at night should be fed when they’re put away, and they should have enough feed to last for several hours. This reduces the amount of time they will spend not eating. Remember, in the wild horses naturally spend around 20 hours a day grazing.
Can a horse go all night without food?
Unlike us humans, horses don’t spend most of the night sleeping! They can, and will, spend at least some of that time eating so long as they have something to eat. As mentioned above, horses are designed to eat continuously for around 20 hours a day. Leaving them without food all night on a regular basis can lead to issues like gastric ulcers i.e. they need enough food in their stomach to buffer the digestive acids!
Can you overfeed when feeding horses?
You can very definitely overfeed a horse! Indeed, many well-meaning horse owners are guilty of doing just that. If any or all of the following apply, you are overfeeding your horse!
- You can’t see at least the shadow of its ribs when it breathes out,
- It has a drainage ditch along its spine,
- It has rolls of fat either side of the tail head,
- It is covered in lumpy fat deposits,
- It has a hard, cresty neck,
- It continually founders.
Alternatively, it may have a metabolic disorder like EMS (Equine Metabolic Syndrome), which can also cause fatty deposits to develop.
Should I feed my horse on the ground?
Horses should be fed on the ground for preference because that’s their natural eating position. It reduces the risk of choke, respiratory problems, and colic. It’s also better for their teeth because they wear more naturally. However, if this isn’t possible, placing their feed as close to the ground as possible also works. What you want to avoid is consistently feeding them above chest height.
Should horse feed be wet or dry?
There are several reasons for dampening down horse feed. Note the keyword here is ‘damp’ NOT soaking wet (unless the horse won’t drink so you’re trying to get fluid into it).
- Reduce dust and the danger of inhaling it
- Prevent things like bits of chaff blowing into their eyes (removing it is usually an expensive medical emergency)
- Mix in powdered supplements (over soaking will cause these to leach out of the feed in a puddle of water in the bottom of the feed bin that your horse may, but probably won’t, eat)
- Some feeds require soaking before they can be fed – whole lupins, whole barley, lupin pellets, copra, sugar beet flakes/pellets etc.
However, if you’re just feeding pellets or sweet feeds (one with molasses mixed through it) you generally don’t need to dampen it. For example, if you mostly feed hay plus a small feed of balancer pellets on their own, you don’t need to dampen down the pellets (or the sweet feed).
Is it better to graze horses at night or day?
It depends on your horse’s health.
Plants absorb sunlight during the day, turn it into sugar (synthetisation), and store it to fuel their growth during the night. So, on a sunny day, the grass in your horse’s paddock will usually be full of sugar by late afternoon. During the night, the grass will use the sugar to grow, and by early morning, stores are largely depleted. When the sun comes up, the process starts all over again.
Healthy horses can usually graze night or day without any problems. However, if your horse is prone to laminitis, the best time to let it graze is in the early morning when sugar content in the grass is at its lowest. By mid-morning, sugar stores are beginning to build up again so generally this is when you’d remove the horse from the pasture.
Having said that, plants don’t grow once temperatures drop below around 5oC so on a cold frosty morning, your grass is still full of sugar. Similarly, it will store sugar when water stressed i.e. drought, or on extremely hot days if there’s no moisture in the ground.
Do horses know when to stop eating?
Horses only stop eating when they’re not hungry, or don’t have anything to eat! Or are sick…
From a nutritional perspective, they don’t know when they’ve met their nutrient quota for the day. So, if they’re still hungry, they’ll keep eating until there is either no more food, or they’re full. Which is why horses with constant access to large amounts of overly rich food will often gorge on it, and suffer from metabolic related health disorders.
Can horses go 12 hours without hay?
In an ideal world, horses would never go without forage for longer than 4 hours. They evolved to eat this way. However, it’s not an ideal world. Yarded or stabled horses may well go without hay for that long. That’s why you should always provide them with enough hay to last several hours at least. If they have a tendency to wolf it down, put the hay in a slow feeder haynet. Some owners also feed a mix of barley and oaten hay so the horse is getting the bulk fibre it needs without the excess calories.
How do you know when a horse is starving?
For most people, the signs of a starving horse are tragically only too obvious. They are thin, or beginning to show signs of emaciation. So – clearly visible ribs and vertebrae, sunken hindquarters with hips and pelvic structure visible, muscle atrophy, dull coat, glassy eyes, weakness etc.
However, it’s important to note that some horses are naturally lean and to the untrained eye, may appear to be ‘starving’. They may for example have visible ribs and look ‘light on’ in condition. But – so long as they still have good muscle cover and tone, a healthy coat, bright eyes, a good appetite, and are overall fit and healthy, it’s usually not a concern. In fact, although it can be a hard concept to grasp, a horse that is healthy but a little light on in condition is far healthier than one that is obesely overweight! Obviously though the ideal situation is try and keep your horse not too thin and not too fat.
We hope we’ve answered most of the common and most frequently asked questions about feeding horses in this post.
