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HORSE Magazine



Feeding your horse this winter

Winter feed

Wednesday 14 October 2009

Liz Bulbrook of Baileys Horse Feeds offers advice on keeping your horse healthy as the temperature drops


As autumn progresses grass will become scarcer, with little nutritional value, so be ready to supplement your horse's diet with additional forage, even if he's turned out 24/7.

Not only does this provide essential digestible fibre to keep the gut healthy and support condition, but it also warms the horse from inside as heat is released during its fermentation.

Consider high-fibre cubes and/or alfalfa, chaff and sugar beet pulp as alternative digestible fibre sources, especially for the older horse who may be dentally challenged.

Monitor condition

Keep an eye on condition by monitoring your horse regularly. Poorer doers should be rugged sooner rather than later to conserve energy used by the body to keep warm, while good-doers should be encouraged to burn some body fat by wearing just a thin rug or none at all.

Maintaining a balanced diet throughout the winter months, whether your horse is in work or not, is important to support health, well-being and muscle tone. A balancer is ideal all year round for the good-doer, while a conditioning feed is preferable for those with higher energy requirements and will deliver more calories per scoop than an ordinary horse and pony mix.

Portion control

Keep meal sizes manageable by dividing into as many small feeds as you can. The horse's stomach is small for his size and not very stretchy, so if you can't feed more than once or twice a day, get creative.

To avoid overloading the stomach, chaffs and sugar beet can be fed as a separate 'side salad' rather than mixing them with compound feed.

This article appears in the November issue of Horse, on sale from 15 October.