A vitamin/mineral lick without iron?

[micra]

Hello, I was wanting to hang vitamin licks in the horses stable but the hay I have is high in iron. I'd like to supplement their copper but all the licks I'm finding are high in iron! Would anyone know of one, thank you

 

[be positive]

This is the lick I use, mine have one in the field over winter, it doesn't have iron listed and although it does have molasses in it it is not a lick they tend to use unless they need it, on the info it says it will last 2 weeks but mine last far longer, 1 lasted about 3 months in the field shared by 3 most of the winter, a horse on box rest had one for 8 weeks and never finished it although it was used most days, if they got though it in 2 weeks I would rather use a supplement or increase their forage as I would suspect they were seriously lacking something.

http://www.dengie.com/horse-feeds/licks/stable-lick/#nutritional-guide

 

[supsup]

I don't think you'll find a lick that will work for you. The Dengie one above, for example, has 50mg/kg of copper. The daily requirement for a 500kg horse, even if you don't have iron, is 100mg. In other words, the horse would have to eat 2kg of the lick per day to cover their copper requirement (assuming they don't get copper anywhere else)! If you want to balance for high iron intake, that would increase even more.

The reason you won't find a lick that works is because no feed company will risk being sued for harming your horse through overdosing of a particular trace mineral. Since you can't control intake with a lick, they will put in very low levels of anything that might be harmful if eaten in excess, which means the levels fall far short of the daily requirements. I'd recommend you look into a good balancer/vit&min supplement instead.

 

[HBB]

Good advice as always from supsup.

 

[Nudibranch]

If you want to provide a lick anyway and supplement separately, I'm pretty sure red Rockies don't contain iron.