Chaff! Help decide an arguement please!!!

Spyda

Spyda

Well-Known Member
Joined
30 October 2005
Messages
5,148
Location
U.K.
Visit site
A debate is going on at the yard this morning. Opinions needed please!

One of my friends at the yard is bulking out her 16.1hh gelding's night feed with 2.5 Kg HiFi Lite. Mixed into this she's adding his balancer (600g), a very small amount Pasture Mix, a 500ml scoop of linseed meal and some sugar beet to moisten the whole lot. This almost fills her horse's corner manger and one of the other liveries made a snide comment about it last night. My friend replied that the extra chaff was to help slow her horse eating his feed and to make his feed last longer. The second livery argued that she couldn't see the point (which is a valid point as all the horses on our yard are fed ad-lib hay.)

I was eves-dropping from the tack room (:rolleyes::o) but it did leave me wondering whether bulking out a small'ish hard feed with chaff was a good idea or not.

If a horse's stomach is roughly the size of a rugby ball, surely adding any chaff (or sugarbeet) to bulk out a 4lb hard feed would exceed this recommended volume?
 
but I have always thought no more than hay.. and that it doesn't count on the whole rugby ball size thing as it is fibre, as is beet so not really dealt with as 'concentrate' per se.
 
I had a livery that used to feed a whole bug trug tub of hifi, plus a small tyre one of sugar beet, whe did this for years and he was fine :) Took him the whole night to eat it!
 
People are obsessed with hard feed!

My horse gets what a shetland pony would eat, probably less! She does however get as much haylage as she likes. My view is that hay/haylage is much better than feeding oodles of hard feed.

Someone I knew bought a trakenner and wondered why it went loopy when she fed it 3 trugs full of feed daily!
 
chaff is just chopped hay/alfalfa +/- straw so adding to hard feed would make sense if she wants to slow him down and it spreads out his hard feed over a longer period of time.

Why is it causing such an debate? Let her do what she wants... not as if other lady is being directly affected??
 
Ours get fibre only, no hard feed at all. They get hay plus buckets of chaff, works very well for us and both horses are happy and well xx
 
as I understand it its over loading the stomach with grain or grain derivative eg ponynuts thats bad, too much and undigested bits get pushed into the small intestine which causes a chain reasction which can kill off the good bacteria in the whole of the intestine and so cause lamimitis and or colic. Think grass, horses are designed to eat grass, hay and hayledge are grass,chaff is chopped hay, straw [very fibrous ] and alfalfa [a legume] .so loads of this is only like the horse eating hay or grass. not straight alfalfa though,thats richer. so diluting grain with loads of chaff is I think a good thing. also if it takes the horse an age to eat the mangerful the first eaten bit will be digested before it gets to the end of the trough anyway.
 
If it's taking him all night to munch his way through that and his hay then it is keeping him occupied for longer and simulates a more natural feeding system, allowing him to graze at it all night, and keeping his gut moving throughout the night, than those who only have a small feed and wolf it down i one.

As said earlier whether you do or don't isn't a big issue so why is someone making it one??!! people!! I'm so glad I'm on the yard I'm on!!
 
competitiondiva said:
As said earlier whether you do or don't isn't a big issue so why is someone making it one??!! people!! I'm so glad I'm on the yard I'm on!!
Click to expand...

Actually, we're pretty lucky overall at our yard as there's only the one 'big-mouthed, know-it-all' on the whole yard (of 40+ horses) BUT sadly she's in our 8 horse barn :( [And this is the person who gives her retired 12 year old TB a full-clip because "he sweats in his rugs otherwise!" Duh. Is it me, or wouldn't a normal person just use a lighter weight rug or [god forbid] use no rug at all if their unclipped horse was sweating under it's rug/s? :confused:]

I guess last night's conversation just got me wondering on the subject. There's long-fibre; grass, hay and haylage, and then there's short-fibre; like chopped chaff, sugar beet, etc. I just wondered if feeding hard-food mixed in with lots of short-fibre would cause the hard-food to move out of the stomach quicker, along with the chaff and, therefore, not be digested as efficiently? Just a wonder.... My friend was still grumbling about the comment from last night, this afternoon, so it's obviously rattled her chain :rolleyes:
 
My old mare was fed 4 large buckets full of original HiFi every day as she couldn't eat hay. I gave her as much as she could eat, just the same as feeding ad lib hay IMO.
 
Spyda said:
My friend was still grumbling about the comment from last night, this afternoon, so it's obviously rattled her chain :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

I'm not surprised, I would be too, flipping hate people sticking their noses in. It's her horse, and her choice what she does. But hey ho, tell her to count to 10 and ignore her!
 
my warmblood x gets a handful of chaff (i mean a handful!) and an even smaller handful off pony cubes!

that is all.

she looks fab and has the right amount of energy requred to work but not kill the rider!

so why people feel the need to give their horses tons of feed is beyond me.......???

p.s she has masses of hay (shes never without!)
 
Spyda said:
A debate is going on at the yard this morning. Opinions needed please!

One of my friends at the yard is bulking out her 16.1hh gelding's night feed with 2.5 Kg HiFi Lite. Mixed into this she's adding his balancer (600g), a very small amount Pasture Mix, a 500ml scoop of linseed meal and some sugar beet to moisten the whole lot. This almost fills her horse's corner manger and one of the other liveries made a snide comment about it last night. My friend replied that the extra chaff was to help slow her horse eating his feed and to make his feed last longer. The second livery argued that she couldn't see the point (which is a valid point as all the horses on our yard are fed ad-lib hay.)

I was eves-dropping from the tack room (:rolleyes::o) but it did leave me wondering whether bulking out a small'ish hard feed with chaff was a good idea or not.

If a horse's stomach is roughly the size of a rugby ball, surely adding any chaff (or sugarbeet) to bulk out a 4lb hard feed would exceed this recommended volume?
Click to expand...

I used to feed that amout to my horse but it was the Oil version. I see no problem with it, but tbh i dont see the point in adding very small amounts of mix or different feed, in my mind it doesnt do anything!!
 
I don't feed much hard feed, but chop is what I do feed most of. I'd rather feed ad lib hayledge. However giving the horse loads of chop isn't going to do them any harm. Just different schools of thought I suppose.
 
This is why I hate livery yards, does it really matter? No. It's her horse let her get on with it and other livery should keep their noses out.
Hi fi can be used as a hay replacer so no harm done
 
chaff does indeed slow down the eating time - she may be doing this to prevent the horse from bolting his balancer down and then choking even if he does have ad lib hay it won't stop him from eating his hard food really fast if he thinks it is very tasty and he is greedy for it.
 
Pearlsacarolsinger said:
Actually having re-read OP, I can't see the point of feeding Hi-F- Lite and linseed. She might as well feed ordinary Hi-Fi, or even Alfa-A and not bother with the linseed.
Click to expand...

I'm sure the girl who's horse we are talking about knows what she is doing!

Each to his own and if her horse is well on it etc then it must be working! Neither of my horses are lamanitics or particulaly good doers but I give them a big bucket of safe and sound chaff with high fibre cubes plus ad lib hay My aim is to give my horses a low sugar, high fibre diet. They love their bucket feeds and this diet doesn't send them loopy.
 
As far as my understanding goes, its protein that you want to linger in the stomach, not fibre, as that isn't digested until a lot further on. One could argue that feeding a lot of chaff would carry the small amount of protein-filled pasture mix through the stomach too quickly for it to be absorbed, so the horse may not be getting much benefit from the mix, but I'd say the principal of getting the horse to take longer to eat the feed is sound. I suppose it depends on if the horse is stuffing himself eating it all in one go, or if he is taking a more graze a bit, come back later approach.

TBH I'm not worried about either approach, as long as he doesn't scoff.
 
Pearlsacarolsinger said:
Actually having re-read OP, I can't see the point of feeding Hi-F- Lite and linseed. She might as well feed ordinary Hi-Fi, or even Alfa-A and not bother with the linseed.
Click to expand...

Hifi lite has a lower sugar content then hi-fi orginal so better for the horse. Linseed is good for skin and feet so a sensible supplement to feed. Alfa-A is not only cover in mollasses, it's pure alfalfa, which can send some horses loopy and there is a limit to the amount of alfala they can eat (too high in protien to be fed adlib). If she wants to feed a large fibre feed than hi-fi lite is the best way to go (although in fact the new 'no mollasass' hi-fi looks even better)

Sounds like an ideal diet. Hi-fi lite is suitable as a hay replacer so no harm in feeding large quantities. It doesn't really have a 'point' in that he already has ad lib hay, but it'll be a nice alternative to hay and make him feel like he's getting a big dinner.

Short and long fibre only really makes a difference to their chewing time, not their digestion time - if they're chewing hay properly it will pretty much be 'chop' by the time it get to the stomach anyways.

And as someone else said, the 'small meals only' only applies to grain feeds: the horse stomach is designed to trickle in one end and out the other, into the intestines, with the fibre only partly digested. It's when undigested grains (from a too-big hard feed) start trickling through that the problems start.
 
I have a mare and foal living out 24/7 in the snow. We keep getting hay nicked from the field, including what they are eating! So I provide them with hay and 2 big trugs full of HiFi good doer, readigrass and sugar beet. Mainly on the basis that its not worth anyones while to nick a half eaten trug of feed, and my mare would def have something to say if they took her bucket feed away! They also get half rations of suregrow which is chucked on top. They are both pretty canny and dig through the snow for the grass anyway and they both look really well on it. In an ideal world I'd just give them ad lib hay but as its been nicked more than once I cant guarantee this so I give them the trugs as a substitute just in case.
 
Bulking out with chaff doesn't really affect the "over the limit" factor you were talking about as it is fibre..i would maybe break down that amount of chaff to 2 feeds which would proably still slow them down, but that depends on weather the horse eats it all instantly or keeps it all through the night....

i have to say though...a big dinner to me was a girl at my uni livery with a horse that refuses to keep on weight but goes super crazy on everything...he has literally one of these giant trug tyre buckets filled to the brim with sugarbeet, soaked luci nuts and some other nuts that are soaked...the bucket weighs a ton and she has to carry it with a wheelbarrow! although the horse does save it for hours and picks at it all night! amusing to watch her try and carry it though :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top