Confused - Weighing hay

Go careful on the thing that works out what weight of concentrate your horse should be on.....Id be bankrupt and possibly in hospital if I fed mine the amount of hard feed it recommends for my horse!
 
that and the fact that my horse would be a obese :)
Got the feed right I think was just concerned I was feeding enough hay
Thanks for the advise
 
Gosh that is a lot of hard feed isn't it? Having said that, I've left my approx 430kg native good doer pony with 6kg hay overnight, which will be all gone by morning when he will go out to graze all day on fairly good grass.

They recommended 5.2kg "forage" and 3.4kg "concentrates" His dinner is probably less than a kilo in total - a cup of outshine, a cup of lo-cal, 1/2 (stubbs round)scoop Alfa A oil and 1/2 scoop runny fibre beet. He's not gaining weight on this so I am happy for now.
 
spaniel said:
Go careful on the thing that works out what weight of concentrate your horse should be on.....Id be bankrupt and possibly in hospital if I fed mine the amount of hard feed it recommends for my horse!
Click to expand...

Frankly the whole thing is complete cock. The amount of forage for example can only be given on a dry matter basis.1kg of haylage is very different to 1kg of hay.
 
It also recommends the same amounts of feed for an overweight horse as for a normal weight horse & if I fed my mare those quantities -about five times the hard feed she gets -she soon would be overweight.
 
Possibly the easiest way of looking at it is from a maintenance plus ,point of view. For maintenance ,a horse needs about 2% of his body weight in forrage as dry matter. So a 500kg horse needs about 10 kg of dry matter per day. Since hay and most hard feeds are about 12% moisture, this is about 11 kg of feed. If you are feeding a maintenance diet eg hay and a ballencer. Say 1,5 kg of Saracen "waistline"for example. Thats 9.5 kg hay and 1.5 kg hard feed. Simply deduct any hard feed from the maintenance hay ration.
 
Amount will vary according to size, work, amount of grass etc. for a horse in Medium to Hard work you should look at a minimum of half his daily ration of food being fibre - grass, hay, chaff. Never less than one third of the daily ration as fibre.

A quick calculation was to take the horses measurement in hands, deduct 2 and then double the answer - this was the ideal total daily food consumption for a stabled horse.
eg Horse is 15.2hh. 15.2 - 2 = 13.2 Multiply by 2 = 26lbs 4oz of food daily. This includes Hay, grass, hard feed.
 
Something I have always wondered - with the forage recommendations, is that based on what hay/haylage to be fed in the stable overnight, or includes what grass they have consumed during the day?!
 
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