Duh - A novice question about sugar beet!

Spyda

Spyda

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I haven't fed soaked sugar beet for years, so forgot just how much it swells up when soaked.

Eeeek! The dry amount of shreds I weighed out and soaked over night has almost filled a builders' bucket!

I am obviously introducing it slowly but the amount I soaked last night is the amount I plan to build up to and feed one horse on daily basis. Even split into two feeds it's going to be a lot of bucket food.

Then I figured, sugar beet is a forage feed, so will it matter?

I am only mixing it with 500g of Sure Grow balancer per feed, along with Hi Fi chaff to keep the feed open.

So.... how much soaked sugar beet can be fed per meal? Ideally?
 
http://www.britishhorsefeeds.com/speedi-beet/feeding-recommendations.html

Ekk, right need to ask a million more questions here to answer your question in full. Size, type, age of horse etc. etc.etc. So try the above link & see if it answers for you. Speedi beet is just a brand of quick soaking sugar beet. Should be much the same as whatever you are feeding.
Personally I would never feed more than a scoop (you know round stubbs type feeding scoop) of sugar beet in one feed.
 
Hi, thanks for the link. Was just reading the Trident Sugar Beet website, too. Both sites are helpful.

The horse in question is a 2 year old TBxSF, standing 16 hands. I've kept her relatively light in weight as she's quickly growing but a recent growth spurt, combined with the foul freezing weather we've been having, has caught up with her and she's looking too thin for my liking now.

Was planning on feeding her 1.2Kg of soaked sugar beet a day, mixed with the HiFi chaff and her balancer. Just seem like I'm going to be giving her 2 much-larger-than-I-am-used-to feeds!

She's already on ad-lib quality haylage but isn't a great eater of it. Maybe gets through 5 or 6 Kg per evening when in.
 
Horses in general cannot effectively cope with more then 2 kilos in any one bucket feed. If half a bucket weighs more than 2 kilos, which I suspect it will, you will need to feed over more than 2 sittings!
 
Yes, of course, and I never feed more than 4lbs of concentrates in any one feed, but SB is a forage feed containing a lot of water. Personally, I now use feed balancers for all my horses so am not feeding more than 250g - 500g of 'hard food' per feed, to any of the horses.

Sure, a largish feed containing a lot of sugar beet will pass out of the horse's small stomach fairly rapidly (which you would not want with cereals), but because the beet is predominantly digested in the hind gut... would it matter? That's where my confusion set in.

Well, I suppose I could start feeding it as a partial forage replacement. Manufacturer website's suggest combining the soaked beet with chaff on a 1:3 ratio. I suppose that combination sufficiently slows the horse's consumption of it.

Maybe that's the route I need to go.

Thanks.
 
The horses stomach is not that big so a horse should not be given more than 4LBs of food in any one feed as it cannot maximise it and it will just go to waste, which is an important consideration when adding expensive supplements! I think speedi beet is an excellent source of sugar beet as it doesn't need soaking for long whether cold or hot water is used and makes a brilliant sugar beet water drink for your horses in the summer months when horses that are competing at shows are often reluctant to drink.
 
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