Ensuring near constant access to forage?

[live2ride]

I am currently treating my mare as if she has ulcers.

However having just been up to the yard I find that even though she got 2 full haynets full of haylage at 4ish, she had none left come 9pm.

Unfortunately due to the weather all the horses are having to be in 24/7 at the moment apart from an hours turnout in the morning.

She gets approx. 30lbs haylage in a 24 hour period, and is 15.3hh, approc 500kg or a little less. And all this is either triple netted or double netted to slow her down

I am trying to keep her at a good weight so cant overfeed the haylage and unable to switch to hay due to a shortage on the yard.

So any suggestions what else I can give forage wise, or to make her chew to buffer the acid in her stomach please without a lot of calories

 

[lachlanandmarcus]

You could get some bags of chopped oat straw from Halleys by mail order (there might be other firms that also do it). That way horse could have a big bucket of that, it is lacking in minerals tho so give a mineral block in the stable too (eg yellow Rockies, the 2x10kg ones from agric stores are a lot cheaper than the small horse ones and you can get holders for them too).

 

[Puppy]

Could you switch to hay? As well as being lower in calories, I believe it's preferable for horses with ulcers as haylage can be too acidic for them.

 

[FairyLights]

I feed my horses ad lib hay. You can slowly change over from haylage to hay taking about 10 days to do it. adding more hay each day. they will eat to appetite over the course of 24 hrs. for variety you can also feed something like hi fi lite and /or alfalfa as a "bucket" feed. Cant you get hay from somewhere else?

 

[Hen]

My two are getting regular hay feeds in tricklenets - 2-3 during the day and 2 through the course of the night, made up/soaked in advance and just hung up at intervals; I find not filling the nets to the top slows them down, they are not encouraged to 'grab' mouthfuls from the opening and just settle immediately into 'browsing' mode rather than gobbling mode! They also take longer to work through two half-filled nets than one full one.
I use stalky chaff a lot, like Simple Systems Luciestalks which are pretty chewy, also Timothy hay chop, and each horse gets one of their preferred forage block daily - I use either the Halleys Feeds ones or Simple Systems luciebrix, depending on availability. This is their favourite forage source and they will gnaw away on one block for ages. If your horse doesn't like the stalkier chaffs then something like Top Chop Lite which is a very soft, quite fine blend of oat straw with a little alfalfa might work as a bucket feed.