how much haylage a day?

AFlapjack

AFlapjack

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Just a quick question.
I'm thinking of changing from feeding hay to haylage and wondering how much I should feed. Pony is approx. 400kg and gets 6/7kg of hay a day plus 1kg in the form of chaff (split into 2 feeds). He is in 24/7 at the mo but is exercised everyday and I try and hand graze him for half an hour most days.

How much haylage would I need to be feeding him a day?

Thanks
 
Alice I have a good do-er who is out on a muddy field, barely any grass, for 4-6 hours a day. He's in at night on haylage. I estimate his weight via the weightape to be about 412kg, so as he puts on weight easily and is over at the moment his ideal weight, I have been doing the food intake based on the 2% of bodyweight calculation (which means 8kg of total food including feed, grass & haylage) though am in the process of bringing that down to 1.75% as he's not shifting much.

If yours doesn't need to lose any weight and he's only getting 1kg feed and not much time on grass then if you did the 2% calculation thing you should be giving him 7kg of haylage + your 1kg of chaff = 8kg. But it sometimes depends on how moist the haylage is, quality of it, etc. They do sometimes say you need to feed a bit more haylage due to the weight of the moisture on it but some horses can react to haylage also in terms of increased energy/fizziness but again probably depends on the type of haylage. Typically we are only allowed haylage in the winter at our yard while I need mine to be on hay to get the calories down!

May be worth posting this in NL too as sometimes things in Stable Yard don't get looked at as frequently.
 
MochaDun said:
Alice I have a good do-er who is out on a muddy field, barely any grass, for 4-6 hours a day. He's in at night on haylage. I estimate his weight via the weightape to be about 412kg, so as he puts on weight easily and is over at the moment his ideal weight, I have been doing the food intake based on the 2% of bodyweight calculation (which means 8kg of total food including feed, grass & haylage) though am in the process of bringing that down to 1.75% as he's not shifting much.

If yours doesn't need to lose any weight and he's only getting 1kg feed and not much time on grass then if you did the 2% calculation thing you should be giving him 7kg of haylage + your 1kg of chaff = 8kg. But it sometimes depends on how moist the haylage is, quality of it, etc. They do sometimes say you need to feed a bit more haylage due to the weight of the moisture on it but some horses can react to haylage also in terms of increased energy/fizziness but again probably depends on the type of haylage. Typically we are only allowed haylage in the winter at our yard while I need mine to be on hay to get the calories down!

May be worth posting this in NL too as sometimes things in Stable Yard don't get looked at as frequently.
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Thank you for the reply :)

I think I'll slowly replace the haylage with hay and give him the same amount of haylage that I was giving as hay and see how he copes with it.... if that makes sense? Then he if starts getting fizzy or starts putting on/losing weight I can adjust it accordingly.

Thanks again for your input.
 
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