Opinions on this feeding

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dumpling

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I would be curious to hear your thoughts on my boys feeding, just too see if you think it's correct or I could add of remove or up anything.

He is a 14hh cob x welsh pony. He's previously been overweight but for the last year has been on a controlled diet and he's down to a sensible 400kg. His food gets weighed religiously. Condition scoring I'd say he was about a 3.5.

I notice now a days he's coming in hungry as such whereas before he'd happily have a snooze. I'd also say he's losing weight aswell due to the lack of grass in the field(he's in with big cob and a lamenitic pony) field gets monitored and expanded as required.

Dinner he gets 300gm dengie healthy hooves chaff, 1 small feed scoop of soaked speedi beet and 1 cut apple.

Breakfast he gets 200gm dengie healthy hooves chaff and half small scoop of soaked speedi beet and a few cut carrots.

After dinner he gets his dechahedron play toy with 300gm of high fibre cubes in it.

He's out in the field for on average 6- 8hours a day.

At night he gets one haylage net weighing in at 4kg.

For his weight I've worked out that he should be getting about 8kg of food a day. With haylage and hard feed that would mean he needs around 3kg of grass a day which I'm not sure is likely?

Thank you for opinions :) x
 
I'd say his haylage needs to be increased. Haylage weighs heavier than hay due to the moisture content, so he really isn't getting much forage to see him over night. If haylage is too fattening perhaps switch him to soaked hay?
 
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Up the haylage. 4kg is absolutely bog all TBH. You should feed 15% more haylage than you would hay. As PS says you could switch him to hay and soak it if you are worried.
 
Oh gosh, thanks!

He went on to haylage as our current hay wasn't the best and I found through late summer he was picking at it if eating it at all, I tried soaking too but still wouldn't touch it. Will work out how much more I need to give him :)
 
I'd increase the haylage too, or swap it for hay if possible and as someone else said you could soak the hay if you were concerned.
I'd also get rid of the speedi-beet, we use it to maintain weight in our oldie.
He doesn't need apples or carrots and only needs chaff if you need to give him a supplement in it. You could lose all those calories and give him them in hay/lage instead. I bet he'd rather have the hi-fibre cubes' worth of calories in hay/lage as well. He really should have a small amount of forage left every morning. If you feel that that would be too much hay/lage and he would put weight on, you could try giving him good quality oat straw as part of his forage - introduce it very gradually, though. We have one horse who gets colic if she eats more than a tiny amount of straw, although the others are fine with it. A shame really, as she is the one who needs to lose weight!
As you say there is unlikely to be 3kg of grass available daily over winter, so his forage will need to be increased. Over winter, we usually reckon that grazing is just to keep them busy during the day and don't count any feed value.
 
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