Seaweed and barefoot, thoughts

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thatsmygirl

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Hi iv currently got my horses who are all bare on fast fibre, linseed, equimins advance complete, mag ox and equimins hoof mender pellets. They look fab but the equimins is expensive, but I keep getting told to drop the advance complete and feed seaweed instead? Thoughts? I thought seaweed was a go no as to high in iron where as the advance complete has no iron, linseed based and quite high spec. They say seaweed is better balanced than any vit supplement that is human made. What do people think
 
I *think* as you say seaweed is a no now, but it was commonly used a few years ago. I think cptrayes will know hopefully she will see this.

What about the progressive earth or forage plus balancers (not the specific hoof balancers) they have good reports but not sure if they will work out any cheaper?
 
Issue with seaweed is it can be very high in iodine and levels very greatly between batches so unless you have a source than tests all batches and guarentees the nutritional make up prob safer not to risk it.
 
Seaweed is also high in iron and as most UK grazing and forage are also high in iron it can cause issues with copper absorption.


Like many barefooters on mixed grazing I supplement only mag ox and brewers yeast, plus copper because of my sky high manganese levels.

Cheap as chips and my boys are blindingly shiny though I rarely groom them:)
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I feed seaweed despite all the recent research but I trust her judgement and let her choose how much she needs. I leave a bucket in her stable and shes eats it when she needs it. In the winter she eats more and sometimes she will eat a fair amount whilst other times she wont touch it for months. Even the greedy ones on our yard will only take what they need.
 
Oh right, so u don't add any vit/min supple to their feed just let them have seaweed at lib so to speak. How much do u put out at once then?
 
Yeah just a black bucket full and she helps herself when she needs it. I think because we literally have no grass in the winter she eats more of it in fits and starts:) It might be a bit diff this winter though because ive swapped her over to thunderbrook which is like a balancer anyway so she shouldn't need it but ill still leave it out for her and see what she does
 
Thanks for the reply, I guess it's just finding something that works for your horse. All mine are good doers so have no hard feed as such just a tiny bit of fast fibre and I mean a tiny bit ( topspec measure up to 100 mark) so just covering the bottom, mug of linseed and the vits etc but wonder if I could leave them out and just leave seaweed then
 
thatsmygirl said:
Thanks for the reply, I guess it's just finding something that works for your horse. All mine are good doers so have no hard feed as such just a tiny bit of fast fibre and I mean a tiny bit ( topspec measure up to 100 mark) so just covering the bottom, mug of linseed and the vits etc but wonder if I could leave them out and just leave seaweed then
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I think I've moved away from doing it that way. For one thing, I think horses could happily overdose on iodine without realising, and the amount of iodine varies so much between batches of seaweed that you'd have no real idea of what they were getting. So it's a bit of a scattergun approach, hoping that the seaweed has what you need, none of what you don't and not too much of what you need either. I was offering fee choice iodised salt for a while which all the horses would take - they needed sodium. I then got my grass tested and found that, yes, we were very low in sodium... but we're actually very high in iodine for an inland location. So the horse's need for salt overrode any caution they might have about taking in excess iodine.

That's why I've changed to feeding only the minerals that were deficient in the grazing, and nothing else. My horse is also a very good do-er - lives out year round with only a rainsheet on wet days and even then doesn't lose much weight over winter! So he gets a bucket with a good scoop of Timothy chaff (although I think he'd eat chopped oat straw chaff too), a small handful of high fibre cubes, and then minerals added. He eats this low cal dinner absolutely fine, and the improvement in his feet since I've been doing this tells me I'm on the right lines.

I think if I wanted to feed minerals without weight gain, I'd just buy something like e.g. Farrier's Formula (provided I wasn't worried about iron levels) and just offer the pellets to the horse ontheir own. All in my field will eat these without anything else added and at least I'd know that there was exactly the same amount in each scoop and each batch. ETA - see you feed Hoofmender - again, mine used to eat the pellets on their own - I could nearly handfeed them! It's a good supplement, worked quite well for us, just not as good as the balanced minerals.
 
Thanks for all your replays, def food for thought. We had our fields tested ( soil) and it came back as totally low in everything, not good at all so that's why I went for equimins as it seems high spec going by most supplements out there.
 
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