Silage

Our old YO used to, but horses don't have a digestive system that can really cope with it. Not like cows who it was made for.

We used to constantly complain about the quality of the stuff our horses were fed. My horse actually died and 2 others were rushed in a week later for botulism operations.

I'd be very wary of using it unless it's exceptional quality
 
Depends if you're planning the first expedition into space on horse back. I call it rocket fuel for horses!
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I certainly wouldn't feed it to any of mine. Far too rich.
 
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Definitely not.

Full of rubbish

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I wouldn't say it was full of rubbish, but I would say it's not really produced with horses in mind.

When we make silage, be it to put in a clamp or bale, we always cut end of April/early May time and the grass is already too rich for most horses without the added fermentation that happens with silage. Our silage is produced for the cows.

When we bale hay or haylage, it's always end of July/August time when the grass growth rate has slowed.
 
We make our own for our sheep and I feed it to my pony sometimes although it is good quality. I don't tend to use the very wet stuff but our first cut this year is somewhere between silage and haylage and she loves it.
 
Our haylage is somewhere between haylage and hay really. Not wet at all but still having that unmistakable sweet haylage smell.

I love the smell of haylage.
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I love that smell too. I was stood sniffing it yesterday actually, my OH though I was crazy! Silage on the other hand has the most repulsive smell, I can't stand it! Thats the thing with this "silage", it smells nice! My OH isn't very happy as its no good for sheep unfortunately.
 
Yard i am moving to only has silage and its included in price. Smells a bit like sick (sorry) . They call it haylege and feed it to all their competition horses who seem fine.
 
Competition horses no doubt use up all of the "whizz whizz bang" in it if they are in very hard work.

What will you be doing with your horse, work wise?

Can you not buy in your own hay?
 
When someone asked this last year sometime on here, I said no, and got slated for it.
 
it has to be very top quality, it can be fed if your horse can tolerate it, supposedly good for some COPD sufferers, I'd excercise caution with some animals tho...
 
Not by me.
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I'd not feed silage to any of my horses - what anyone else chooses to do is up to them; their risk.
 
Haylage and Silage are different by the amount of fermenting that has occured. Haylage is at one end of the scale and Silage at the other, with varying moisture levels between the two. Hay cut and wrapped dry is haylage, the wetter it is when it is wrapped the more along the scale towards silage. Silage is considered to acidic for horses to cope with. Hope this helps, someone explained it to me recently so hope info is correct, just passing on what I was told.
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