Talk to me about balancers!

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xgemmax

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Hi everyone

My barefoot horse is usually fed on chaff with equivita mineral balancer and does well on it, he's rock crunching his feet are great. However when summer comes and theres more grass I struggle to get him to eat his dinner and breakfast so he just has one feed a day which makes it a lot of powder in one meal and he won't eat it. He has eaten it mixed with speedibeet in the past but have found that beet seems to upset his gut so would rather avoid changing feed if I can.

So thinking about swapping him to a pelleted balancer for the summer but not sure where to start! Firstly they don't seem to have the same level of minerals in as the one I currently feed and the ones I have seen are all high in sugar/starch? Can anyone recommend me a good one?

Thanks :)
 
Ditto equimins though also IMO tif using their powder the volume is less than others. Though I do add extra mag too
 
Thanks all, just been having a look at the equimins, is it super low in magnesium or have I got my calculations wrong? haha I make it that it contains 1.2g of mg if fed at 60g a day and the one I'm currently feeding contains 12g? it says 20,000mg/kg
 
It is low, but I also lived in a super high calcium area ;) when I did the maths I worked out it was pretty much fine for everything else and cost wise getting magnesium super cheap from intralabs and adding it separately made sense.

Mine is fussy, I used to make up bespoke but he was always a bit troublesome with it and I'd expect him to be the same with any of the commercial powder blends. He has always been better with the equimins though he went off the pellets for a bit and was leaving an few in the bowl, was fine with powder back on pellets now and mums mare will take them from hand as a treat ;).
 
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Same here. I tried the Equimins pellets for exactly the same reasons, and pony wouldn't eat them at all, not even in his usual feed. I ended up resorting to pulverising them in a blender together with mints so I could get them hidden in his feed. Totally defeated the purpose of going with a pellet. I now use the powdered one with extra MagOx, and that works great most of the year.

Last summer I went on a week-long trail ride, and decided to pack Spillers balancer with a bit of extra magox and salt added. It's palatable enough that I could add the extras without having to add any additional feed. Yes, the Cu/Zn levels are lower than I'd like, but at least no extra iron added these days. In previous years when I was still mixing my own minerals, I'd also often make up a "bare bones" mix with the absolute minimum of everything so I'd have less powder to hide. If figured feeding more supplement only to throw away uneaten feed all the time wasn't getting more minerals into him either, and I could usually go back to the normal dose again two months later or so.
 
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