This determines if you're feeding program meets or exceeds the horse's needs. There are a variety of websites that allow you to make the calculations automatically or provide step-by-step instructions.
An example of one:. Always be careful not to create an excess of other nutrients when increasing feed ingredient levels. Excesses of some nutrients can inter-act with other nutrients. For example, excess calcium can prevent complete utilization of phosphorus. Check National Research Council tables for calcium to phosphorus ratios; however, a good rule of thumb is a ratio.
Metabolic disorders, such as laminitis, osteochondrosis and epiphysitis, stem from an imbalance in nutrients. Many disorders can be avoided by giving your horse a balanced ration. Remember, each horse has to be fed as an individual. Feed an amount that is adequate to maintain a body condition similar to that of an athlete. The National Research Council requirements are suggested values; individual horses may require adjustments to these nutrients.
Constantly assess the body condition of your horse. A properly conditioned horse will have enough fat so its ribs don't show, but you should still be able to feel the ribs when you run your fingers over them. Some horses require more and some less feed than others. Other factors such as body condition, health history and environmental factors should be taken into account to best design a sound ration for your horse. Consult with your nutrition professional, county extension agent or veterinarian to help you formulate a ration designed to insure the health and longevity of your horse.
Because a horse's stomach is very small and cannot hold a large amount of feed at one time, it should be fed at least twice a day on a regular schedule.
Some horses benefit from three or more feedings per day. But don't overfeed your horse; too much feed at one time can cause founder. Multiply the girth in inches times itself heart girth 2 times the body length in inches and divide by Nutrient Requirements of Horses, 6th Revised Edition. Let's Stay Connected. By entering your email, you consent to receive communications from Penn State Extension.
View our privacy policy. Thank you for your submission! Home Feeding Horses. Feeding Horses. When you feed your horse, take into account its age, weight, work and growth to determine its diet. Gastrointestinal GI Tract Forty-five to 72 hours is required for food to completely pass through the digestive tract of the horse.
A horse's GI tract consists of: the mouth esophagus stomach small intestine cecum large colon small colon rectum. Horses require fiber in their diet for the gut to function normally It is recommended that the diet contain no less than 1 percent of body weight of roughage such as hay, pasture, etc. Five types of nutrients A horse requires five types of nutrients. Energy nutrients such as carbohydrates and fats , Proteins Vitamins Minerals Water Water is the greatest single part of nearly all-living things.
Types of feeds Your horse can get its essential nutrients from many types of feed. Long stem hay is the traditional baled hay. It is cut, cured, and baled. It can be bundled in to pound square bales or large, round or long square bales that can weigh tons.
Hay cubes are about an inch wide and 1- to 3-inches long. Hay Horses need good quality hay. Pasture Good pasture or grass that an animal can graze can be an economical food for horses, but pasture must be maintained. Some of the basic requirements for a good pasture are: a supply of appetizing plants such as grasses or legumes a paddock or stall to house your horse for part of the day only use pastures for daily exercise and grazing a year-round supply of fresh, clean water shelter from wind, cold and sun safe, durable fencing no poisonous plants no equipment, holes or other dangerous materials in the pasture grain for highly active horses or if the quality of the grass is poor.
Concentrates Small grains, such as corn, oats and barley, are known as concentrates. Supplements Protein and vitamin-mineral supplements are added to the diet to increase the diet's concentration. Commercial grain mixes or complete feeds Concentrated mixes are cereal grains with supplements added to increase the specific nutrient content of the mix.
General daily feed required for the average adult 1,pound horse in good body condition and health No Work Hay lbs. Grain-none Light hrs. Grain lbs. An example of one: National Research Council Always be careful not to create an excess of other nutrients when increasing feed ingredient levels.
Feeding tips These helpful hints will help you care for your horse nutritionally. Provide high quality alfalfa or grass roughage with a complementing grain to balance the horse's diet. Feed by weight, not by volume. Cereal grains and grass forages are low in calcium, phosphorus, protein, and lysine.
Excess energy from cereal grains may be more detrimental than excess energy from grass forages; one reason may be that energy from grain is derived from starch, whereas energy from grass forage comes from microbial production of volatile fatty acids. Starch, but not volatile fatty acids, stimulates insulin secretion, which has been implicated in stimulating hormone changes that contribute to osteochondrosis.
Older horses often have dental problems that compromise feed intake and mastication. Extruded or soft pelleted feeds are ideal. Hay should be good quality, leafy, and easy to chew. The most variable dietary requirement for any horse is energy. A certain amount of energy is required for maintenance and daily activity. Metabolic demands are increased for such activities as growing, performance activity, or lactation.
Diet manipulation can help treat, control, and prevent other disease conditions. Horses with recurrent airway obstruction should be fed as dust-free a feed as possible. Adding water or oil to grains decreases dust. Hay should be thoroughly soaked and fed close to the ground. If complete pelleted feeds are fed, hay can be removed completely from the diet.
On sandy soils, hay should be fed off the ground to reduce sand ingestion. Dietary management can be used to reduce the risk of gastric ulcers. Alfalfa hay, with its high calcium and protein concentration, acts as a buffering antacid and has a protective effect on the nonglandular squamous mucosa. Small hay meals fed frequently or access to pasture also reduces the risk of gastric ulceration.
Nutritional management for Quarter horses with hyperkalemic periodic paralysis see Hyperkalemic Periodic Paralysis Hyperkalemic Periodic Paralysis In angular limb deformities, which are congenital or acquired skeletal defects, the distal portion of a limb deviates laterally or medially early in neonatal life. In utero malposition, hypothyroidism Dietary manipulation includes avoiding high-potassium feeds such as alfalfa hay, brome grass, canola oil, soybean meal or oil, and sugar or beet molasses and replacing them with timothy or bermuda grass, beet pulp, and grains such as oats, corn, wheat, or barley.
Affected horses should be exercised regularly and have access to pasture. Heavily muscled breeds of horses, including Quarter horses, draft horses, and Warmbloods, are prone to myopathies associated with increased muscle glycogen stores and polysaccharide storage inclusions in type II muscle fibers. It is important to recognize that forage is also a source of protein. Select hay that will help meet the horse? Hays can be categorized as either grass hays e. In general, legume hays are higher in protein than grass hays.
Good quality legume hay can have roughly 18 to 22 percent crude protein, while good quality grass hay can have 10 to 16 percent crude protein. Again, quality and growth stage at harvest determine how digestible the hay is and influence how much protein the horse receives from it. Feeding high-fat diets is a relatively new trend in the horse industry. It has been demonstrated that horses can tolerate a fairly high level of fat in their diet.
Fat is an excellent and easily digestible source of energy. Commercial feeds that are not supplemented with additional fats contain approximately 2 to 4 percent fat. Many commercial feeds are now supplemented with fat in the form of some type of stabilized oil. These feeds can contain anywhere from 6 to 12 percent fat.
Since adding fat to a feed increases its energy density and the horse will require less feed, it is important to be sure that all other nutrients i. While commercial feeds will be nutritionally balanced, if you are increasing the fat in your horse?
Vitamins are critically important organic compounds. They must be present in the body to enable important reactions to take place that allow the animal to live. Vitamins are divided into two categories: the water-soluble group consists of the B-complex vitamins e. Some vitamins also have associated names for example, B 1 is also known as thiamine.
It is important to recognize that the horse synthesizes many of the vitamins it needs and therefore does not typically need dietary supplementation of all vitamins. This would include vitamin C, B-vitamins and vitamin K; therefore, you will often not see these vitamins included on commercial horse feed tags. It is important to check your feed and be sure that all of your horse?
However, it is also important to realize that extreme excesses in these vitamins are not desirable either, particularly regarding fat-soluble vitamins. Excess water-soluble vitamins are generally excreted in the urine; however, fat-soluble vitamins are stored readily in the animal? Since excessively high levels of vitamins can lead to toxicity, it is important to use good judgment when feeding nutritional supplements that are high in particular vitamins.
In most cases, a good forage program combined with a well-formulated concentrate will provide adequate vitamins to meet your horse? Minerals are critical inorganic materials that must be present in adequate amounts for the body to function properly. Minerals are another item that can be found in supplements on feed and tack store shelves. It is important to understand that mineral needs will change depending on your horse? Most commercial feed companies balance their feed to meet the mineral requirements of different classifications of horses.
Forage will also provide minerals. In some cases, additional supplementation of some minerals may provide desirable results. For example, biotin, zinc and copper supplemented above requirements have been shown to improve hoof strength.
In the first part of this century, there was little advancement in horse nutrition and little research was undertaken. However, in the last few years, there has been a great increase in interest in this whole area. This review surveys some of the more recent developments and how they have influenced feeding practices and also compares these with those feeding practices found at the start of this century.
The review concentrates on the nutrition of the adult horse in work, exploring in particular what they are fed and how the nutrient value of these feeds is evaluated. Research in the field of domestic animal and farm animal nutrition increased markedly in the period following the world wars, whereas that of the horse decreased. This was due to the decline in the use of the horse for transportation, as an agricultural animal and as a source of power. In a review Squibb , it was stated that there had been little advancement in knowledge of horse nutrition over the previous 50 years, resulting in little change in feeding practices from the early s.
This review noted that there were only six references on horse nutrition published in the Journal of Animal Science during the period — However, since that time, the horse has been used increasingly for pleasure and leisure purposes, and more recently, there has been a great expansion in the number and popularity of various equine-oriented courses at universities and colleges throughout the world.
There has also been an increase in the amount of equine nutrition research being conducted. In a review Hintz , it was reported that from to at least 60 papers related to equine nutrition were published in the Journal of Animal Science. From to , not only were nearly 20 references on this topic published in this journal, but there were also published proceedings of several European Equine Nutrition Conferences, the Biannual Equine Nutritional and Physiology Society meetings and many other relevant papers in the expanding number of equine journals.
There has in fact been so much new information produced on various aspects of horse nutrition over the last few years that it would be very difficult to summarize it all. This review therefore provides an overview of some key developments in performance horse nutrition and will look in particular at how these may have influenced feeding practices, and how such practices may have changed from those used at the turn of the century.
As a main point of comparison, this review uses a book originally published in and prepared in the Veterinary Department for the war office Anon and an Animal Nutrition and Veterinary Dietetics book published in Linton What horses were fed at the start of this century obviously depended to a certain extent, as it does today, on where they lived and what feedstuffs were available.
In , many of the feedstuffs listed as being suitable feedstuffs for horses would be fed today, e. Today, the grains most commonly fed to horses are still oats and corn with some barley and maize, although oat production in certain areas of the U.
Although the basic types of grain fed to horses may be identical between and today oats, barley and corn , there are differences in how they might be presented to horses. In , it was appreciated that crushing, soaking, boiling or parching certain grains, in particular corn and barley, helped improve the digestibility of these grains. Recent work, conducted mainly in Germany Meyer et al. Considerable individual variability in prececal starch digestion was shown to be a result in part of chewing activity and amylase activity Kienzle , Meyer et al.
Today, many compound feeds fed to horses contain steam-cooked, micronized or extruded cereal grains with the aim of improving starch availability and prececal digestion. In the northwestern part of the U. However, because there may be little effect of such processing on the total digestibility of feeds, much of the crimping and flaking of most grains is for cosmetic reasons unless the animal being fed has problems with chewing Breuer One of the major differences one would notice between the list of feedstuffs considered suitable for horses at the turn of the century and that today would be the current inclusion of supplementary fat in the diets of many horses, especially competition horses.
The increased interest in fat supplementation developed as a result of work in the mids Slade et al. Although it is appreciated that horses can digest and utilize different types of dietary fat Potter et al. In some ways, the horse differs from other animals; for example, adult horses do not appear to have any chylomicron lipoproteins Watson and the activities of lipoprotein lipase and carnitine palmitoyl transferase are much lower in horses than in humans Scholte et al.
There is, however, no doubt that supplementary fat has an important role to play in the nutrition of horses today Harris , Hintz et al. Due to its energy density, the amount of feed that an individual horse requires to provide a sufficient energy intake can be reduced, which can be an advantage, especially in hard working animals in which appetite is often depressed.
Fat is less thermogenic than digestible carbohydrates or fermentable fiber and may help reduce bowel ballast and water intake Kronfeld One of the other major differences in the use of feeding materials is the common use of manufactured commercial feeds today. The few manufactured feeds available at the start of this century tended to be expensive and contained poor quality ingredients such as ground corn stalks and sawdust Hintz Increased competition, improved knowledge as well as more ethical companies and government regulations have resulted in a large industry, producing mainly high quality pelleted and coarse mix feeds sweet feeds , often tailored for the different types or uses of the horse Breuer , Harris et al.
More recently, extruded feeds have been introduced, which may help improve feed utilization in certain horses and may help reduce the incidence of digestive disturbances under certain management systems Breuer , Hintz et al. At the start of this century, as discussed later, very little was known about the importance of even the macrominerals; the role of trace elements had not been established and the work on vitamins was about to start.
Today, perhaps because of the increased demands placed on our horses especially our competition horses , supplementary salt is considered to be an important part of the performance horse's diet.
Today it is known that horse sweat is hypertonic to plasma with respect to sodium and chloride and that, depending on many factors, including the horse's fitness, the environmental conditions plus the speed and duration of exercise, the amount of sweat produced will vary and therefore sodium requirements will vary Table 1.
The need for such supplementation was highlighted in some recent work from Canada McCutcheon and Geor These researchers used specially designed sealed polythene pouches for sweat collection to assess the concentration of various electrolytes in sweat as well as the sweating rate during exercise tests carried out on a high speed treadmill. Under HH conditions, a mean of nearly 20 L of sweat was produced with an average Na and Cl content of 3. Without this supplementary sodium, the cumulative losses associated with regular training may have exceeded dietary intake even in CD.
In a recent study Pagan et al. Salt was offered free choice to the horses in 1-kg blocks. Although the exercised horses receiving the mixed diets ingested sufficient sodium to meet their estimated requirements, those consuming the forage did not. This could mean that the actual sodium requirement was lower when the forage only diet was consumed. Perhaps these horses were able to conserve sodium more effectively, or the dietary sodium was more available, or they required less.
Alternatively, unlike commonly held beliefs, they did not voluntarily consume sufficient sodium from a salt block to meet their requirements. Much more work is required in this whole area of electrolyte supplementation.
Looking at the list of nutrients said to be available from feeds for horses in the manual Anon , it is apparent that although the fundamentals might have been appreciated, very little detail was available.
The main categories or groups of the constituents of all foods as given in are illustrated in Table 2 together with the values given for oats and meadow hay.
It was appreciated in that overlap was possible between certain groups, i. Equally the fat-heat-energy—producing elements could under certain conditions be used to put weight on.
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