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Good Doers

Feeding the Good Doer During Winter

Winter feeding can sometimes be confusing. As the days get darker and the amount of time you have to ride your horse after work appears to rapidly decrease you find that your horse becomes less and less exercised. However due to the lack of nutrition in their grazing and the increase in cold weather, your horse’s diet may need to be re evaluated.

Each horse is an individual and therefore must be treated accordingly. For some, winter feeding is the only time of year that they require a hard feed. For these horses their requirements are mainly for additional vitamins & minerals which they normally gain from grazing on grass. These can be replaced by adding a broad spectrum vitamin and mineral supplement to some low energy/ low sugar oat straw chaff. Please do not confuse this with Alfalfa chaff which has a naturally higher level of calories, energy, oil and is far more than your horse requires.

Something as simple as choosing a chaff too high in energy, despite how small a quantity is being fed can be too much and push your horse over the edge. Resulting is too much energy (horse starts being spooky, fresh or even irritable) and gain weight.  Against popular belief, there are more cases of reported Laminitis in December and January than when people start to wory about it in the spring time when the grass starts to grow.

So if you are worried about how to work out the correct diet to feed your horse then simply ask horse-guru.com and I’ll do my best to help you.  As a horse feed expert I do yard visits so let me know where you are and I can always come and help you and your horse .

Thanks for reading x