The idea of feeding a horse may appear simple but may horse owners are uninformed about the fundamentals. It is a fact that there is no golden rule relevant involving the nutritionary requires of a horse, as it largely depends on the age, body weight and the level of activity, which the horse goes through. To start with, your horse naturally uses grass as a crucial element of their diets. This incidentally is one of the most crucial components of his diet, which keeps his digestive system working correctly, and when we say forage we are meaning a combining of natural grass and cut hay.
The amount of food a mature horse needs per day is dependent on its body size, which is 2 to 2.5%, so if the horse weighs a thousand pound the measure of everyday food needed can be calculated to twenty to twenty five pounds. Horses require food, which is high in nutrition value and not high-fiber, food which fiddles with its digestive system. Ideally, your horse would be healthy if you fed him with 1% of his body weight made up of hay/pasture forage. If your horse doesn’t do much work, they will do nicely on strictly grass, with no grain thrown in. On the other hand, horses which are active, or at the developing or breeding stage, require additional supplementary feeds over and above the pasture like grains or concentrate supplements. Think about it this way, pastures should supply at least one half or more of the total weight of the food eaten everyday for optimum growth and development.
When you are thinking about a stable diet for your horse, think about the nutrient content as well as quality standards of the grass. When you are aware of this, you can easily figure out the proper amounts of nutrients that would meet his specific requires. One of the best and most low-cost sources of summer feed is pasture, which if it is good quality, can satisfy all the nutritional requirements of the horse. To know the correct amount of pasture that your horse needs, use this rough guideline, which uses the weight of 1000 to 1200 pounds. This means that a mare and foal 1.75 to 2 acres – yearlings 1.5 to 2 acre and weanlings 0.5 to 1 acre.
Winter feed of course would be cut hay, and again, high quality if you can provide it. The hay which you feed should be cut uniformly and have green leaf-like appearance and there should not be any dust, moulds, weeds or stubble accompanying the hay. This food is enriched with protein, minerals and vitamins. Alfalfa hay is excellent for horses in a developing phase as it is protein enriched by there could be abnormal calcium content in relation to phosphorus. Overdose of calcium is not recommended for developing horses; so in case you have any doubts, get the hay quality analyzed.