Vet has mentioned he would like these guys to get a supplement with copper in it. These guys do get to go out every day, and eat very nice hay, but are not on grass. ANY THOUGHTS?
Absolutely - ration balancer. That’s been in play since it was appropriate for his age/weight as a suckling, and is still in play as a weaner, and will continue to be in play as long as he doesn’t need many more calories.
Me too. That is the perfect time for a ration balancer.
Same here. And the advice came from a PhD in equine nutrition that I contracted with to review all of our horse diets including foals growing to adult, pregnant and lactating mares. The hay we submitted for analysis was considered high quality, but still the recommendations for all classes of horses was to feed a ration balancer along with this hay. Our program was customized for each class of horse, but quality hay and a ration balancer are the basic elements.
Good question, wondering the same myself. I’ve raised horses for many years, sometimes supplementing, sometimes not and have never seen a definitive difference (but not scientific, just observation).
Megan just brought me the four weanlings, all WB x TB crosses about 4-5 months old. All appear healthy (AND FURRY!!), active, all have good appetites and have been eating grain for months. They are outside beasts with free access to barn & shelter during bad weather, not stalled normally.
My hay is local fescue, so it’s not wonderful. I’ll probably scare up some alfalfa/alfalfa mix for Ca/P ratio, but haven’t done that yet.
I feed Southern States mare & foal, about a scoop (3 # or so) twice a day each.
Pardon my ignorance, but I’m not sure I understand the terminology “ration balancer.” Explain please, with specifics?
Or should I supplement with vitamin/mineral package such as Grow Colt or the like? I’m not looking to maximize growth rate, but want to provide adequate raw materials for them to utilize.
I feed Triple Crown Growth if they need extra calories or just a vitamin/mineral supplement (Horse Guard- developed for my selenium deficient area) if their weight is fine.
A ration balancer is a concentrated feed that is meant to supply all the vitamins and minerals a horse would need in a smaller dose. For example, a 500 lb weanling might need 6 lbs of a fortified feed (ie SafeChoice or Omolene) to get the needed copper but a ration balancer would provide all they need in just a 1 lb serving.
If your foal’s weight is fine right now, you should feed a vitmain/mineral supplement OR a ration balancer but not both.
Gotta say I’m not that sold on the whole ration balancer idea, but I’m old school.
I DO give a multi-vit to all my weanlings and for protein just give them a daily ration of high-quality alfalfa. I’m lucky that I have access to this sort of hay, because you really do need to give young, growing horses (and lactating mares) protein.
If they need more cals I just give them a mixture of BP & rolled oats, with fat.
I have made a ration balancer the basis of my feeding program since 1998 and have had great results.
Couple of points:
If you don’t have your hay analyzed, you can’t know what is adequate and what is missing. You can’t go by variety of the hay. It all depends on soil and conditions in the final crop. For instance, my grass hay this year came out at 15% protein. Yours maybe won’t. That number is unique to the soil and the time of the cutting, etc. Next year, or next cutting could be quite different. That’s just one variable.
Not all supplement vitamin/mineral mixes are the same. I fed Horse Guard in addition to mixed hay to all my horses prior to having an expert do analysis and all the complicated equations for each class of horse, i.e. weanling, yearling, lactating mare, lactating/pregnant mare, open mare. And all of the calculations changed depending on the age of the weanling (increasing as they grow/weigh more) or the month of gestation and so on. In my case, Horse Guard was deficient for Lysine and Zinc, both important for reproduction/development/growth. Would it be deficient in your program? You will never know unless you have your feedstuffs analyzed, and unless you are a whiz with unit conversions and a calculator and able to plug in the weight/age variables etc. I tried to do this for years, and found that my best efforts were still a fraction off the ideal in most cases, and way off in others. I’m glad I spent the money with a nutritionist who holds a PhD in equine nutrition. It was worth it.
A ration balancer is more than simply vitamins and minerals in balance, it is also a concentrated form of protein and things like lysine.
If you are shooting in the dark, a ration balancer is your best bet for being in the ballpark, and you may well find it is close to the same $ at maintenence amounts as some of these better quality straight vitamin/mineral supplements
My program now also has us supplementing with ground flax and vitamin E as well. We do have pasture, but it is dormant in the coldest months. That changes things too. As far as ration balancers go, they are different as well. We went with a brand that was readily available in our remote area. Not because it was the “best” choice, but a realistic choice that we built the program around.
i use a ration balancer as well for my weanlings and pregnant/lactating mares. They also get soaked alfalfa/timothy cubes, which not only provides extra calcium/protein, but lots of fibre.
Absolutely
I feed, Hay, local grass hay, with about 1 lb per day per horse of a basic pellet, and 4 oz per day of LinPro, plus some flax seed.
They look great, grow well, and we have no joint issues.
MW
ours get orchard grass/alfalfa mix hay, 1 qt of pellets and Source supplements for micronutirents.
I have been reading this thread with interest, because I have found that most people, even breeders (at least around here), don’t realize that unless horses are on green pasture every day, they need vitamin e and omega 3. And they have specific requirements for vitamin e that is not fulfilled by 99% of ration balancers or even vit-min supplements.
I think anyone with mares and foals should spend a couple hundred bucks and put together a program with an equine nutritionist. It is scarey just how little many owners of broodmares and foals know about their nutritional needs, probably the most important thing to know since so few in the North-East and West get enough actual green grass.
This is going to sound like overkill but I feed a ration balancer, flax meal, brewers yeast as well as loose salt. To this I also add pelleted alfalfa and orchard grass as necessary. Each is fed according to weight/by the label so the amount of handfeed is pretty low but sufficient to meet with daily requirements. I have actually met with an Equine Nutritionist and she had very few suggestions outside of vitamin e during the deep of winter when the pastures are pretty much dormant. When you have easy keeping ponies it is part rocket science to find a middle road—to provide what is necessary and required, without adding excess weight. I have also found that my Native Ponies have a very high natural requirement for vitamins/minerals—but very modest-low requirement for energy–even with the working ponies.
Mine also get a selenium/Vit E supplement along with all adult horses as our hay and pasture is selenium deficient in this area. Flax also gets fed to everyone. My hay is good to very good quality.
In case anyone is interested in Se…
http://tin.er.usgs.gov/geochem/doc/averages/se/usa.html
here where I live selinium levels are high.
Indy-lou is correct – ideally, to truly be accurate in designing a feeding program, one should have their hay analyzed with each load.
However, in my case it is impractical to the point of being near impossible. I get my hay in5- 6 ton loads, and by the time I would get the results back from the extension office 1/3 of the hay would already be fed.
Not to mention the fact I’m liable to give myself an aneurysm doing all that math.:eek:
So if you are in the same boat as I am, then to some degree we are both shooting in the dark.
However I don’t get my panties all wadded up about it; I figure “close enough is good enough.”
Why? Because I’m old enough to vouch for the fact that many, many, many foals grew up to be world class competition horses…and they did so while being fed pretty much nothing but oats & high quality hay.
Example: during the decade I worked on the track there were THREE Triple Crown winners! THREE!!
This amazing feat has never been duplicated (before or since) …and it was accomplished by horses who were raised and trained while being fed little more than COB + timothy/alfalfa hay (and probably such “cutting edge” additives like Red Cell and Calf Manna :winkgrin:).
Now, I’m not trying to be argumentative and I’m certainly not saying that newer products like RB’s and/or “specialized feeds” are bad or useless. And I totally agree that, for some breeders, RBs might make it simpler over-all.
However I do feel it’s important to point out that it is just as easy to give a weaner a nutritionally balanced diet without RBs or specialized feeds AND that (as Inde-lou mentioned) just because you are feeding an RB does NOT mean your baby is necessarily getting a balanced diet.
You still need to do some homework & read the fine print…:yes:
Once I’ve done that, I simply use my eye, and if my stock is looking good, feeling good and growing/producing on par with what is to be expected, then odds are heavily in my favor that they are getting a balanced diet. It’s pretty much that simple 98% of the time.
As an aside: Indy-lou, not sure if we feed the same brand of “Horse Guard” Vit/Min or not, but mine does have lysine. And of course, both alfalfa & oats are excellent sources of lysine all by themselves. Since it is close to impossible to “overdose” on protein, I feel fairly confident that my weanlings are getting what they need, nutrient-wise.
And it’s worked great for me so far…knock wood…
And besides, somebody has to speak for the redneck, backwoods contingent here on COTH!:lol::winkgrin::D;)
[QUOTE=Perfect Pony;5986195]
I have been reading this thread with interest, because I have found that most people, even breeders (at least around here), don’t realize that unless horses are on green pasture every day, they need vitamin e and omega 3. And they have specific requirements for vitamin e that is not fulfilled by 99% of ration balancers or even vit-min supplements.
I think anyone with mares and foals should spend a couple hundred bucks and put together a program with an equine nutritionist. It is scarey just how little many owners of broodmares and foals know about their nutritional needs, probably the most important thing to know since so few in the North-East and West get enough actual green grass.[/QUOTE]
Thank you Perfect Pony. I was one who tried to do all the math myself, but being one who likes to master all variables that can possibly be mastered…came to the conclusion that I did not have a PhD in equine nutrition after all. And you have got it right about where green grass pasture enters into the equation IMO. My own awareness came as we also began a grass-fed beef program and researched nutrients from pasture to plate from the human consumer side. Bottom line: there are nutrients that can only come from green grass, and besides all the other stuff that there is to manage, reality is that most horses don’t get enough of this. The green grass quotient is not met with basic vitamin/mineral supplements either. Hence, the addition of ground flax and Vitamin E into my program. I was actually on to the Vit E and ground flax before hiring the PhD, as I became more and more aware of the importance of phytonutrients into the big picture. As well, we put a lot of money and energy into making sure the mares and foals have green pasture as many months as possible. That said, I have tried to share the knowledge I have gained to the OP’s request, and that is that you must have your feedstuffs analyzed and you must give pasture where you can, and supplement for the absence of that. The best “shotgun” approach without paying the few hundred dollars for the expert is a ration balancer, plus good forage, plus access to pasture, plus the addition of omega 3’s and vitamin E to cover when winter makes the phytonutrients of grass disappear. So important when talking about horses involved with growth/development which we are talking about when it comes to weanlings and pregnant/lactating mares. In sum, nutrition is far more complicated than most horse owners want to acknowledge or deal with, and we see this in the lack of nutritional knowledge in human health as well.
Kyzteke: precisely because I did not want to give myself an an aneurysm, I turned to an expert in Equine nutrition. I have a Masters degree and my husband is a Cal Tech engineer with advanced math skills who is a member of the Mars Rover team that has sent multiple missions to Mars. He can handle a calculator as well as anyone, and I have employed him many times. We are not exactly without resources in our ability to fathom complicated math equations and other complex ideas. We live in a remote, agricultural based region where “redneck” is a proud flag flown and somehow, we fit in and get along, so please don’t discount my input in that regard. I am certain that the brand “Horseguard” is the same. I used it for years, for good reason, and found via a PhD in equine nutrition that along with our hay analysis, it didn’t meet requirements for all of our horses. It might well meet requirements with whatever hay you have been feeding, and if so, good for you. My input should not be seen as a treatise against Horseguard or rednecks in general, lol. In my case, there was not enough lysine or zinc and that was evaluated against the hay analysis. Unless you have the hay and other feedstuffs analyzed, you really don’t know. End of story. This is my best attempt at answering the OPs questions. There must be a million other stories where nobody sought outside expert opinion and their horses did well. Bravo, I say.
I consulted an equine nutritionist way back in 1998 and that was how I came to be feeding a ration balancer before it was common. I find it much simpler and easier to fashion diets for all ages and activity levels using a rb as the base. I breed Hanoverians. It has been my experience that they tend to be very easy keepers, so the challenge has been getting the essentials into their diet without a lot of extra calories. A rb let’s me do that easily. I am sure there are other ways.
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