Exactly. I now know that good hay will give my horse almost everything she needs, I just need to balance vitamins and minerals. This was not obvious with the hay I fed in the 1970s 
I think nutrition would be much less of a mystery if more people got their hay tested. The appearance of hay does not tell the whole story. I’m a bit of a hypocrite there since two of mine are boarded and the hay sources are too varied and inconsistent for an analysis to be of much use. Instead I base their feed programs on the assumption that the hay is “average cool season grass hay”.
A lot of people start adding in supplements and fortified feeds while completely ignoring the fact that they have no idea what is in their forage.
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Yes. This.
When I was a kid I read everything I could find and much horse wisdom was very traditional. As an adult I kept up with human nutrition generally and when I got back into horses found that equine nutrition had developed along similar lines.
OP wants more recent and more advanced stuff. I did a Coursera several years ago that recommended Julie Getty’s book as a reference. As far as basics there isn’t much further to go than that. I think that if you want to get into advanced diet management for specific horses you need more data on those horses. You need a hay test, maybe a water test for iron, a blood test for SE and Vitamin E. And you need to crunch the numbers on your hay to decide what vitamins and minerals you need to supplement.
I decided I didn’t have the bandwidth to do all that for healthy easy keepers so my good-enough solution has been quality hay, a comprehensive VMS in a mash, flax and salt.
I feel like the number one health risk for North American pet horses today is obesity and the risk of metabolic syndromes and IR resistance. The big dilemma for many owners is balancing the current “best practice” of 24/7 hay to chew with the fact their horses become obese and founder. Yes, I’ve seen horses get obese and founder on low sugar hay if they eat enough.
I’d add that horse nutrition also follows human nutrition in fads for pointless supplements or at minutely irrelevant quantities.
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I totally agree. But like your situation, most people board, a great many of those places get hay from hay brokers/feed stores, and even many who keep their horses at home, get hay from the same sources. So, there’s never enough of a single batch to warrant testing 
Realistically though, if the hay smells and looks fresh, and the horse is able to eat around 2% of his body weight in that hay, and you use a ration balancer or fortified feed fed within the feeding range, the odds of a gross deficiency are pretty slim. Not zero, as folks out in the Midwest who’ve dealt with a major drought, are finding hays with unacceptably low calcium even as they are clean and fresh
At that point, you start looking at the horse in front of you. If he’s dealing with chronic skin conditions, test for and/or supplement things like selenium, Vit E, copper and zinc, maybe Vit A depending.
sigh yes, because it’s so easy to get sucked into the marketing aspect of things without understanding what they’re already feeding, let alone what the magic supplement is allegedly bringing to the table.
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I can attest to this. I just graduated in December with my BS in animal science, so my nutrition classes are pretty recent. I had a great time with biochem and “animal” nutrition which covered horses and most food-animal species. These classes were great at understanding nutrition at a biological level and how various nutrients are absorbed. Though I assume this is at a level beyond what the standard horse owner wants, or even needs, to know.
The specific equine classes, which touched on nutrition, were horrible. Outdated and some info just outright wrong. Some was taught at such a basic level such as corn raises the glycemic index and therefore a good source of energy. Technically, yes; but that is just a tiny snippet of a much bigger picture.
TL;DR. Equine nutrition (at my school) was uninformative and lacking. Animal nutrition and biochem are great if you are a super nerd and want to go that deep.
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There are a couple of Facebook groups I find informative, and I receive blog posts from Kentucky Equine Research and The Horse.
Equine Nutrition Education and Clarity Equine Nutrition are two pages I follow on Facebook. I can’t remember if you have to be invited or just request to join ENE but there’s a lot of interactive discussion on that page.
I also try to find technical papers on new products that back up claims from various companies.
I do nutrition consultations at the feed store I work at, and believe it is imperative that I stay up to date on nutrition to best help our customers.
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Thanks for this!! I listen to podcasts while I muck and will definitely listen in!
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All great advice but IMHO the absolute most important thing you can do is to learn to read the guaranteed analysis AND the ingredients list on every single bag of horse feed out there.
Is the formula fixed or not?
What does NSC mean and how is it calculated.
Have the numbnuts added iron to the feed or were they smart enough to not add any.
have the three essential amino acids been added and what are they?
Compare amounts and percentages between brands and each “model” under a brand name.
You can educate yourself for free.
Yes to testing hay if you have a horse with any sort of health issues and be sure the test(s) include those things that may effect your horse.
Would a condensed vit/min supplement work better for your horse? What does “condensed “ mean.
In the end for whatever it’s worth and for example, I got my best education regarding metabolic issues right here on COTH in 2007, when I thought I would lose my heart horse. Back then all I knew about “metabolic” was how to spell it.
There is a LOT of excellent anecdotal & honest information on here. You just have to figure who knows what they’re talking about and which information may work best for your horse as not every horse reacts the same to something:)
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Agree. I’ve learned more practical, useful information about nutrition in particular and home horsekeeping in general here at COTH than anywhere else. Not that I haven’t gone to other sources, books etc. too but for information that works IRL, the posters on COTH who are knowledgeable and experienced can’t be beat.
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Excellent one, assuming you’re referring to the group ( as opposed to a page) run by Dr Rachel Mottet of Legacy Equine Nutrition. Since you mentioned joining, I assume you mean group, and anyone can hit Join to have membership reviewed.
Is Clarity Equine Nutrition the new name for Clair Thune’s old Summit Nutrition?
Adding iron isn’t the devil. You can’t even tell how much iron is added unless you call and ask. Not seeing iron in the GA doesn’t mean there isn’t any (because that’s not possible unless pretty much it’s a fat product), and seeing 500ppm iron doesn’t tell you how much is intrinsic vs added. You can have 200ppm Fe with most of intrinsic, and you can have 175ppm Fe (many of the Tribute products) which is all intrinsic. It also matters how much of the product you’re feeding
I would want to compare total mg or gm fed per serving, not just ppm and %. If the feed rate of one is minimally 4lb, but it’s 6lb for another, that makes a big difference
And you are so right, there’s a learning curve of learning who to trust, what sites to trust, as there’s a lot out there talking a good talk, but completely missing the mark
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JB, can you just transplant your nutrition knowledge into my brain?!? 
Thank you all for the replies! Unfortunately my college nutrition textbooks were rentals, so I no longer have them. I’m sure I can find some research papers in the references section of some of the papers I wrote though… I’m sure they’re in some google folder.
I will definitely check out all mentioned however, and continue to read as much COTH forum postings/replies as I have time for!
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JB, yes and yes. I’ve also picked up some useful information from the Feed XL site, except its Australian based so some of the hay and feed recommendations aren’t completely relevant, but the basics are sound.
One of the biggest things I recommend is to 1) know about what your horse weighs (or should weigh), and 2) weigh your hay and feed so you know what you’re feeding and if it’s appropriate for your horse and its workload. Familiarize yourself with the recommended feeding rates and realize that’s the suggested rate to meet protein, vitamins, and mineral rates and digestible energy isn’t really counted in that.
For example, that’s why a ration balancer has 26%+ protein with a 1-2 lb feeding rate, versus a 10% protein feed with a 4-6 lb feeding rate for a mature 1,000 lb horse in light work. I do a lot of math, figuring out percentages of non-structured carbohydrates or minerals in a feed. I also crunch a lot of numbers on supplements to see what’s even worth spending money on. I know one very popular electrolyte powder that is less than 25% total electrolytes, the rest is sugar. Lots of math and label reading for sure.
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