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Feeding the 2yo

I’m possibly buying my first ever youngster, a 2yo mostly TB, small bit of Welsh, Arab and riding pony, to make 16hh at maturity. I know a fair bit about feeding adult horses. Even more about feeding elderly Cushing’s ones. I know NOTHING about the different requirements of the young ones!

All help and advice much appreciated.

At 24 months, they are much, much more like an adult in terms of nutrient needs, than a growing horse. Yes, they’re still growing, but the fastest, most critical growth is behind them.

So, you can feed him like an adult :slight_smile: If you’re using a ration balancer, you can feed on the higher side of the feeding rate to cover some extra bases, without any significant calorie increase.

Thanks @JB was hoping you’d chime in. I was having a look at the various balancers, most of the big name ones in the UK are quite high volume with lots of fillers, but I’ve used progressive earth and Forageplus in the past so will see why they recommend.

I’m always looking to learn more names of UK balancers - what are some you looked at? I have seen a few that were needing to be fed in the 2-3lb range. I’ve heard good things about both Progressive Earth and Forageplus.

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Almost all of the feed companies over here do their own range of balancers and they have become increasingly popular over the last 15/20 years. The majority of horses are not worked very hard, and with the number of natives, cobs, heavies and now WBs who are very good doers, kept on agricultural land which is often seeded with grasses more suitable to raising dairy cows, there are SO MANY fat horses! Most of the feed companies own nutritionists will now recommend balancer + chaff + speedi-beet/pink mash to almost every horse on a yard.

Spillers, Dodson & Horrell, Dengie are probably the 3 most commonly used feed companies here and all have a whole range of different balancers. Blue Chip had one of the original balancers and now do a range of concentrated balancers, but I had a bad experience with them years ago and their customer service was terrible. Then there’s a whole array of pelleted vitamin/mineral supplements which are also sold as balancers, made by the likes of NAF, Feedmark, Global Herbs, Thunderbrooks etc, but many of these don’t contain anything approaching NRC guidelines.

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