Maximum volume of hay cubes per feeding

[LovieBird]

I’m wondering if there’s a maximum volume of hay cubes that is safe to feed in one sitting.

I’ve recently moved my horse to Triple Crown Senior Gold as a complete feed and give him soaked alfalfa cubes when I go out to the barn for additional roughage. I’m out there just about everyday.

However, I wonder if it’s actually doing much. I feed him 2 pounds of dry cubes, which doesn’t seem like much, but after I add enough water to soften them up, it feels HEAVY. Therefore I’m ambivalent to feed any more than this at once because I wonder about stomach capacity, etc.

Does anyone have any experience in this regard?

[carman_liz]

How much is he eating of everything else? My mare got a “scoop” (about 3lbs) of triple crown senior, a scoop of beet pulp pellets and a scoop of timothy pellets or tim/alf blend, soaked in a feed tub wiith hot water and a lid for an hr, 2x a day.

Plus a smaller sized (think kid pony wash bucket) of chopped triple crown forage, soaked with hot water in a smaller sized muck tub, then the water left in the tub for her to drink…yes warm sugar water but no laminitis to worry about and she stayed hydrated…and she ate all the chopped forage. She was about 31 when we started her on all that and a 14.2h arab mix mare. How large is your guy and I dont think you can max him out if he is eating it and holding weight good. I would just soak the everliving heck out of them. I get scared of feeding dried cubes or pelllets of any sort!

[lenapesadie]

The upper limit is how much horse will eat before it goes rancid in heat or freezes in winter.

It’s really just hay. If you put a large portion out and he takes hours to eat it up that’s perfect.

[LovieBird]

So I usually give him the cubes around lunch time. He gets 4.5 pounds of TCS Gold am and pm, also very well soaked.

I’d say he’s average size: 15.3 tb/qh. He actually lost some weight going into winter because he was having trouble eating hay. I think he’s gaining it back though since we changed him to something that can be fed as a complete feed.

[LovieBird]

I’m a little nervous to do that because he lives out with a fatty pony. He’s definitely the boss and won’t let her get his feed, but I’m worried that because it takes a little while for him to eat the cubes, his pony friend might encourage him to eat faster than he should and cause him to choke.

Maybe I’m overthinking…

[carman_liz]

So while the am and pm workers are presumably cleaning stalls, can they let him have some quiet time in a stall to eat his cubes in the am and pm?

Is there anyway at least thru the rest of winter he can have 4 to 6 hrs to himself to eat, relax, and you can monitor output on him? I am a dork but ever since my pony colicked for the first time ( bred him from my mare in 09) I looovvee being able to have stall or at least separated paddock time for him to say ok, in this amount of time you pooped this many times, yay. Lol.

[Snowdenfarm]

I have actually wondered about this too. Smaller, frequent meals are definitely the gold standard, but is there any danger in feeding one large, soaked meal of Timothy cubes to a horse with free choice access to hay and pasture? Many years ago, I remember being told that a large meal causes a weighty mass in one area of the intestines which can swing around and cause a deadly twist should the horse roll. True or old wives’ tale?

[Livie]

It’s no different than if they ate 2 lbs of hay and then went and drank some water. It’s the dry weight that matters

[splitrockfarmnc]

I would think this would be very horse-specific. For example, both of mine get soaked alf/tim cubes 1x daily (plus supplements). They are on 24x7 hay otherwise. One gets an eyeballed very small amount of the cubes with extra water, to make a soup. It simply serves as a carrier for her supplements, and a little extra hydration. She slurps it up FAST and if she were in a situation where she needed pounds of cubes, I would be concerned about her eating it all too quickly. She would probably need 3-4 meals a day if that were the case.
The other one, however, gets 2 lbs of cubes at her 1x daily feeding, plus 2 lbs of Copra. She almost always licks the bowl clean (on occasion she will be more interested in grass or alfalfa hay) but it takes FOREVER. I feel comfortable offering this to her in 1x feeding because I know she will nibble and slurp and take her sweet time. No concerns about gobbling up a big meal and having it sit in her stomach.

There’s a big difference between pounds of hay cubes and pounds of “grain” working through the digestive system.

[Snowdenfarm]

The difference is that it is not 2lbs of cubes once they are soaked. And 2lbs. dry is not much more than a handful. Most people feed more like 5lbs dry. It more than doubles in weight, but is eaten very quickly. And the water is absorbed into the cubes, not surrounding the hay and helping move it through the system. I have fed soaked Timothy cubes for over 10 years with no problem, but just wondering.