I’ve been trying to better my knowledge on my horses nutrition, I currently switched them to a forage based diet and they’re doing amazing (I have it linked below). I’m curious to hear what others find is important to include in a forage based diet. I’m mainly wondering about minerals - should I be adding just plain redmond real salt to their feed or something else. My one horse has moderate arthritis in her one knee, but honestly you would never know she moves so soundly, but I do have her on prevacox and I really want to get her off and on to something more natural, since I don’t really like what I’ve heard about the risk of damaging internal organs. She’s also prone to abscesses and recently blew a really bad one, several actually, and half her hoof came off, still she’s amazingly sound and runs everyday out in the pasture, but I’m trying to regrow the hoof and hopefully try to prevent future abscesses, or at least lower her chances, and I just started her on this supplement that a friend of mine swears by her (I’ve linked it below as well. Her horse had the exact same thing happen and said it was the only thing that regrew her horses hoof back in a very short time and seems to be keeping abscesses away too. The supplement is a trace mineral supplement and I wonder if that’s enough to cover minerals? Or should I be adding salt or something else? Or should their forage based diet cover everything? And, does anyone know any alternatives to prevacox? Something more natural? She also doesn’t really sweat and I just started her this month on sweat more - don’t know if anyone has any suggestions for what to give a non sweating horse?
I find it hard to translate between % and ppm and total grams per serving when reading different VMs labels.
The big hoof and coat nutrients are copper and zinc in the right ratios, plus biotin. You also want to have your calcium and potassium in balance.
I really like Mad Barn Omneity PreMix and their website has a lot of good information.
I am in a low mineral low selenium area and our hay tests low in minerals so I find Omneity covers the bases. I also feed a cup of flax and an ounce of white salt. All this in a beet pulp and alfalfa cubes mash, plus good commercially grown second cut Timothy.
The wafer fioc has a lot of actual grain in it?
Previcox is a pharmaceutical and unfortunately there’s no herb or spice or mineral out there that can do the job of a pharmaceutical painkiller.
If they’re eating at least 1.5% of their weight in forage, it’s already a forage-based diet.
I assume you mean the extras, above hay/grass, is forage-based? That’s usually what that means, but it’s misleading a bit.
You can feed a commercial bagged feed that’s forage-based, and still feed a forage-based diet. But most who use the term also mean they aren’t feeding any commercial feed
What you SHOULD add, would require a forage analysis. That’s usually not feasible, so then you go the next step, which is typically to start with a forage balancer, like Vermont Blend/Pro, California Trace/Plus, and many others.
Redmond and any designer salt is overpriced salt. No matter how many extra minerals are in it, they’re still 97%+ salt, and the amount of extra minerals is miniscule.
Nothing “natural” does the inflammatory job that an NSAID like firocoxib does, but a horse may not need what an NSAID does
A horse who’s prone to abcesses would have me looking at the quality of the trim, and testing for IR/EMS and PPID
Power Horse loses all credibility, and is (illegally) presenting itself as a drug, with
“Use Power Horse as an anti-inflammatory agent to protect the horse’s capillaries from the effects of laminitis.”
It’s analysis shows how useless it is. Most of what’s in it aren’t essential minerals. Why would you want to feed lithium, titanium, and mercury to your horse? Thankfully they, like most everything else, are in such tiny amounts it doesn’t make a difference. But that said, what’s the unit of the GA not shown as a %? mg? ppm?
Unless you have a really good reason to piece-meal together a diet, I would just use a ration balancer. If you don’t even want that, then use a good forage balancer, and mix with some hay pellets. Many forage balancers contain ample amounts of copper, zinc, and biotin, all of which support healthy feet
You general location would be helpful, since locations can have specific mineral issues a horse owner needs to deal with. Like Scribbler, we have almost no soil Selenium, to get in any product (hay) grown locally. Selenium with Vit E is a required addition for our local horses, since it affects muscles and reproductive systems, can’t be stored in the body, gets sweated out. Other places have lots of soil Selenium, supplementing is not needed.
Soil testing, hay testing, a blood test on each horse, Selenium test is done by itself, can tell you what you are working with right now. No guessing, just facts to work with in planning your feed program.
If you need to balance diet with additives, you can read it in the test results. Hay can vary, depending on whom you buy it from. All fields will not test the same, even though it may all be alfalfa or grass hay. Some producers never fertilize or use a generic “fits all” fertilizer which may not give their hay a balanced mineral content. Same with pasture grazing needing a soil test to show you the minerals present.
And this may be mean, but Organic products may just mean they grow things without any additives to put needed minerals in. We bought a horse who was on an organic hay and grain diet. Seller was quite proud of herself for feeding such a “healthy” diet. Horse had a nice body, but lacked bloom, poor hair and hoof quality. It took us a year to get him looking like I expect one of our horses to look and be able to perform, grow out all new hooves that held a shoe on. He lacked Selenium to almost a dangerous level. So being “natural” using Organic feeds is not a warranty of keeping a horse healthy, although organic labeling is supposed to meet certain criteria.
There is a LOT to learn about creating a diet. JB gave a lot of good advice, but you have to establish a baseline with the testing of horses, soil, hay you use NOW, to figure out what needs changing to improve things. You can blow thru a lot of money, over feed some minerals, with just buying well-advertised products. Salt is a basic, and new information tells us we need to add a Tablespoon of loose salt daily, because horses can’t lick enough off a block to get sufficient amounts needed. I have changed my horse diets to reflect this new information.
My horses are on a forage diet, using the old-fashioned defination. They graze or get hay daily as their main source of food. They get a minimal amount of a cracked corn, oats and soybean meal (protien source) mixed to our “recipe” as their grain. No sugar or molasses needed for them to clean it up. No commercial mixed feed. They get Old Kent vitamins, plus Selenium and Vit E, the loose salt in wet beet pulp (more forage food). The soybean meal provides their protein for good hooves and hair, all are pretty shiny with long tails!
I would agree with JB again, that abscesses may be a hoof trim issue. Do you and friend share the same Farrier? An unbalanced hoof puts odd pressure on places not made for that impact or weight carrying ability. Hoof has a LOT of moisture in it, can change in minutes with trim work! Seen it happen!! Unfortunately some trimmers and Farriers still believe that horses need corrective trimming as mature animals, which can throw the whole animal out of balance. Uneven landing, bad weighting, can cause abcesses. Others just don’t do good work, need replacing. Horse will wear a bare hoof into the condition horse PREFERS to wear. Then the Farrier just needs to rasp off the rough edges to make your old girl happy, and MAYBE quit getting abcesses!
OP you’re newer here but just as an fyi JB is like the person for nutrition on here for literally pushing 25 years so I’d heavily weight that advice.
Theres a lot of fluffy pseudo science social media content, influencers, blogs, and supplements that can feed you a ton of misinformation.
Both are stored in the body, which makes over-supplementation possible. Vit E is one of the fat-soluble vitamins, meaning it gets stored in fat. Vit A is as well. This is why many horses who get enough pasture during the grazing season can still have good blood levels after a period of months of only hay, where Vit E levels are low to non-existent.
Organic farmers can, and usually do, still fertilize, but those fertilizers have to meet organic standards.
Se is a function of what naturally occurs in soil. Some areas don’t have much, so not much ends up in the grass or the hay. That applies regardless of a hay being organic or not, as not even non-organic fertilizers supply Se. But in your particular case, there are lots of people who do run an “organic” system, who think that means doing absolutely nothing to the soil or the plants. That may be organic, but it’s not GOOD organic farming.
Absolutely, which is one of the biggest misconceptions about what Organic really is. It is not inherently healthier. You can grow the best variety of grass, or tomatoes, and do absolutely nothing to the soil, or for pest (insects, weeds) protection, and grow a crappy product. And, some of the pesticides allowed in organic farming are just as harmful as ones that can be used for non-organic
The basic requirement is about 1tbsp per 500lb per day, so 2tbsp for a 1000lb horse in no work. The requirement goes up with sweat, whether because it’s hot, or they’re working hard enough
@GraceLikeRain awwww!! 
It’s actually more complicated than that, which is why this map:
[USGS Soil Selenium map]
And this map:
[Forage Selenium map]
Look so different.
Soil pH and soil sulfur impact selenium uptake in plants:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0147651320316262
Which is why a need for selenium supplement is more common in the east, despite high soil selenium.
tl;dr: you can’t just look at the USGS soil selenium map, because how much selenium winds up in plants your horse eats is not a function of how much selenium is in the soil.
Came here to say this.
OP, I took a quick breeze through the products you linked and just want to say again: careful you don’t get sucked into the social media misinformation machine. LOTS of well-marketed pseudoscience out there.
Best practice is hay and grass testing, blood tests, and balancing your diet to that. If that isn’t possible (again, even neighboring fields can test differently so if you get hay from varying sources it may or may not be useful to test, but a pull for E and Se can be educational), a best guess and a quality forage or ration balancer plus salt is usually sufficient and cheaper!
It is helpful to know the minimum needs of your horses for the basics. Often times people find that their expensive supplements have a list of good things in such tiny quantities they’re completely useless. It’s also SO easy to unbalance the diet and (for example) wreck their feet when doing a piecemeal approach without really crunching numbers.
FWIW - the basic plan of FeedXL is now free, and is a good place to start if you just want to dip your toe in all of this. If you don’t have forage analysis it is less useful, but if you’re feeding from different sources it’s better than nothing at all!
Simke thanks for the maps. We are blue zone Michigan on both maps. “They” say glaciers scraped away our Selenium so it needs supplementing in all our farm animals to keep them healthy. Not much, but some.
JB We add Selenium with Vit E to each horse’s grain daily. It is only one eigth of a teaspoon daily, but keeps them in the acceptable range when Selenium tested. With them mostly in work, sweated almost daily, they need the additional supplementation of salt and Selenium (with Vit E) to keep everything working properly. The Selenium does not get absorbed without the Vit E addition. Testing has not shown them to be over supplemented with Vit E.
OP may not need additional supplementation. But they won’t KNOW that without blood testing and Selenium testing (two separate tests using blood) of each horse. Two horses fed the same diet, grazing, can test at different mineral levels because of the way their bodies use the available minerals. I had two like that. Had to change things after reading test results!
I know about the restrictions of producing true organic food, animals, in farming. They need more acres than I have available. The price of organically acceptable fertilizers is beyond expensive! I can see why they don’t usually spend so much to use it. But just spreading manure on fields does not provide enough in needed minerals or the proper proportions, to provide good products. I am more towards production farming, using non-organic fertilizers on the pastures and hayfields here to get the balance needed in grass and hay.
My present feed program works for us in our location, uses of the equines. It may or may not work in other locations because local conditions would vary from mine.
What’s particularly interesting to me is how overlaying the soil pH map & the soil sulfur maps comes pretty close to producing the forage selenium map:
[Soil pH map]
[Soil Sulfur map]
Low pH (acidic soil) and high sulfur limit how much selenium plants can uptake. This gets discussed very little with regard to foodstuff for horses, and lots of articles just reference the USGS soil selenium map OR a forage selenium map…which is confusing, since they contradict each other in many areas!
Anyway, as you say: super important to test the horse and individual horses may have different needs, even if on identical diets. Maps are best used to drive testing need rather than supplementation need. But the USGS soil selenium map sure isn’t the full picture there!
Simke, those are interesting additional maps! Perhaps the glaciers dug deeper in some places than others to get varying results. I never heard about acidic soil affecting Selenium in plants. Just that some locations had plants with too much Selenium, could not graze the land without animal issues or deaths. Sheep related. We do have spotty Selenium in Michigan. The next County west has some Selenium in their soil. None in our County 20 miles away. The East Coast is also Selenium poor. Both Eastern horses we purchased, one from Virginia, one from Conn, had to get the Selenium shots immediately after testing. Vet was afraid they would die because the numbers were so low!
The more you learn, the more is still waiting to be found!!
I’m just chiming in here to say I live in an alleged low selenium area. I test my horses’ Vit E and Se annually. They both test high in E and Se. I feed K.I.S. without Se.
“A function of” (definitions: related to, changes with) was accurate enough for this purpose, or so I thought. My comment wasn’t intended to be a chemistry lesson on how Se ends up in plants. We’d have to do that for other minerals too if that was the case. High iron, or zinc, or phosphorous in soil impedes uptake of copper. So yes, nutrient uptake into plants IS more complicated, I didn’t see the need to go into all that in my comment
The more FeedXL results I see, the less I trust it, so caveat emptor. Same with MadBarn. They both are producing results that don’t always match with even the data they have in their database, and their databases on GAs for too many products are incorrect. FeedXL tells everyone their horse is deficient in folic acid, for example, unless you’re specifically adding a supp with enough in it, without any caveat that horses make their own. A report I saw a few months ago said a horse was low in Se, despite their own results saying he was getting around 3mg. MadBarn just yesterday reported that their horse was low in copper and zinc, and despite their levels for that being higher from what the product’s actual page has, even though the resulting number was 130% of the horse’s RDA
I’ve seen way too many incorrect reports that have sent people down rabbit holes of supplements to fill in all the gaps 
you don’t need one to have the other absorbed, they are different pathways. Vit E uses bile to get micellized in order to cross the intestinal barrier. Se is absorbed (properly) through amino acid pathways, which is why you really need to use an organic form, like selenomethione.
E and Se are really the only 2 nutrients you can test blood for. Everything else has to come from the diet analysis. And yes, test each horse, because no 2 individuals absorb all nutrients the same, including E and Se.
I knew Mad Barn was a wild card, but hadn’t realized FeedXL was that far off these days! I always ignore the folic acid but had good luck with it in the past for calories, protein, and E.
It’s a good concept, too bad the numbers don’t make sense 
it’s very unfortunate for sure, especially since it’s not just a rarity that I’ve seen things like that. The folic acid has always been an issue, but more and more I’m seeing either wrong numbers, or mis-information based on the numbers.
OH, I remember the last one - horse was eating 8lb of a particular feed, and FeedXL was saying he was < 100% of his RDI for copper, zinc, selenium, and something else. 8lb of that feed ALONE provided enough of those things, never mind that they exist in forage (which was input, an actual analysis, so ok, Se wasn’t there but it never is), and including some in the supplements provided.
This is a great point and why I posted. This is what’s super interesting:
Much of the east coast is quite high in soil selenium. Pennsylvania is a great example of this (but certainly not the only one)–check out the soil selenium map in PA. The entire state is almost all solid red, the highest level shown. Connecticut is also almost entirely red (since you mentioned a horse from here coming in quite low!)
But compare to the forage selenium map. Huuuuuuuuuge difference, right?
Because of the pH and sulfur issue. And exactly why it’s really incorrect to say that high soil selenium means high selenium across the board. Someone could easily look at the soil selenium map for quite a lot of the east coast and not realize that yes, absolutely–low forage selenium can STILL be at play despite high soil selenium.
Interesting, huh?
(What’s also pretty wild?? Sulfur impacts copper uptake! Which is such a missing piece for me here in CT where my copper need is super high. Seriously blew my mind. 
)
Isn’t that interesting?! I tested one of mine this year, too. She came in slightly over normal range. It’s unknown if that’s because she was quite high from living in Colorado and it’s been dropping slowly over time, or if she’s high from something here (where we are “inadequate” on the forage map but top of the range on the soil map.)
I was surprised, moving to CT, that none of my vets advised selenium supplementation or even testing. This is the first time I’ve tested in a long time. Do you see your selenium value change much in your yearly testing?
@Simke, I don’t! It’s fascinating to me. I’ve been testing for five years. The horses are very different. One wears a muzzle all year long every day and is a VERY easy keeper. The other is a TB. The levels are pretty consistent. Se is a bit above range as is the E. I am the only one around here I know who tests for this. Many of my friends supplement Se. When I suggest testing based on my experience, they say “everybody knows we are in a Se deficient area”.
That’s so interesting! I agree it’s just so fascinating and so reflective of how complex this sort of thing is. (And frankly, of how little we know!)
I often wonder about how a farmer manages the hay field, or how a farm manages their pasture, plays in. If a farmer in an acidic area is aggressive about liming and bringing the field up to neutral, how much does that change the selenium in the hay? Or the same with a pasture.
But it’s clear that soil selenium has very little correlation to forage selenium, and man–that just gets no attention. Soil pH seems to be a much better map, if one wants to look at a single soil map.
It’s frustrating how $$ it is to test the horse or the hay. But I’ll check my mare next year to see which direction she’s trending, and I’m super tempted to at least test my main lot of hay this fall!
I don’t believe that is accurate.
Se and Vitamin E do act synergistically at the cellular level to stop free radical formation/accumulation, though.
