My boarding barn feeds Healthy Edge to everyone and I’m just wondering what the general consensus is. I won’t feed it to my guys because I was really not pleased with Purina’s ration balancer or some of the other feeds I’ve tried in the past.
My trainer calls is horse crack but the barn manager thinks the earth revolves around it. At 18% NSC, it doesn’t seem too awful on the surface?
I have been feeding Purina Healthy Edge for about a year now and have been fairly satisfied with it.
For the first year I had my mare I had control of her feed and did a grain free diet (alfalfa pellets, beet pulp, rice brain, ration balancer, + minerals/hoof supplement) while mare lived out on grass. She survived a fairly hard winter (living out most of the time) and came out of the winter fat. I was pleased with that plan but when I shipped her to FL had to adhere to a boarding farm’s choice of feed. They fed ProForce Fuel and my mare looked terrible. I mean awful, it was embarrassing and I was desperate to get her out of there - and she was hotter to boot. I don’t know if it was the rest of her program, but that situation and feed just didn’t work.
When I took over management and brought the mare to my own property (inheriting a few boarders for company to my one horse) the horses were on the lower end Purina feeds. I switched over to Purina Healthy Edge for one of the boarders and have more or less loved it. With good hay both horses now have dapples and great coats in addition to great body condition. It works for these two. I don’t feel like it creates hotness (have TB mare that is young) and when it was cold/they needed a little more I fed beet pulp and a little oil.
I have really come to believe that grain/feed can help, but that the base of the diet must be hay and it must be high quality. If the hay quality is high and the quantity is ample I am very happy feeding Healthy Edge, my horse looks the best I’ve ever seen her right now. If I couldn’t get decent hay, I’d probably switch to Triple Crown (the cost difference isn’t huge).
I have the dilemma of moving from FL to KS in the coming months and losing control of feed again- to SafeChoice. I will probably continue to buy Healthy Edge and feed a small extra meal following rides. I like H.E. enough that I’m afraid to come off it.
I’ve fed Healthy Edge to my (Air Fern) guys for two years. They like the taste and seem to do quite well on it.
All are shiny, dabbled, with great hooves. They are fed high quality hay and my pastures are also very good (so good they need muzzles most of the year).
I’m happy with it. I’ve not noticed any inconsistencies between bags.
18% NSC is right at the borderline between what is considered low and high starch feeds. If you horse is currently on a lower starch (or total NSC) feed, then moving to the HE might make him a bit more hyper, but of course there’s really only one way to know for sure. 
Personally, my problem with Purina feeds as a whole is that they do not use fixed formulas, which means the quantity and quality of ingredients can vary widely from one batch to the next.
I don’t like it at all. If you look at the feeding chart, they only recommend 12 lbs of hay for a 1,000 lb horse. Then there is this blurb: “This is the recommended minimum amount of hay to be fed. If feeding more hay, reduce the feeding rate of Strategy® Healthy Edge® horse feed by 1 pound for every additional 2 pounds of hay fed.” I strongly feel that a horse needs hay/pasture in front of it 24/7, so you should first do that, and then fill in any holes with the appropriate feed. So a horse is more likely to be eating closer to 20 lbs of hay/pasture. If you reduce the Strategy as directed, your horse will most likely be getting enough of the rda’s. It just does not make much sense to me.
If you have an easy keeper, you should muzzle or dry lot the horse, and feed a lesser quality (but not poor!) hay that went mature and is more stemmy than leafy.
A harder keeper should have all the good quality hay and pasture it can eat.
You will often find that once you go that route, you can totally avoid a concentrate for many of the easy keepers, and the hard keepers will require a minimum of a premium concentrate.
So Palm Beach, essentially they are telling you to do exactly what you are doing. As far as RDA of vitamins and mineral, no feed will give you the recommended amounts, if you feed minimal amounts of feed. That’s where Ration Balancers come in.
At the barn I’m in, the horses get free choice hay in winter, and all the pasture they can stuff in in summer, a handful of grain, and a ration balancer.
And I’m more than happy as are the horses
Don’t care for strategy healthy edge or just the strategy gx,don’t think either are good feeds.
If horse is an easy keeper they don’t need anything but hay or grass…and a vit/min,that only requires 2 to 4 oz. My horses have done just fine, in the past on hay only diets nothing else given.
Only reason i feed hard feed now is because of my old mare…once she’s dies i’ll go back to hay only diets.
[QUOTE=merrygoround;8603940]
So Palm Beach, essentially they are telling you to do exactly what you are doing. As far as RDA of vitamins and mineral, no feed will give you the recommended amounts, if you feed minimal amounts of feed. That’s where Ration Balancers come in.
At the barn I’m in, the horses get free choice hay in winter, and all the pasture they can stuff in in summer, a handful of grain, and a ration balancer.
And I’m more than happy as are the horses[/QUOTE]
No, they don’t, they have the amount of hay too low. If you feed 20 lbs of hay a day, the amount of this feed is below .3% of body weight for 1000 lb horse, and they don’t recommend that this feed be fed below that amount.
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