Nutrition question here! My 20 year old TB is currently on 6 lb of Tribute Kalm n EZ + 1 lb of Essential K per day. She gets 24 lb of hay in her stall and eats hay freely in her pasture. I need to cut back on my expenses and a friend suggested switching from Tribute Kalm n EZ to rolled oats. The ideal option would be to remove the 6 lb of Tribute Kalm n EZ (without replacing with oats), and then she could go out on pasture board. While she looks great right now, she has always been a hard keeper so I’m worried she couldn’t handle the lack of grain in her diet. Any suggestions?
In my area rolled oats are $31.00 a bag, Tribute Kalm and EZ is $34.00 a bag which translates into a $12 a month savings. For that $12 you are getting a balanced low NSC ration. I can see where field board would be a cost savings but can she not do field board but also still receive her grain ration? I would also take into consideration her age, 20 can bring about metabolic changes that coming into winter need to be closely watched. Weight gain or loss can happen quickly and with winter coming on, could be difficult, expensive and time consuming to overcome.
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As @four2farm points out, rolled oats are basically the same price as the Kalm N EZ that you are feeding now. A couple of bucks per bag is not worth dinking around with your horse’s health when it is currently doing well on it. Since Kalm N EZ is a complete fortified feed, thus suppling all her basic vitamins/minerals, you will have to start a good vit/min supplement at the same time that you discontinue the Kalm N EZ and begin a rolled oat diet. Can’t imagine you will save even a single dollar doing it this way.
Transitioning to pasture board will only decrease her current supplemental forage/feed requirement if she actually gets more calories from grass than she is currently getting with her normal management. More hours on crap or nonexistent pasture won’t mean you can feed her less other stuff. In fact, constantly moving around on crap pasture will burn more calories than she does now being stalled and she might even require even more hay/grain than she does now. Do you have a plan to feed her on pasture board if the added grass, if any, does not adequately keep weight on her? I will also remind you that you are making this change at the exact season change moment going into fall. Do you have any idea how long any existing “grass” will last? Even if it is there now and seeing a mild cool seasonal surge in greenness and growth, I cannot imagine that this will last or be enough for her over the entire winter season.
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The tribute kalm and ez is contributing about 9,000 calories a day to your horse’s diet (at about 1500 calories per pound). That’s quite a bit. You can look at other sources of calories such as alfalfa or a cheaper feed and try to replace those calories with something cheaper to feed.
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Senior horses are not simple or inexpensive to manage, unfortunately. There’s really no easy way to replace the calories and nutrition provided by 6lbs of a fortified feed like Kalm n Ez. Rolled oats would not be appropriate. You’d have to feed them almost pound for pound to replace the caloric content of the grain, while losing the nutrition and skyrocketing the NSC.
Is there a specific reason why you’re feeding a balancer on top of a full ration of fortified feed? That seems like a simple way to cut some costs - you’re doubling up and you likely don’t need to.
If your current farm is not willing or able to provide grain to pasture boarded horses, and your horse needs those supplemental calories to thrive, it may be that pasture board is not the appropriate solution.
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She’s most likely feeding the balancer because she’s not feeding the full recommend amount of the grain
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OP stated they’re feeding 6lbs a day. Depending on the horse’s weight and workload, that’s likely meeting the minimum feeding requirement.
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I’m going to guess that someone at Tribute told her to add the EK. You’d be astonished how many people have been directed by Tribute reps to feed full amounts of EK on top of full (or more) amounts of a regular feed. And this is all around the country, so it’s not a single rep who’s that badly educated 
I’d save the money and not feed the EK, and you can either go with that, or add 1lb more of the KNE.
If there’s a way to replace some of her grass hay with alfalfa, up to about 20% of the total, without increasing your board or having to buy it yourself, that would be an increase in calories and you could potentially feed just 2-2.5lb of the EK
But no, simply dropping 9000k-ish calories is unlikely to work for her, and replacing the KNE with oats is a pound for pound drop in calories, a huge increase in starch, and not saving any significant money.
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Ok, lots of good info in the replies so far, thank you! To explain a little further, my understanding was that I could feed less pounds of oats versus Tribute grain, which would save cost. I thought oats provided more calories. I’m now thinking this is incorrect?
I would love to switch my horse to pasture board. She would continue to get hay freely in pasture. Hay 24/7 basically. There is no grass in her pasture. But they will not feed more than supplements in a feed bag, and I’m not sure she could keep weight with only a ration balancer. But maybe it’s worth a try?
oats are around 1200 cal/lb. The KNE feeds are in the 1400 cal/lb range. Plus, you’d be losing a lot of protein and amino acids, a lot of trace minerals, you’d be adding a lot of phosphous to a grass-based diet which may already have plenty of P and/or not quite enough Ca which is being helped by the fortified KNE.
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Calories aren’t the only consideration, as JB said. Protein, trace minerals, etc. are all coming from the KNE and cannot be found in the oats.
KNE is approximately 1500kcal per lb, and EK is roughly 1400kcal per lb. That puts her caloric intake from 6lbs of KNE and 1lb of EK somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,500kcal daily. If you fed 2lbs of EK per day, dropped the KNE and kept her hay exactly as it is now, you’re still reducing her calories from grain by nearly 75%. It’s very unlikely she’d maintain body condition this way, all else equal.
24/7 turnout also could result in more total movement/activity than on stall board, increasing her calorie requirements. Depending on your climate, she may also start expending energy to maintain her body temperature as winter temps start setting in.
If you could add a higher calorie forage in a considerable quantity (hard to do in a shared pasture setting), you might be able to get away with it.
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Ok, it’s sounding like oats will not save me money at all (or only a tiny amount). What about just reducing her grain (slowly of course) to about 3 lb / day? That would save me half the cost on grain.
Like JB said, if she’s getting at least the recommended minimum feeding rate of the KNE, you should not need to add a full pound of EK. I would drop the EK before cutting her feed. 6lbs of KNE is providing a lot of calories that she would probably not be able to replace with forage, as well as the amino acids, minerals, and vitamins that may not be in the forage. Cutting her feed to save money may be robbing Peter to pay Paul in the long run when she starts dropping weight.
You may be able to feed less of a higher fat supplement in conjunction with the EK, but odds are the price per pound of a higher fat supplement may not offset the price of the regular feed (ie feed 1 lb/day of EK and 2-3 lbs of K Finish).
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How much does the horse weigh? 4lbs is probably about the minimum you could feed without shortchanging her nutritionally, assuming you drop the EK and she’s a 1000lb horse in no or light work.
Will she eat oil? Good old vegetable oil isn’t fancy or perfectly balanced but it’s an economical way to add a lot of calories without much volume. 1 cup of oil is equal to about 2000kcal. You could replace a good chunk of the lost calories that way.
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I would not expect that your horse will stay the same weight if you start feeding her less, especially as a hardish keeper.
Will they do one feeding a day? Sounds like they are willing to with a nose bag. I would switch to 5 lbs. of Kalm Ultra instead of what you are doing, once a day in the nose bag.
I have several 20 yo retirees who are TBs, eating 6 lbs of Kalm Ultra and looking great. hard keepers. The money savings could be the pasture board and not the feed itself.
FWIW, I used to feed Kalm N Ez and I did not like the finish it put on the horses. Kalm Ultra is only a little more expensive but more fat, etc. and produces a much nicer end result. “cheaper” isn’t always better. If you do Kalm Ultra you can stop the Essential K.
Editing to add another thought: can you go out once a day and do a second feeding? Or at least enough days per week it will matter? That’s another option to keep the same calories going in, while moving to field board.
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Um…if you cut your hard-keeping 20-year-old mare’s grain ration in half and don’t replace those calories with anything you will definitely save yourself some money. Your mare will also definitely lose a lot of weight.
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Your best option would be to call around to feed stores and see if you can find a similar product to Kalm N EZ at a lower price.
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I’d reach out to MadBarn and request an online feed analysis. I listened to the founder, Scott Ciesler, on a podcast earlier today and he mentioned a field study done last year in which 6,515 equine diets were analyzed with some interesting findings. It seems that most horse diets are:
- Oversupplying energy (84.5% were above requirement)
- Oversupplying protein (97.9% were above requirement)
- Oversupplying iron (99.5% were above requirement)
- Undersupplying electrolytes, such as sodium (70.9% were under requirement)
- Undersupplying key antioxidants such as selenium (49.3% were under requirement) and vitamin E (57% were under requirement)
If your mare is out with 24/7 access to hay, you’d think she’d be able to make up those calories lost from the ration balancer, no? A hay analysis would be worth spending on to be sure, of course. And then the vitamin & mineral supplement could be fed with a handful of sweet feed (just as a carrier for the supplement), so your barn isn’t having to funnel large amounts of grain into her via a feed bag.
I actually just switched from a Tribute ration balancer to one of MadBarn’s vitamin & mineral supplements.
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As others have pointed out, switching to an unfortified grain is almost never a cost effective alternative to a balanced commercial feed. However, it is highly likely that you could find a higher quality alternative to your current Tribute feed that would allow you to better maximize your feed dollars. What brands are available to you, OP?
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I think you’ve been given very solid advice here. My two cents are when you have something that’s working for an easy keeper or a hard one…don’t fuss with it. I get you’re trying to cut some costs and eliminating the ration balancer seems to be the obvious choice to start with. Anymore than that, what happens when your horse inevitability drops weight or other issues crop up due to not getting enough nutrients? $$$ down the road.
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