A ration balancer is my “go to” base feed as well. I’m partial to Gro N Win, but they are all mostly equivalent.
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Popping in to ask a question that’s relevant, might help OP, and doesn’t start a new thread: Can you feed a non-senior horse a senior feed without any impact? (I’m talking a 4/5-year-old). Are there any benefits?
Some senior feeds are meant just to be the “grain” component and some are meant to be the full diet “complete feed” replacing both hay and “grain.”
The latter are not going to be nutrient dense enough to be that useful if fed just as a grain. They will contain a lot of hay chaff and other roughage.
I haven’t gone deep into senior feeds as there’s only a couple of feed brands in our market. I am going to guess that “senior feed” can be interpreted widely by different companies.
All the feed companies have a range of feeds, which might include senior, foal starter, brood mare, high energy performance, low carb high fat “cool calorie,” lower carb “maintenance,” and perhaps an old school sweet feed. You need to look at labels to see what makes the senior feed different from say the maintenance or the high performance feeds from the same brand.
I think the most important thing is getting the vitamin and minerals covered, and then if the horse is young and growing, to make sure they have enough protein. You could do this with adding alfalfa to the hay ration and feeding a good ration balancer or VMS.
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Sure. I fed my homebred TC Sr feed for a couple years while he was a young horse. The Sr feed was low NSC and provided enough calories in the minimum serving for his size to keep his weight up. Could I have found a non Sr feed that had the same profile, almost certainly. But the TC Sr was easy to source and fit my needs at that time. Now the same horse is mature and not working hard and does fine on a balancer and plenty of good hay.
Some folks say that Sr feeds are more easily digestible and therefore superior to non senior feeds. My opinion is that’s entirely dependent on the actual feeds in question.
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Forage first. Then I start with a ration balancer, and move to TC Senior/a mix of the two depending on a horse’s caloric needs.
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Most have feeding rates based on whether the horse can, or can’t eat, a suitable amount of hay. Those are all complete feeds, that can also be fed as regular feeds.
And, not all Sr feeds are complete feeds and shouldn’t be fed as such.
Lots and lots and lots of non-Sr horses are eating a Sr feed as their “grain” 
The benefits are all about the horse. Many Sr feeds are moderate calorie and higher fat, some are lower calories and lower fat. They’re generally just more easily chewed and theoretically more easily digested. Some are extruded, many are textured, some are pelleted, so it all really depends on what fits a horse’s needs, even if they’re not a Sr
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More in-depth question for you. I know the complete feeds tend to have lower calories per serving (as they’re meant to be fed over 3-4 times per day to horses that cannot eat hay). One of these that comes to mind in particular is Triple Crown Senior. Is this the case?
TC Senior is a great feed, and I mention it because my barn is switching to that from Nutrena Pro Force Senior. My hard-keeping senior can eat hay, and is currently eating 8 lbs per day of the PF Senior (plus 4 lbs of alfalfa pellets per day) in attempt to help him gain weight (I made the mistake of putting him on Fiber Plus - a good economy feed but not for him as he lost of a lot of top line). It’s my understanding that PF Senior is not a true complete feed like TC Senior. Does this mean I might expect to see him drop weight on the TC senior if I feed at the same rate?
I can also provide my own feed at the barn - I provide Purina Strategy Healthy Edge for my easier-keeping OTTB performance horse. I’d consider switching him to Purina Equine Senior Active along with my hard-keeping retiree IF the TC Senior isn’t a good fit for my retiree. The reason being to prevent my very sweet and hard-working barn owner from having to sort through yet another bag of feed (and Senior Active is easier to find in a pinch where I am than Healthy Edge). The senior active has a lower feed rate than the healthy edge for the OTTB.
This whole scenario is why I asked about feeding young horses senior feed.
Feed is tricky! I love reading these discussions. When I was a backyard rider as a kid, my parents did all the purchasing, so it’s been a huge learning curve as an adult making all my horse’s decisions.
TC Sr is 1546 cal/lb, which is pretty average, probably pretty close to the middle of the bell curve. Tribute feeds really trend towards the lower end, 1300-1400. Not many feeds at all, much less Sr feeds, are more than 1600 or so. I only know of 3 that are 1700+, and that’s TC Complete (not a Sr feed but IS a complete feed), TC Sr Gold (1800), and Purina Ultium (1900). There may be more, but they’re few and far between, and probably not the widely available ones.
It’s definitely a complete feed, there are feeding directions for horses not eating hay, and the summary under the product selection on the Nutrena website says “High fat, beet pulp based complete feed for the needs of active senior horses”
Regardless of being complete, these are things you just have to try. TC Sr IS a great feed, but some horses do terribly on it, and the same for PF Sr.
There’s nothing about any Sr feed which makes it inherently inappropriate for any non-Sr horse. TC Sr is a GREAT growth and gestation feed, as are some other Sr feeds, for example.
