What's your favorite bucket/bowl/device for feeding your horse's meal out of?

[One_Two_Three]

My horse gets a lot of food. 6lbs of alfalfa pellets by volume is quite a bit, plus add all his supplements on top and it’s pretty crowded. He used to eat out of one of those on the ground little feed pans. However, he enjoys playing with his lips (his lips are ALWAYS moving) and when he eats, the lips splash around his goodies all over the ground, where I can’t be sure he’s getting all his important supplements.

I swapped him to a traditional water bucket hanging on the wall, where he doesn’t dump his food out, but we all know it doesn’t appear super comfortable to eat out of one of those. I’ve seen a few people who have ‘ergonomical’ feed buckets that allow the horse’s face to fit better…

anyways…

what do you guys use? Particularly those who have food flingers or horses who eat a lot per meal by volume.

[Highflyer]

One of our boarders came with a gigantic rubber tub that works great (think the size of a muck tub, but the depth of thee regular tub).

[Equestrian2]

One of my friends feeds her gelding out of a large rubber feeding tub with 2 big round rocks at the bottom. That way he can’t dump the feed and it also slows him down while he’s eating.

[Texarkana]

I like feed bags, but if I have to feed in a stall, I’m a big fan of the Dan’s Super Belmont Feed Tubs with a lip hung in the corner.

In a perfect world, I’d rather feed horses in a container on the ground, but it seems for horses getting any sort of large volume of feed, at some point you’ll experience at least one major incident of feed wastage.

[IPEsq]

Ones like these are my favorite:

http://www.bigdweb.com/Feed-Tub-Large-30-Qt/productinfo/1124/

[cayuse]

I use a medium sized black rubber feed pan for my mare who likes to “flip and slurp.” It’s the “floor version” not the hanging kind and it’s just heavy enough she does not toss it everywhere. I think the come in a variety of sizes. My gelding had a round wall hanging feed tub that I took the hanger rings off of and used as a floor feeder and that contained his slop pretty well. It was fairly deep. He had big meals of mash and bad table manners.

[cayuse]

IPEsq link shows the exact one I used for the sloppy gelding, I believe. Worked well.

[fordtraktor]

I use the same one as IPEsq with a feed saver ring on it for my horse that slings feed.

[JRG]

http://www.bigdweb.com/Feed-Bucket-Better-Bucket-20-Qt/productinfo/BB78/

My horse would always tip over his ground feeder at shows. This he loved because he could get his head into it.

[merrygoround]

Like Texarkana, I like Dan’s Feed Tubs, I use the 5 gallon size. There are similar ones on the market but Dan’s are the most durable.

I also love Dan’s Muck tubs, I have one that’s over 35 years old, having hauled it with me to overnight Horse Trials,

[Scribbler]

My horse has a fairly big mash, about 3.5 pounds dry weight (alfalfa cubes, beet pulp, oats, supplements).

I had a plastic corner mounted manger that worked fine. I took it down last summer when I was power-washing the stall, and didn’t put it back up. Instead, I went to a flat black rubber pan. Horse is too busy eating to play with it until it is empty and licked clean! The pan fits her current mash, but would be too small for 6 lbs of cubes, I think. But you can get a double-height pan.

I don’t find any feed gets wasted. But the part of her stall where she eats is swept clear of shavings before I feed her, and then I usually try to plop the pan on top of her hay. So if she dribbles into the hay, she just eats it up, and she sometimes licks the rubber mats clean. She has a run-out paddock and isn’t a stall pooper, so her eating area stays clean.

I went with the rubber pan for two reasons. First, I can scrub it out after every use, while the manger was a PITA to get off the wall. She licked the manger clean inside, but the outside got a bit slimy. Also, maresy hated the mare next door staring at her while she ate (there is see-through wire on the top half of the walls between the stalls) and tended to toss her head around, snap her teeth, and ended up spitting feed everywhere, all over the walls (then the neighbor horse licked the spit-out mash off the wire, and that made maresy even angrier). When she eats off the ground, she doesn’t see her neighbor and is much calmer.

However, when feeding other people’s horses, I don’t like the rubber pans so much if you have a horse that poops all over the stall, and especially if you have a horse that poops in the pan! Very gross to deal with when you’re just trying to do a friend a fast favor, way above the call of duty IMHO

And there is something about those rubber pans … they can be very hard to get totally clean, for some reason. You can be scrubbing and scrubbing and the rinse water is still greyish. They pick up all the dust from the bedding and even the scum from powdered supplements, etc.

[BeckyS]

Well, one of my geldings is eating from an old roaster pan, but I’m sure that doesn’t look all that cool or traditional…but it works!

The other one usually eats out of a bucket. He’s got a long, skinny head and hasn’t complained about the size of the bucket.

In the summer, when I don’t need to give as much feed or any alfalfa cubes, they get fed from a large rubber pan.

[betsyk]

Huge rubber floor feeder. You could put a big (50#) salt block in it, to keep it from being as easy to move or dump, assuming your horse doesn’t mind if the salt block melts into his (soaked?) feed. One of mine hated his mash to be salty; the other doesn’t care.

[leaf]

Muck buckets for my drafts with big heads.

[sublimequine]

When my rescue filly was getting a lot of feed I used a plastic muck tub. Strapped it to stall corner with bucket straps.

[Highflyer]

I just looked and the rubber one we have is 15 gallons. I think it is a fortiflex. The one downside is that if you use it outside and they play with it and drag it to the other side of the field it is really awkward to move back But it’s too big to flip easily!

[cutter99]

Tubtrugs. They come in a variety of sizes and are hard to destroy.

http://us.tubtrugs.com/collections/gorilla

[Displaced_Yankee]

[QUOTE=JRG;8460018]
http://www.bigdweb.com/Feed-Bucket-Better-Bucket-20-Qt/productinfo/BB78/

My horse would always tip over his ground feeder at shows. This he loved because he could get his head into it.[/QUOTE]

These are great. My horses seem much more comfortable eating from these than triangle corner feeders or regular buckets and they disinfect/clean better than rubber tubs.

[gumtree]

[QUOTE=Texarkana;8459907]
I like feed bags, but if I have to feed in a stall, I’m a big fan of the Dan’s Super Belmont Feed Tubs with a lip hung in the corner.

In a perfect world, I’d rather feed horses in a container on the ground, but it seems for horses getting any sort of large volume of feed, at some point you’ll experience at least one major incident of feed wastage.[/QUOTE]

Big fan of Dan’s also. IMO pretty much the gold standard. They will pretty much last a lifetime. As will their muck buckets as Merrygoround said. As will their water buckets. Have been knocking frozen water buckets against my rock wall for years to break up the ice. Not one has ever cracked/broken.

Not a fan of their fence feed buckets. Well made but crappy design. Not deep enough so horses can and do “throw” feed out of them. Like all the time. Feed gets “trapped” in the molded “hollow” in the lip that fits on the fence. So horses bang them around to knock the feed out. If they are not strapped down well which is a PITA, they end up on the ground so you have to jump over the fence to get them. For the price they could have drilled some holes in the bottom so rain water drains out. Not a hard DIY but shouldn’t have to.

[MysticOakRanch]

http://www.horse.com/item/fortiflex-over-the-fence-feeder/E000523/

If you have a place to put these - my horses come in to a pipe panel mare motel for feeding, so I have these on the pipe panels, then I use a small chain to keep them from removing the feeders when they are done. Far prefer these to buckets because there is no metal handle for them to get hurt on.

You can put quite a bit in them - I’ve done as much as 8 pounds of pellets plus all the supplements, and it was only about half full. They last quite a while - a few of my guys pound on them and play with them quite a bit.

Horses in pasture eat out of the huge fortiflex tubs - and those do get beat up - mine step in them and drag them around. They are EXPENSIVE and seem to last a couple of years before they are totally destroyed. Muck buckets are too fragile - you have to take them out afterwards, otherwise they break easily and do have sharp edges that can hurt a horse who puts his foot through it.