By Vicki Glasgow

Harbro

Many horses will now be tight for grass, if there is any left at all, and whilst some people may have the luxury of copious winter grazing, others will now be heavily reliant on hay and haylage.

If you are worried about your horse losing condition this winter, the following points should help to get your equine friend back on track.

1. Assess body condition

Remember that horses are designed to lose weight during the lean months of winter.

If your horse is generally in good body condition during the summer, it is not a major issue for him to lose a little weight over the winter months. If your horse is prone to being on the chubby side, then winter weight loss is a good thing.

If your horse still looks healthy and you cannot see his ribs then there is no need to panic. Some slight tweaks to his diet will solve the issue.

Assess your horse’s body condition before making any unnecessary changes.

2. Check forage provision

For the majority of horses and ponies grass, hay and haylage should make up at least 70% of their diet and in many cases probably makes up between 90-100% of their diet.

It is therefore the greatest contributor to your horse’s diet, in terms of kg per day. What this essentially means, is that the nutritional quality of your forage is key to helping your hose maintain condition during the winter.

If you are able, try to purchase hay with a high energy content (ME (MJ/Kg DM). This can only be ascertained from analysis.

Just changing the forage in the diet may be all that is required but if you can’t change to different forage or can’t source anything better, then the next thing to look at is the hard feed portion of the diet.

3. Increased feeding level?

The key to maintaining or gaining condition in any animal is energy balance.

For weight gain, energy consumed must be equal or greater than energy expended. The limited size of the horse’s stomach dictates that no more than 1.5-2kg of feed should be offered in any one meal.

To increase energy intake, it is necessary to either, increase the number of meals fed a day or, more practically, to increase the nutrient density of the diet.

This just means that every mouthful that the horse consumes will contain more nutrition (energy, protein etc) thus increasing the energy intake.

These feeds are generally known as conditioning feeds but any feed that has a higher energy (DE MJ/kg) level than your current one will have the desired effect.

4. Increasing energy intake

Energy density in a diet can be increased in two main ways – by increasing the proportion of fats and oils in the diet or by increasing the proportion of cereals included in the diet.

Both will result in a feed with more energy. Oils and fats (included with quality fibre sources) provide slow release energy and cereals provide fast release energy and can result in fizziness in some horses and an upset digestive system.

Unless your horse is in medium to hard work and absolutely needs a high proportion of cereals in the diet, it is prudent to select conditioning feeds that are high in oil and quality fibre sources.

Harbro Conditioning Mix and Nuts are designed to condition without causing fizziness and are high in oils and good quality fibre. When deciding on a conditioning feed look to check that barley and/or wheat are not at the top of the list of ingredients!

5. Other strategies

If you want to keep your horse’s diet more flexible or are already using a balancer, then there are other possible, well proven changes that can be made.

A balancer provides all the vits, mins and protein that your horse requires, which means all you have to provide is more energy. Firstly, switch chop to a high energy one (eg Alfalfa or grass chop).

Adding oil is an efficient way of providing energy. Start with building up to 100ml a day (up to 300ml a day can be used safely if required). Chopped, dried grass can even be offered in the stable to partially replace low energy forage.

6. Keep warm and toasty

One of the other issues in winter time is that some horse’s energy expenditure increases due to the process of trying to keep warm.

If you have a horse that struggles to hold condition during the winter, then make sure it is warm enough. Tactics include clipping off the minimum amount of hair that you can get away with and rugging up appropriately.

Plenty of forage also helps keep them warm, as the process of fibre digestion produces a lot of heat in the horses hindgut – their own, very efficient central heating.