Video: Horse Nutrition

Horses have a food pyramid just like humans, though theirs includes dry, cured hay and food formula in pellets. Feed a horse healthy, nutritious food with tips from a ranch owner in this free horse care video.

Video Transcript

Our hard working horses here rely on good nutrition to maintain that tough job that they have schooling students throughout the year. We start with what all veterinarians recommend as the base of their pyramid or the very core of their nutritional program. A good dry well cured grass hay. Here in Texas we have Bermuda coastal. Hay can be different per region and so you have to look in your area to see what is the best quality horse hay that your region provides. Then we supplement with a pelleted feed formula, they're lots of choices in how you're going to use your grain or feed. Some prefer the natural oats and corn, but here we find with our heat that the pelleted formulas work very well. This is also more of a dry pelleted formula and we like that it doesn't attract the flies as much as some of the sweetened varieties. We look at the feed analysis, identifying the fat, the protein, and the fiber, as well as the different additives, your minerals and salts. You can get feeds that contain things like biotin, which could also be known as a hoof supplement that you could add later. But some feeds are processed with those in place. We often supplement with alfalfa, but we recognize that it is a legume more in other words of the bean family. Horses do not digest and metabolize alfalfa as well as they do the grass hay, so it should always be looked at as a supplement and not their mainstay in their way of their roughage. These three items along with plenty of fresh water, keep our hard working horses healthy throughout their year.

Horse Nutrition

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