Whatever your horse’s age it’s vital that he gets the right diet to suit his workload and breeding. Get it wrong and your horse could face behavioral problems, weight and health problems for example: obesity or regular occurrence of colic.
Appreciating how the horse’s digestive system works is the key to being able to provide him with the most appropriate diet.
Horses have evolved to eat mainly grass, small amounts of wild cereals and other plants. Therefore they have adapted to eat a high-fibre, low-starch diet. Left naturally horses would graze for up to 18 hours a day whilst roaming over large distances. Their digestive systems are designed for this, eating small amounts of very fibrous food.

Domesticated horses are often fed large cereal (starch) based meals morning and night with restricted forage in-between. Cereals such as oats contain relatively high levels of starch (for which the horse has a limited digestive capacity). Excess starch can cause excitable behavior and digestive upsets so it’s important to keep the starch levels down.
The starch found in cereals must be broken down before absorption; the horse has a limited amount of enzyme responsible for the key stages in this breakdown. If the amount of starch a horse consumes overwhelms the capacity of his small intestine any excess flows through the caecum where it can cause major problems. When it comes to the production of saliva the nature of the feed is also important. Twice as much saliva is produced when horses eat a kg of dry hay compared to grains and other concentrates. Diets that are high in grain/cereals and low in forage will decrease the flow of saliva and result in lower ph values in the stomach – a risk factor associated with the development of gastric ulcers. There is also a risk of gastric colic due to the excessive microbial activity when large concentrate meals are fed.

Unfortunately we do not have the luxury, unlike in England, of endless meadow fields for grazing our horses. In southern Spain people generally have this choice of forage: heno which is oat straw, paja which is wheat straw, alfalfa and haylage (vacuum packed grasses.)

Here at the Natural Horse Centre we feed a combination of oat straw, Alfalfa which can be bought in bales just like the oat straw, wheat straw (paja) and haylage. The alfa is given in moderation along with the oat straw, the paja is fed adlib. Horses will not gorge on the paja but trickle feed it through the day which makes it an excellent replacement for the grazing they are not getting. Be careful when feeding oat straw adlib if it still contains the oat seeds!! You will be feeding far too much starch. “Filled legs” are a common symptom of too much starch in the diet. We also seed the field with oat and barley seed so that through the winter months the horses have access to natural grazing. See above picture.

A horse will chew around 3,500 times per kg of dry hay consumed, taking about 40 minutes to eat each kg. However a kg of oats may only take 10 minutes to eat. So it’s easy to see how, when grains and other concentrated feeds are substituted for fibre in the diet, the total time spent feeding will be drastically reduced. Consequently, horses may continue to attempt to forage, especially when they’re left in the stable with nothing to eat, ingesting bedding, consuming faeces or wood chewing. (It’s well known that low-forage or high-starch diets increase the risk of crib-biting). This is another reason why fibre is such an important part of the diet. If your horse has to be stabled for long lengths of time, then put in plenty of hay nets. If your horse drops condition feed lots of fibre based feeds instead of high-starch based feeds, as these tend to put weight and condition on, without causing the horse to be over-excitable. Fibre can also be given to your horse in the form of compound or short-chop feed.

So to summarize, the horses’ digestive system functions best when it is fed almost continuously on a forage-based diet to mimic natural grazing behavior. Obviously , this is not always practical however you can look closely at how best to optimize the use of the fibre available to you.

In our next article we look at Worming and the best ways to Repel those Flies!

For competitive prices and delivery of Eno, paja, alfalfa or haylage please contact Tracy James, 952 720 271