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Some Basic Horse Nutrition
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by: EliasMaseko
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Word Count: 479
The idea of feeding a horse may appear easy but may horse owners are uninformed about the fundamentals. It is a fact that there is no golden rule relevant involving the nutrition requires of a horse, as it for the most part depends on the age, body weight and the level of activity, which the horse goes through. Grass is the most essential part of a horse diet. Being one of the most essential components to keep its digestive system to work optimally, grass normally means natural pasture and cut hay.
The quantum of food a big horse requires is close to 2 to two point five% of their body weight, so when a horse weighs a thousand pound, it would require 20 to 25 pounds of feed per day. Horses require feed, which is high in nutrition value and not high-fiber, food which tampers with its digestive system. In a perfect world, your horse should consume a minimum of 1 percent of his body size in hay/grass grass daily.
Ideally, your horse would be healthy if you fed him with 1% of his body weight made up of hay/pasture forage. In case your horse is not employed in much activity, then the right feed is only forging without any grains.
The nutrient content and the quality of the forage are crucial considerations when you are planning to give your horse a stable diet. When you are aware of this, you can easily figure out the correct amounts of nutrients that would meet his specific needs. One of the best and most affordable sources of summer feed is pasture, which if it is good quality, can satisfy all the nutrition requisites of the horse.
The best source and the least expensive one for summer feed is your grass fields and, in most cases good pasture by itself can provide all the nutrition requisites your horse needs. But how do you come to know how much pasture is right for your horse? Using a weight of 1000 to 1200 pounds, here is a rough guideline. This means that a mare and foal 1.75 to 2 acres - yearlings 1.5 to 2 acre and weanlings 0.5 to 1 acre.
Winter feed of course would be cut hay, and again, high quality if you can provide it. Ensure that the hay is leafy and green in colored and cut in a systematic way, free of dust, moulds weeds or stubble. There are plenty of proteins, vitamins and minerals contained in this feed.
Alfalfa hay is great for horses in a developing phase as it is protein enriched by there could be excessive calcium content in relation to phosphorus. Since abnormal calcium may not be good for growing horses, you could opt for a hay analysis, in case you are not too sure.
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