Equine Nutrition & Feeding

Feed with confidence — forage, grain, supplements, body condition, and building a balanced program for every horse in the barn.

• Forage first: why hay is the most important thing in the feed room — Most feed-room problems start with the scoop instead of the hay. A horse is built to graze sixteen hours a day, and everything else you feed is a footnote to that.
• Body condition scoring: learning to see what your hands feel — A winter coat hides everything and a long mane forgives a cresty neck. The only honest way to judge weight is with your hands, on a 1-to-9 scale, in the same six places every time.
• How much hay does a horse actually need? — The honest answer isn't 'two flakes.' It's a percentage of body weight, adjusted for work, weather, and whether your horse turns hay into muscle or fat.
• Reading a feed tag: choosing the right concentrate — The front of the bag is marketing. The guaranteed analysis and the ingredient list on the back tell you what you're actually buying — and whether your horse needs it at all.
• Does your horse actually need that supplement? — The American supplement aisle is a multi-billion-dollar business built on owner guilt. Some products earn their place; most are expensive insurance against problems your horse doesn't have.
• The easy keeper's diet: managing the horse who lives on air — Some horses get fat looking at a pasture. Managing them isn't cruelty — it's the kindest thing you can do, because the alternative is laminitis.
• Putting weight on the hard keeper safely — Before you dump in more grain, rule out the reasons a horse can't hold weight. Then add calories the way the gut can handle them — slowly, and mostly from fat and fiber.
• How to change your horse's feed without causing colic — The hindgut microbes that digest your horse's food need a week or more to adapt to anything new. Rush the switch and you risk the most preventable colic there is.
• Water and electrolytes: the cheapest health insurance you've got — A horse can go off feed for a day and recover. Go short on water and you're looking at impaction colic. Salt and clean water do more for health than most of what's in the supplement cabinet.
• Feeding the laminitis-prone horse — For a metabolic horse, sugar in the diet isn't a comfort — it's a trigger. Feeding to keep the feet attached means controlling carbohydrates with a discipline most barns find uncomfortable.
• Ration math made simple: a feeding calculator for any horse — Stop feeding by the scoop and start feeding by the number. This is the same back-of-the-envelope calculation we run for any horse — work through it once and you'll never guess a ration again.
• A barn feed-chart template that survives a new groom — The feed program in your head is worthless the day you're not at the barn. This is a fill-in chart any fill-in helper can follow without calling you — and without colicking a horse.
• A feeding playbook for the metabolic and laminitis-prone horse — For the easy keeper with a cresty neck, feeding isn't about shine — it's about keeping the coffin bone attached. This is the season-by-season playbook we give owners after a metabolic diagnosis.