Providing a quality diet with the right amounts of food and nutrients to your horse should be a top priority.
A horse typically consumes 1.5-2% of their body weight in dry matter each day. This amount of food is a necessity to maintain a healthy gastrointestinal tract.
It is not always a practice to have a horse’s feed weighed each day. However, this process will result in a more optimal feeding schedule and will make it easier to monitor food consumption to ensure your horse’s health.
Horses naturally graze in their pasture throughout the day, which leads to a larger consumption of food intake. However, if the meal-fed hay is not weighed, we might actually be under-feeding our horses, which does not support the recommendations of daily consumption.
The goal of weighing meal-fed foods is to determine whether or not the right amount of forage is being provided to the horses.
For bales of hay specifically, flake weights vary. Bales from different sources have a great variation in weight which can be risky for a horse’s health.
Subtle changes in hay weight might not seem like a big deal, but overtime those changes and variations in weight can have significant impacts on a horse’s daily food consumption. Weighing hay does create consistency, especially if you have multiple people feeding the horses during the day. Also, hay weighing will help your horse to maintain a healthy weight.
Running a horse barn is costly, especially when keeping up with 1,200-pound horse’s daily diets.
When you weigh your horse’s hay, you are able to better calculate how much hay should be purchased.
Weighing your food will also help you figure out how much feed is needed for an extended amount of time.
In addition to weighing hay, you will also want to weigh grains, concentrate feeds and supplements. These additional nutrients are needed daily for premium horse healthcare and too little or too much can have negatively impact your horse.
To be sure you are providing the daily target for dietary supplementation, weighing products is a necessity.
A balanced diet consists of the right amount of forage and hay, along with the correct amount of supplements and additional grains. It might seem like a daunting task, but this can be essential in making sure your horse is healthy.