Making A Forage Replacer

Horses are forage eaters, meaning they ramble
around your yard eating the grass and hay
accessible. Each must have a suitable and steady
flow of high quality nutrients to stay as healthy
as they deserve However, horses in some cases
stop nibbling hay due to poor dental health.
Horse with rotten teeth may find it impossible
to break apart the hay follicles or to pull
grass from the field.

Your horse may also have developed a dislike or
fickle taste that suddenly excludes grass or hay.
The reasons for this pickiness are likely
mysterious but they must be dealt with
immediately. You cannot let your steeds get
malnurished during the summer and winter months.
The best solution is to make a forage replacer
for your horse. A forage replacer is a group of
concentrated foods that your horse can easily
eat. These combined foods will take over the
place of hay in your horse's diet, if necessary.

The ingredients for a forage replacer include
high fiber nuts, kwikbeats and alfalfa. The
kwikbeats must be soaked in water before mixing
them into your forage replacer. The high fiber
nuts may be soaked if your horse is struggling
to chew them. Leave these to soak overnight
before preparing your forage replacer.

Start by weighing your horse on a scale in
kilograms. Write this number down somewhere to
keep as a reference for later. The recipe for
this feed is very simple. Each ingredient must
be mixed in at 600 grams for every 100 kilogram
of your horse. For example, if your horse is 600
kilograms, you divide 600 by 100 to get 6.
Multiple the 6 by 600 to come up with 3,600
grams. Divide this by 1,000 to find the
kilograms needed. In the case of a 600 kilogram
horse, you will need 3.6 grams of all of your
ingredients.

Carefully weight all your ingredients into
separate buckets. Pour them into a larger bucket
that you can fit around your horse's ears or
neck. Don't feed all of it to the horse in one
feed. Horses are "trickle feeders" which means
they must eat their food throughout the day in
order to stay healthy. They will gladly eat it
all at once, which will leave them hungry later.

If your horse struggles when you try to remove
the bucket, try a "bucket spread" method. Pour
equal amounts of your feed into smaller buckets
and place one or two in the stable every few
hours. The horse will eat all the feed and be
content until next feeding time. Spreading
several buckets of all of the feed around the
stable may also work but it may also lead to
your horse eating all of his feed too quickly.

Another way to slow his feeding is to place a
small block of salt or large rocks into the
bucket. The horse won't eat these but will eat
around them. The horse will necessarily slow
down to eat around the rocks and may even
temporarily give up out of frustration.

Experiment with feeding methods until you find
one that works for you and is comfortable for
your horse. Never force a particular feeding
method on a horse that is already struggling to
eat. This may only further complicate matters
and make him more frustrated.

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These quantaties will differ depending on which
horse feed suppliers products you decide to use,
please check with feed manufacturer. Resourced
http://www.dodsonandhorrell.com

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