Minimizing Feed Costs

Let’s face it, those aren’t gerbils out in your stalls and pastures. They’re 1,000-pound herbivores, with appetites wired for perpetual hunger and teeth designed to make short work out of massive amounts of fiber. If your feed bills are starting

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Let’s face it, those aren’t gerbils out in your stalls and pastures. They’re 1,000-pound herbivores, with appetites wired for perpetual hunger and teeth designed to make short work out of massive amounts of fiber. If your feed bills are starting to make you consider the comparative joys of virtual pets, that’s no surprise. “Horse feed ain’t cheap,” and in some parts of the world, where hay and/or grain have to be imported, the price tag can rocket into the “positively appalling” range.


Short of trading your equine friends in for caged rodents, how can you minimize your feed costs, yet still provide complete and correct nutrition? The good news is there are a number of strategies at your disposal to help you make your operation as cost-effective as possible. Mix and match a few of these simple ideas for a feeding program that’s both efficient and nutritious.


#1: Minimize Waste


You can reduce feed costs considerably by depending on good pasture to provide much of your horse’s forage requirement, rather than feeding large quantities of hay. But even if you have acres of Kentucky bluegrass at your disposal, your horses still will find a way to cost you more than you’d planned. Given the opportunity, horses will waste a substantial amount of their pasture. As most of us know, horses are selective grazers which tend to create two distinct areas in their pastures: “lawns” (the preferred grazing areas) and “roughs” (which are used as manure dumping stations, thus encouraging rampant weed growth!). Delicate creatures that they are, horses prefer not to graze where they defecate, but their “hunt and peck” method of grazing works better on the open plains than it does in enclosed spaces. In order to encourage them to use more of the land for grazing, you need to minimize the roughs by spraying or mowing the weeds, then picking the manure manually or spreading it over the field with a chain drag or harrow. (The catch there is that you have to leave the pasture empty for a period of a couple of weeks so the sun can kill the worm eggs that lurk in the manure; otherwise, you might increase the chance of your horses’ acquiring a bellyful of internal parasites

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Written by:

Karen Briggs is the author of six books, including the recently updated Understanding Equine Nutrition as well as Understanding The Pony, both published by Eclipse Press. She’s written a few thousand articles on subjects ranging from guttural pouch infections to how to compost your manure. She is also a Canadian certified riding coach, an equine nutritionist, and works in media relations for the harness racing industry. She lives with her band of off-the-track Thoroughbreds on a farm near Guelph, Ontario, and dabbles in eventing.

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