12 Months of Feeding Tips

Here’s how to roll with Mother Nature through the seasons, nutritionally speaking.
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Here’s how to roll with Mother Nature through the seasons, nutritionally speaking.

Sometimes it feels as if humans have divorced themselves from the rhythms of nature. Perhaps that’s part of the appeal of horses. They seem so much more attuned to the natural world than we are. And when we spend time in their company, we’re brought back into an environment where we become conscious of the orbit of the Earth and the ebb and flow of the seasons again.

Although horses are creatures of habit, they do respond to the changes in the seasons, and one of the most obvious ways in which they do so is in their feeding patterns. In the wild horses thrive on green pastures through the summer months, while in winter they subsist on whatever sparse, dry forage they manage to find under the snow. We can certainly minimize this feast-or-famine lifestyle with our domestic beasties, but we still have to adjust feeding patterns to work with the seasons.

Here’s a 12-month rundown of some of the year’s most important feeding concerns. Keeping them in mind can help ensure your horse remains healthy and happy and in tune with Mother Nature 24/7.

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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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