Every once in awhile we like to share a little “transparency” with you about the business side of things. I’ve been working on a post about feeding because it’s one of our biggest expenses. Enjoy.
The basis of our feeding program is free-fed grass hay. That means the horses have grass hay available to them 24/7. Horses have small stomachs and loooong intestines, and are made to graze. So, keeping grass hay in front of them is healthiest for their gut.
The kind of hay is important. We’d never leave a bale of alfalfa out for them for a few reasons. Alfalfa is higher in protein than grass hay and the excess in protein can cause a number of issues — mostly excessive urination and/or joint swelling. It’s also a pretty rich feed, so some horses will gain too much weight on alfalfa.
We’ve found that having well-stocked feed bunkers 24/7 does a lot to help with behavioral problems (food aggression), ulcers, and issues on the trail.
With a herd of 12 horses on grass hay, we feed a little over a ton a week. They’ll go through more when it’s cold out.
Hay is around $220 a ton lately, so we are spending close to $1,000 a month on hay.
In addition to the grass hay, we have Yukon who gets a special senior feed. He’s unable to chew and swallow hay, but does well with the feed pellets and it seems to suit his gut better as well. That costs us around $200 a month for him. I know, it’s kind of spendy, but have you met him? He’s totally worth it. He gets his feed twice a day. This is a trade-off. We can’t just free-feed him the pellets because they are too rich and he’d waste too much. I’d love to be able to free-feed him something just so his stomach is busy, as it’s designed to be. My ideal situation would be to give him about 1 cup of senior feed and 1 cup of soaked grass hay pellets every hour or so. Not real feasible.
Then we have some horses who get supplements. During our riding season, they benefit from a little extra:
- Suzie — gets dried raspberry leaves, alfalfa pellets or complete feed, and occasionally some bute (equine equivalent of tylenol). With her we are treating her discomfort from her heat cycles, mainly, and making sure she has a little more energy for the riding season.
- Dash — gets fenugreek for edema, and dried nettles for his cough. Also gets some alfalfa pellets for weight and bute as needed for swelling. Dash also gets a joint supplement. Dash has a cough that he’s had forever that we try to soothe, and he has swelling in one hind leg.
- Jersey — gets dried raspberry leaves mixed with some complete feed just to encourage her to eat the raspberry leaves. She has a lot of discomfort around her heat cycles.
- Sis — gets a GOB of complete or senior feed and joint supplement. She is a hard horse to put and keep weight on.
- Nigel — just gets some extra complete or senior feed to get a little padding on him.
That extra supplementation can cost from $200 to $400 a month, depending.
Some of the horses are on what’s called a “track system” — so their main living area is a narrow track with feeding and watering stations along it. We feed them well away from their water in order to encourage movement. In the middle of the tracks are some grass “pastures” which are big enough to graze them from time to time for some nutritional variety. It’s not enough grass to support the herd for any length of time.
We started the track system as an experiment and only used it on one herd. We love it, so we’ll be putting the rest of them on another track here soon.
Water is of huge importance, so their troughs are always full, thanks to automatic waterers. We also have watering buckets in their holding pens so they always have water available between rides as well.
In the winter time, if we don’t have to haul any water, chores don’t take long at all. We only have to put bales out twice a week, and Yukon is easy to feed. So, maybe 15 minutes a day, and a half hour on “big feed” days where we put the big bales out.
In the summer when we’re supplementing more horses, it might take 1/2 hour or so a day.
