Horses tend to lose weight during winter. This is mainly because as temperatures drop, the amount of calories a horse needs to burn to stay warm and maintain their body temperature increases… so they need to eat more calories to maintain their weight. In many parts of the country the quality of pasture available also falls, which means a horse gets less calories from its pasture during winter which also contributes to weight loss during the winter.
How efficiently a horse uses the feed it is provided depends both on what is fed and also on how it is fed. Feeding in a way that will allow your horses to fully utilise any pasture that is available to them is also important. Let’s look at the ‘what is fed’ part of the equation first.The most important things to consider when looking at feed use efficiency from a ‘what is being fed’ perspective are the digestibility of the cereal grains and the quality of protein being fed...
