What Do You Feed Your Old Horse
Our old girl turned 35 this past January and she looks really, really good for her age. I've played with her diet some and have hit on the magic formula for her. She gets 16 pounds of sweet cob, 2 p...
Forum Discussion
WyoTraveler wrote:
Interesting, we used to be able to buy molasses granules in a 50 lb bag. Haven't seen it in the feed stores anymore. I see you purchase your hay pellets out of Canada. Wonder how their operations are run? In WY and MT a lot of the hay pellets are made from hay that isn't selling well because of quality. Of coarse timothy would have to come from a wetter climate. You see a lot of timothy east of the Mississippi where the water table is too high to raise alfalfa.
IT was hay 'cubes' I bought not pellets. Sadly again, I found many pelleted hay had added ingredients and sugar products raised their ugly head again for flavor to get them to eat it.
In my search all I could find was alfalfa hay cubes or alfalfa/timothy I could not find 'straight timothy' hay cubes state side. Don't recall the name now but they were are very respected high quality operation. I had the cubes analysed before feeding it and it was everything stated to be.
Which speaking of analyzed feeds. After watching a mare drink copies amounts of water to make you believe for sure there were kidney failure problems but none of the tests came back positive. My vet asked me to list everything that had changed in my barn over the past week. The ONLY thing that had changed was I switched to a different hay supplier.
We tested the hay and OMG it was like 95% sodium!!
This is where I learned that when they cut the hay to cure and it unfortunately rains 'many' unscrupulous farmers will douse the heck out of it with sodium to dry it to avoid the loss of a cut hay field with total disregard to what that could mean to the buyers animals.
This results in a lot of misdiagnosed horses and where the owner may not have money for blood tests euthanasia could possibly be recommended solely based on the symptoms. :(
This led me to always test one bale of hay prior to buying large quantities. I found SO many variations in nutritional value let alone the amount of sodium I was shocked. You also couldn't base nutritional value on color alone. Timing of cutting changes the nutritional value also.
Buy a bale of hay and tell the farmer that you are going to have it tested before placing your order and watch the color drain from his face.
Sometimes that look on his face tells you what you need to know and you don't even have to waste the money to have it tested!!:B
