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Can horses cope with sudden cold weather?

In winter, the weather can change dramatically for the worse. Out kept horses may suddenly find their grass is under a thick layer of snow so will need additional feeding. Hay is an obvious answer, but sometimes more nutrition is needed – keeping warm is very calorie demanding. Horses can survive and even thrive in what we consider to be very inhospitable conditions, but they do need plenty of feed to fuel them and keep them warm.

Horses have trillions of microbes which ferment fibre in their hind gut and this releases fuel, vitamins, gas and heat. It is like having a central heating boiler in their gut! However, not all fibre can be fermented – old, tough lignified fibre escapes this process. The fibre needs to be good quality, such as from early made hay and dried forages. Straw, late made and old hay may not be as effective at keeping the microbes fed and generating heat.

Mud, not so glorious, mud...

Horse ownership and mud - they seem to go together in the winter don't they?

We’ve all suffered with mud, wet and floods recently and the pundits tell us this is the ways things will be now. It’s either too wet, or too dry, or too hot, or too windy or the 'Beast From The East' blast chills us to the core. We will need to adapt to cope better next time.

Firming up gateways can go a long way to making life just a little easier, or at least less hazardous! We've all slipped in muddy gateways haven't we? Once it dries out a bit, put down hardcore, over-sized stone, crag or whatever is available locally. Level it off as best you can and make sure here are no dangerous bits sticking up. In time it will level off and may even grow grass.

Winter hydration for horses

When the weather turns cold, horses are less inclined to drink. Coupled with sudden changes in management, such as more time spent stabled or eating more hay, this can increase the risk of impaction colic.

Ensure that excercise is part of your daily routine for stabled horses. Walking out in hand helps to keep the gut moving, reducing the risk of impaction and generating warmth in the process. There's plenty we can do to encourage our horses to drink too...

• Ensure water is readily available. An obvious one perhaps but water freezes quickly in cold weather and needs checking regularly. Have your ice breaking kit to hand: a hammer to break up the ice and a colander to scoop out the pieces out are ideal as leaving the ice in there will only help the water freeze over again faster.
• Offer feeds as a warm mash. We always recommend soaking our pelleted forages to restore hydration, aid digestion and reduce the risk of choke. Using warm water instead of cold will speed up your soaking time as well as provide a warm mash feed for your horse.

Feeding broodmares in-foal

Congratulations if you have an in-foal mare! What can be more rewarding than breeding your own youngster?

The growth of the unborn foal is very slow until the last three months of gestation, so your mare will not need additional feeding until this time. In the meantime she will need a good diet with protein and calcium as well as natural vitamins, but not in any greater amounts than she usually needs. A good chop is Build & Shine and a suitable forage balancer, Simple Balance +. If she needs additional feeding due to losing condition, cold weather and so on, Blue Bag Grass Pellets could be a good choice.

Once into the last three months any work should cease and she will need increasing amounts of good quality feed. Nature provides for this with good spring grass but if your mare is due to foal before the grass is delivering its bounty Red Bag Grass Pellets and / or Lucie Nuts will be an excellent substitute. Condition scoring gets challenging when a mare is obviously pregnant, so keep an eye on her neck as this will give a good guide to her overall condition. At this time you will need to switch your forage balancer to Lunar Eclipse.

New Year, New Horse?

Welcoming a new horse, whether it be your first or your tenth, can be an equally exciting and worrying time. 

Regardless of age and experience, moving to an entirely new home away from all that is familiar - routine, companions and surroundings - can be very stressful for horses. It may take weeks or even months for them to truly settle in. A change in behaviour is quite normal and they may seem very different to the horse you first met or trialled.

To help them adapt and settle in, the routine they have been used to should be maintained as much as possible. i.e. similar turning out and bringing in times, or living our 24/7.

Some yards may have a quarantine procedure that you have to adhere for the safety of the other horses on the yard. If their management changes dramatically, this is almost certain to cause stress. 

Environmental Enrichment for Horses

In winter, more horses are confined to their stables for longer. When horses are confined for long periods they can become bored and restless. A wild or free-roaming horse travels around 25 miles per day and a horse out in a typical paddock can clock up around 8 miles a day. How far can they travel in a stable? Not very far at all!

To help make being stabled less tiresome, environmental enrichment for horses involves small changes we can make to take the horse a little nearer to its origins as a free-roaming, herd-living, obligate herbivore.

Finding a little extra oomph during winter

What do happy hackers, endurance horses and showjumpers all have in common? Well, other than them all being equines, the vast majority of them have a change of pace during the winter months. 

This can mean that the horse's Feed Plan needs a tweak at this time of year to allow them to cope with the change in workload, whilst maintaining shape, condition and performance. Although many of us will be replacing lost grazing during winter with Blue Bag Grass Pellets, this doesn't necessarily mean spending more by adding in an extra balancer, or by changing up your chop. Something as simple as feeding before work can make all the difference to how your horse feels and their way of going. 

Balancers | Costly or cost-effective?

The festive season, being perhaps the most expensive time of the year, may have you asking yourself if everything you're adding into your feed bowl is really necessary? It's a sensible question to ask at the best of times and the answer can vary.

At Simple System Horse Feeds we typically advise feeding a pellet, a chop and a balancer. The soaked forage pellet providing the bulk of the nutrition, the chop adds the right amount of 'chew' and the balancer tops up the essential vitamins and minerals that your horse needs to thrive.

So what about the balancer, is it essential? For us the answer is YES. But, given we are a horse feed company that's no surprise, so allow us to explain...

Mud Fever in Horses

Should horses eat straw?

Simple System was founded on the principle of supplying you with the food nature intended your horse to eat. Horses evolved on the grassy, mainly treeless plains of Central Eurasia, and their digestive system is adapted to suit what grows in their natural environment: grass, herbs and shrubs.

Straw is the dried stalks of cereal grains - such as wheat, barley and oats. Although by definition members of the grass (Gramineae) family, cereals are the product of human engineering over thousands of years. They have been selectively bred for traits that improve cereals as a food source for humans. One of the traits is stiff straw that will not tend to break or bend, thus protecting the valuable grain that is used to make foods such as bread and pasta. Modern cereals are so far from their origin that they have lost many of their natural mechanisms (such as seed dispersal) making them unlikely to survive 'in the wild'.

Straw is very high in lignified fibre, meaning it cannot be fermented by the horse's gut microbes. To increase the feed value of the fibre in straw, it can be treated with sodium hydroxide to make Nutritionally Improved Straw (NIS). Sodium hydroxide, also known as caustic soda, is frequently used as an industrial cleaning agent. It is used in the manufacture of wood pulp and paper, as well as soap, detergent and drain cleaner. NIS was originally developed for cattle, not horses, as a cheap source of fibre.