Just to show you that I really am not starving Freedom, the picture above shows the three bags of grain used for each feeding.
It’s a little bit like Goldilocks: Freedom gets the Papa Bear sized serving; Zelda gets the Mama Bear serving; and Curly gets the Baby Bear portion.
Let’s look at the quantities.
- In Freedom’s bag is 3 quarts of Triple Crown senior (4680 calories), 1 pound of Purina Amplify (2000 calories), 1 quart of hay stretcher (about 1000 calories), and 1.5 pounds of alfalfa/timothy cubes (1350 calories). So his ration comes in at about 18,00 calories a day. Not to mention all the hay I can coax him to eat.
- In Zelda’s bag is 1.5 quarts of Triple Crown Senior (2340); 2 quarts of Hay stretcher (2000); and 2 cups of Amplify (~500). Her ration comes to about 9600 calories per day, although she eats more hay than Freedom.
- In Curly’s bag is 1.5 quarts of Triple Crown Senior (2340), so about 4680 calories per day. She also gets a lot of hay, although that quantity is controlled by Zelda, who eats more than half of what we put out.
What is in your horse’s feed bag?
Made me chuckle. Thank you.
Anyone who didn’t understand horses and what you are doing, would accuse you of favoritism!!
I feel re assured in that you’re feeding hay cubes. My arab, Jordan, in the last few years of his life, decided he only wanted the TOPS of alfalfa…and that stuff isn’t cheap. He’d eat all the tops and leave the rest to get trampled. I tried switching him to timothy, which was less expensive…and refused outright to eat it. In fact, I put a flake of it down for him and he (I am not making this up) stretched out over and pee’ed on it. Nothing like making his opinion known!
So I switched him to hay cubes and that worked. I wondered if it was enough in the roughage department, but he had five acres to graze as well as the cubes, so he kept weight on until the last two weeks of his life.
Hay cubes are considered to be long stem forage, so they are completely good as a hay replacement. Years ago we had a significant hay shortage and I did a lot of research. I ended up feeding a lot of soaked cubes and soaked beet pulp. The horses were fine with that. Hay stretcher is useful but doesn’t thave the roughage they need.