#horses - #When do you start supplementing grass-fed horses with hay and/or grain?

When do you start supplementing grass-fed horses with hay and/or grain?

I have 2 horses that live in a pasture pretty much 100% of the time. They are the first horses I've owned by myself and due to living relatively remotely, I'm not really plugged into any local horsey community for other sources of advice.

I've had them for 4 years now and (knock on wood) they've been very happy and healthy. I live in Northern Europe and we have good grass such that they have plenty of nutrition over the summer months.

In autumn as leaves fall and the grass becomes sparser, I start supplementing with more hay and food as we go into the winter months. They've kept steady healthy weights over the 4 years and I've felt pretty confident in my own judgement on feeding etc.

This year, however, the summer weather was completely screwy. We had insane heatwaves that lasted months not days and no rain. The grass died and I started to feed them food and hay in July as if it was autumn/winter.

Things finally cooled down to "normal" a few weeks ago and we have had rains again. Grass is growing and there are still leaves on the trees. I stopped feeding them the hay and the food but I just don't feel confident that this was the right decision.

Their weight is still looking good and they are munching the grass they have, but I just don't know enough about grass and growth during abnormal weather patterns to know if there's enough nutrition there or if I should still be supplementing what they have.

Inevitably we will be heading into our autumn feeding schedule soon anyway but I was just hoping folk here might have some advice as to what to look out for / how to judge the health of pastures and what they typically rely on to make decisions on adding hay or grain to their horses' diets.

They are leisure horses and only get ridden 3 times a week on average due to our work schedules.

Submitted September 06, 2018 at 11:23AM by princess_o_darkness
via reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/Horses/comments/9dku29/when_do_you_start_supplementing_grassfed_horses/?utm_source=ifttt