04/12/2025
*** PLEASE ENSURE YOUR HORSES HAVE SUPPLEMENTARY FORAGE IN THEIR WET/MUDDY PADDOCKS ***
Having seen 3 FB posts already this week about horses breaking out of their fields and running around on the roads in my area, let alone countrywide, I thought I would share yet another reminder that horses need to be able to EAT pretty much all day. They are grazing animals, and are not designed to stand all day in mud with just a few blades of waterlogged grass to eat.
If you have acres and acres then it’s probably still going to be ok to have native type ponies out with no supplementary forage. If you are under water/extremely muddy/have grazed the same paddocks all summer, then your horses will need hay out in the fields. Yes, hay is ludicrously expensive now (although a huge thank you to my Haylage supplier, who have only put their prices up by £2.50 a bale for this year’s crop), but horses still need to eat. Introduced gradually and correctly, straw is a great alternative to provide something for horses to eat in the fields.
Grass growth has slowed right down now, fields are extremely waterlogged at the moment, and therefore footfall is churning up any grass that is left. If your yards don’t allow hay out in the fields - and I appreciate it is difficult at livery yards, when one horse may eat most of what is put out and another horse may not eat more than a few mouthfuls - then bringing horses in at lunchtime/early afternoon may be the answer. Yes, that means less time out, where nature intended, but nature didn’t intend for horses to be standing in boggy paddocks with waterlogged grass as their only food source. We’d all love to have 5 acres per horse, but certainly for those of us in the south, we are limited as far as land goes.
I post about this a lot, but having the option of hay to eat in the field is so important, and I’d go as far to say essential at this time of year.
