Feeding properly is very important to us.

 

Here is a quick biology breakdown:

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Digestive enzymes help to break down food in the stomach.  In the human digestive system, these enzymes are only released for a short while: when it is time for us to eat (think of your stomach growling before your 3 meals of the day).  In the horse's digestive system, these enzymes are released all the time!  Their digest system is designed to have small amounts of food being processed all the time (think grazing).

 

What's more, if you look at horse's stomach, only the bottom 2/3 of it is "lined" with a special coating that is not effected by the enzymes (remember, enzymes break down food).  The upper 1/3 of the stomach is not lined.  So, when there is not food in the belly of a horse to absorb these enzymes, the enzymes accumulate and "spill" over onto the unlined, upper 1/3 of the stomach.  This is a very simplified description of they way some ulcers get formed.

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Because of this, we do our best to have our feeding program mimic the grazing horses would do naturally. 

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For horses that need extra calories, they have grass hay in front of them 24 hours a day in a hay net.

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For the horses that need to maintain or loose weight, we feed 2% of their body weight in grass hay broken up into:

• 5 lbs at 6 am

• 5 lbs at noon

• 10 lbs at 6 pm

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During the noon feeding, we also feed the supplements each horse receives.  We are very careful about the supplements we recommend owners feed.  We try and stay away from wheat, corn, and soy based feeds.  Wheat is inflammatory to the body (think about most of your efforts in feeding is to reduce inflammation; having wheat in their diet directly contradicts that effort).  Corn is heating to both the body and the mind.  And soy is basically estrogen (that then you need to feed "mare magic" to get them to calm down).

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We've developed our feeding program so that we are not creating problems with their diet that we have to "ride" out of them, or medicate/supplement because we've caused it with something else.

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Here at Versatile Equine, all horses get "Source Micronutrients Focus Weight" with their noon feeding.

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$700/month for Full Service Board

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Includes:

• Grass Pellets with Source Micronutrients 1x day (can feed owner provided supplements with this feeding)

• Pen Cleaning 6x week

• Watering as needed

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• Daily Blanketing/Unblanketing

• Turn Out 2x week

• Feeding necessary ground flax seed

• Holding for vet/farrier 1x/month

• Includes:

• Feeding 3x day

• Grass Hay 2x day

• Grass Pellets with Source Micronutrients 1x day (can feed owner provided supplements with this feeding)

• Pen Cleaning 6x week

• Watering as needed

• Bedding as needed

• Use of arena (200'x130') with roping set up.

• Use of round pen (60')

• Use of dressage arena (60m x 20m)

• Use of trail course set up

• Daily Blanketing/Unblanketing

• Turn Out 2x week

• Feeding necessary ground flax seed

• Holding for vet/farrier 1x/month