Answer

By Your Horse

Nutritionist Lizzie Drury replies:

Forage should form the basis of every horse’s diet and its importance is often overlooked. As a general rule, horses should never receive less than one per
cent of their bodyweight as forage to ensure their digestive systems remain healthy and gut mobility is maintained.
Provided your horses are not overweight, ideally they should be provided with ad-lib forage. Generally speaking, haylage has a higher water content (and therefore a lower dry matter content) than hay. This means that to ensure adequate fibre intake you need to feed more haylage on a weight basis than you would do hay. As a guide, your horses should be eating between 8-10kg of haylage per day.
Haylage has a higher nutritional value than hay, so feeding a balancer such as Saracen Bio-Life 2000 or Baileys Lo-Cal would be ideal, to provide the essential vitamins, minerals and quality protein to balance the haylage – but without the digestible energy.
Remember that once haylage has been opened it can spoil very quickly. Haylage that is old, smells vinegary, is mouldy (white mould is normal), or very wet, should not be fed. Damaged bales should be disposed of as they can potentially pose serious health risks to horses.