The high rainfall in many areas this ‘summer’ is causing digestive issues for some horses.
Grass growing in these conditions has a higher than normal water content and therefore a LOW Dry Matter (fibre) content.
This was a serious problem in spring of 2023 when we conducted forage analyses on such grass because the horses had developed severe digestive upsets such as diarrhea. The analyses revealed VERY LOW DM content <20% - as low as 13%!
This means that even though the horse is consuming 10-15kgs/day of the grass, he is getting next to no fibre going through his digestive system and this can have dire consequences for both the horse and your pocket.
One of the first signs is ‘louder than normal gut sounds’ – easily audible from a few feet away and another is runny manure. It doesn’t pay to take such symptoms lightly because they can escalate towards either colic or full on diarrhoea.
The more mature the grass the higher the Dry Matter content. Hay obviously has a suitably high DM content of 80-90% depending on the stage of maturity when it was cut.
The Dry Matter content of Haylage - when made at a fairly mature stage of growth lies around 60-80%.
‘Fermented’ forages made at a younger stage of growth, have a Dry Matter content of only 45-50% despite their names often containing the word ‘fibre’.
The equine digestive system is adapted to forage with a relatively high 80-90% DM content as when their forage consists of mature, stalky, yellowish GRASS and/or HAY. Feral horses living in much drier environments are rarely exposed to the lush green grass our domestic horses are expected to be healthy on.
If your horse is out on fresh pasture of any sort, whether short and green, or lush and green then you need to supplement more fibre into his daily diet with hay, chaff, beet, hulls.
In other words, items that are brown in colour rather than green.
When horses consume high fibre forage they have little to no need for any of the vast array of digestive products.
To minimise risk:
If possible, over a week, so it isn’t a sudden change, eliminate the cause (the green grass) and replace with plain grass hay, no lucerne as it has the same nutritional profile to the problem grass - high potassium and high crude protein.
Understanding what is going on means you can be proactive and head off trouble.
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