feeding barley for racehorses

Question
hello ma'am, our race club is providing only barley for racehorses. may i know why it is not providing oats?

is barely good for racehorses when compared to oats?

how much quantity of barley should a trainer provide to each horse per day. tell me according to the feeding formula

         (body weight*2.5)/100

Answer
Hi Rohit,

Thank you for your question.  I can't say for sure why your race club only provides barley for horses, it may be a management/availability issue.  Oats are traditionally the cereal grain of choice for horses because they are more safely digestible and comparatively higher in protein and fiber than other cereals.  Barley is the most non-structural carbohydrate rich of the cereal grains and brings the most starch/sugar per kg than other cereals.  However, barley has a very low pre-cecal digestibility which essentially means that it is poorly utilized by the horse's digestive system and can cause digestive upsets.  Extruding or heat-treating barley can increase its pre-cecal digestibility and render it more digestible for the horse, so it is best to treat barley before feeding it to horses.

There is no hard and fast rule for how much barley is too much for a horse.  However, a horses diet should never contain more than 50% (55% if grain is high in fiber) grain daily.  This includes ALL non-forage sources.  So a 1000lb horse eating 2.5% of its body weight in dry matter daily should eat no more than 14lbs (15.6lbs absolute max) of grain per day.  So how much barley you can feed in a day will depend on what other grains you are feeding.  I realize the racehorse industry feeds a lot of starch to horses to fuel performance, but I'm not a fan of feeding starch-rich feeds to horses.  So I would be reluctant to say that 14lbs of barley is safe for a horse to eat. Ultimately that will have to be your judgement call.

Thanks, Corlena