feeding a horse that is losing condition

Question
QUESTION: my horse is 16.2hh, approx 15 -16 yrs old and is normally around 550kg. as we have come in to winter he has started losing condition. he has a condition score of the low end of 3 and i dont want him to lose anymore - i can feel his ribs and am starting to be able to see them, he is fed half a bale of meadow hay, 1 scoop bran, (approx 600grams,) 2kg of pasture mix and 1kg sugarbeet twice a day. we live in greece and cant get such things as conditioning mixes senior mixes and chaff here. i can get barley whole oats and corn though.
his teeth arent great he is missing 2 front teeth, but the vet says his back teeth are fine - he is also due for worming but this has been kept upto date too.
how can i get the condition on him with the old fashioned choices i have available to me? the pasture mix is one called destriero and has 15% protein in it. however this isnt helping him in any way.

ANSWER: Thank you for providing such thorough information and for condition scoring your horse it really helps!  You can certainly help your horse gain more weight with the traditional feeds you have available.  One thing you don't mention is mow many lbs of hay you are feeding and I don't know what an average hay bale in greece weighs so I'm just going to tell you how much you should feed in lbs/kg and you can go from there. FYI sugarbeet and barley are great for putting on weight and if you have a horse with bad teeth soaked sugarbeet could be the way to go.  1kg of dry sugar beet has the same calories as about 2kg of grass hay because it is more available to the digestive process.  You can feed up to about 40% of the horses dry intake of feed a day as beet pulp!  Your bran will do a good job of balancing the calcium and phosphorous in the beet pulp.  The starch in barley is not as easily available as that found in oats however I have found barley to be better at putting on weight than oats.  If you can find barley that has been heat processed in some way that will help, look and see if it has been extruded or micronized.  There are ways that you can boil it, the traditional horse folks where I grew up used to do boiled barley and had great pans on their stove each day of boiling barley.

Here is a link with grain boiling instruction in case you want to go that route
http://www.wikihow.com/Cook-or-Boil-Whole-Grains-for-Horses

Feeding ground stabilized flax is also great for helping with condition issues and is a lot less hassle than doing boiled linsead as discussed in the above link however it also is great for putting on condition.  If you feed pre-ground stablized flax you can feed 100-150g a day.  You should also feed 1500IU of liquid vitamin E per day and this doesn't have to be for horses the cheapest way is often to get human vit E gel caps.

I assume you are feeding him as you always did and that this amount used to maintain his body weight but now isn't so you need to feed more calories.  You need to feed more fiber as the temperature goes down.  For every 3 degrees centegrade that the temp drops you need to increase hay or beet pulp intake by 0.5kg because that will replace the calories lost trying to keep warm.

So based on an ideal body weight of 550kg he needs to be eating at least 11kg a day of hay to meet his energy needs however I assume you are feeding this much if not more plus the other things and he is loosing weight so this clearly won't do on its own.  I would typically say to increase the amount of hay but as he has teeth issues I'm not going to suggest more hay (but you can always feed him more if he will eat it).

I would increase the beet pulp to 2kg a day and feed 1kg of heat treated barley.  This will increase his energy intake by 25% over what he is getting now assuming he is eating 11kg of hay.  If you can't heat treat the barley feed 1kg of oats preferably rolled or crushed instead.

This assumes your hay is good quality.  If you hay is poor quality you can substitute  beet pulp for your hay  at 0.5kg of beet pulp for every 1kg of hay.  So you could for example feed 7kg of hay and 5.25kg of beet pulp with 1kg of grain. This would give you the same number of calories and the beet pulp would be just less than 40% of the dry matter intake which is about the upper limit.  I would keep feeding the bran as you are.

Note that this does not take into account protein requirement and of course your horse may be losing muscle due to lack of protein.  neither does it take into account total mineral requirements.  When horses are loosing weight though the first thing to check is that they are getting enough calories.  I would be happy to look at the overall diet and if you would like further help just drop me an email at info@equilibrateequine.com

Good luck,
Clair

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: just a quick question!
the sugar beet weight i gave is after its been soaked so he gets 1kg of wet beet pulp twice a day. is the weight you mention wet or dry? i am assuming wet?
also will a broad spectrum vit and mineral supplement help to balance out the diet?

Answer
Hi Sharon,

Great question.  The beet pulp weight is actually DRY weight!  So this is going to be a big increase in the amount of beet pulp you feed!  You could just try that for starters and see whether it puts weight on him without adding the grain for now, especially if he isn't working.

Yes a broad spectrum mineral is a good idea.  Try to find one that is specifically aimed at balancing grass hay based diets for example Select II from www.selectthebest.com this product does a good job of balancing the mineral needs of grass hay fed horses, plus it is pretty affordable.  I realize you may not have access to this product, but look at the ingredients and amounts and the amounts of zinc, copper, etc are those that you need to find.  

Another thing to feed an older underweight horse are B vitamins.  These are rarely deficient but if you have a horse who is under condition or older it is a good idea to supplement them.  They are in that product but a cheap way of getting them is to feed brewers grains/yeast.

Let me know how you get on.
Clair