Good nutrition is absolutely essential in helping to maintain a good health and well being of the horse. Feeding can also have quite an influence on the way your horse behaves. Here are a few simple rules of feeding to help you avoid some of the most common pitfalls:

• Allow good access to fresh clean water 24/7 in clean buckets or troughs. The amount of water that your horse needs depends on many different factors, including their workload, diet, sweating rate as well as the temperature of the environment. Therefore, it is essential that clean water is available at all times. Take particular care to monitor water intake. On average, the daily water requirement for a grown up adult horse is between 25-40 litres.

• Feed at least 50% of the overall diet as quality long fibre. Having evolved as grazing herbivores, horses graze and browse on fibre which contains feeds for up to 18 hours per day. Feeding adequate fibre helps to maintain good, healthy gut function, reduces the possibility of digestive disorders and abnormal behaviours. Fibre is found in many forms, from forages to grass and hay. If poss, you should feed forage off a clean floor because this is more natural. If necessary, try and soak hay for about half an hour in clean water to reduce exposure of the horse lungs to dust and other harmful particles.
• Fee little but often. Try and feed cereal based feeds in a minimum of 2 feeds a day for horses in light to medium work and about 4 times a day for horses in heavy work. Keep concentrate feeds to at most 2.5kg for horses of 400kg or over and less for lighter horses.