Who gives a grain ration? How much?

[blue80]

I have never really worked a horse hard enough/long enough to need sustained large quantities of grain, but was taught to look at each horse individually and evaluate their hair and hoof condition; these are the horses overall wellness indicators.
One gentleman was adamant that nosebags are used so the owner knows for sure exactly how much each animal is getting and adjustments can be made accordingly.

My dad told me that when your horses have dapples, you’re where you want to be!

Kevin

[firebrick43]

Grain for horses is terrible. In probably 90 percent of the cases out there they don’t need it. Only if you are working hard for days on end(during plowing/planting season or making lots of hay, or logging) do you need it. And even then high quality alfalpha can replace the grain.

Extra protein in cows/horses that isn’t being used has to be processed out of the body through the kidneys and liver. You can not belive the damage that high energy feed does to milk cows livers and kidneys, which is why they have an average life span of 44 months now in the “standard” dairies.

I have seen this damage as well on horses feed high energy diets that are not being used heavy every/all day.

Grass/legume mixes in a proper rotational grazing system can provide the energy needed in most cases without any inputs except lime/sulphur(to bring ph into line). Notice I said grazing, not hay, and I said proper. False nitrogens kill the soil microbiolgy and harden the ground. The agchem companies know this but once you get addicted to it it you are hooked because it takes some time for the ground to come back to “life” after being poisioned. And most people just cant wait.

God, mother nature, insert belief sytem here, intended grasses to have hooves on them. Hooved animals to be in large hurds. And the hurds are intended to eat on area down and move on letting the ground rest. Only daily rotational grazing can come close to replicationg this natural cycle.

[Jim Ostergard]

Erik,
Was struck about your comment about photos of cows taken back. I sent a picture to Simon in the UK a few years ago of me and Rusty and I apoligized for how thin I thought he looked. Simon’s comment was he looked fine and most Europeans thought we overfed our horses.
Jim

[jac]

A big lot of British horses are way too fat. Our Clydes are off corn now and I have to say for the better. They get chopped alpha mixed with our home grown chopped hay with a 15% protien grass pellet and a warm bran mash mixed. This is varied depending on grass quality/growth and work load. Having said that I think logging will need a different level of feed to ordinary farm work.. but this works for me and I think too many folks take the easy route and read the feed bag label regards quantity and go with that ,rather than moniter the horse daily…
John

[mitchmaine]

a fat man don’t work any better than a lean one, somewhere in the middle i guess. i like to know they got ribs without being able to count. that said, if we expect them to do what we ask, they better get their wheaties. oats and spelt are good, but i think corn is poison. what ever works for you………..

[Carl Russell]

firebrick43;18326 wrote:

…
Extra protein in cows/horses that isn’t being used has to be processed out of the body through the kidneys and liver. ….

The old-timers who fed way more grain than we do always added salt-peter, so the horses would make more water, and they also didn’t feed them grain when they weren’t working.

I feed the bulk 2/3- 3/4 of my working ration in the AM before working, or in AM and at noon, and the remainder as dessert in PM.

I agree that grain fed to keep a horse fat is wasted. I only feed enough grain to provide the kind of working energy that I want in the woods.

I, like Mitch, like a horse that is obviously muscled, has a clean dappled coat, but has ribs.

Feeding horses is not just a menial task of tossing calories at the beast. It is a substantial part of the art of husbandry, and every horse I have ever had was different in the way it utilized its feed. When they need more, I give it, when they don’t, I don’t.

I manage my horses based on the work I am doing with them, and I like to use the simplest ingredients I can, hay, oats, corn, with salt and kelp as amendments.

Carl

[Andy Carson]

Maybe I’ve just had inefficient horses, but I like to think they have been hard workers. At any rate, I’ve always had to grain at least some, and lately alot. I agree that it is essential to monitor the horses condition and adjust grain intake to condition. Someone told me that the best “person” to tell you how much to feed your horse is your horse. I have found this to be good advice. Personally, I like to be able to feel ribs, but not see them. Well, maybe the last one of two on a sunny day… To my experience, how much you can grain a horse depends alot on thier underlying physical condition. When my horse was new and out of shape, she would get fat if I fed her more than about 4 lb a day, even though I started to work her right away. Her increased feed corresponded to her increased workload as she slowly gained condition and strength. It took a full year of consistent exhausting work to get up to 12-15 lbs a day without getting fat. Given this, I am not sure this is amount of food is really strange. The story of Michael Phelps and his 12000 calories a day diet comes to mind. That amount of food would certainly make most people (including me) very fat… I have also found that it is helpful to keep track of her energy level and her muscle tone. For mine, the type of feed makes a big difference in her energy level. Carbs tend to make her hot in the first half hour, and fat gives slow energy over longer periods of time. I try to give as much fat as she’ll eat, but I have often run into palatability issues.

[goodcompanion]

@Countymouse 18343 wrote:

Maybe I’ve just had inefficient horses, but I like to think they have been hard workers. At any rate, I’ve always had to grain at least some, and lately alot. I agree that it is essential to monitor the horses condition and adjust grain intake to condition. Someone told me that the best “person” to tell you how much to feed your horse is your horse. I have found this to be good advice. Personally, I like to be able to feel ribs, but not see them. Well, maybe the last one of two on a sunny day… To my experience, how much you can grain a horse depends alot on thier underlying physical condition. When my horse was new and out of shape, she would get fat if I fed her more than about 4 lb a day, even though I started to work her right away. Her increased feed corresponded to her increased workload as she slowly gained condition and strength. It took a full year of consistent exhausting work to get up to 12-15 lbs a day without getting fat. Given this, I am not sure this is amount of food is really strange. The story of Michael Phelps and his 12000 calories a day diet comes to mind. That amount of food would certainly make most people (including me) very fat… I have also found that it is helpful to keep track of her energy level and her muscle tone. For mine, the type of feed makes a big difference in her energy level. Carbs tend to make her hot in the first half hour, and fat gives slow energy over longer periods of time. I try to give as much fat as she’ll eat, but I have often run into palatability issues.

This brings to mind a much earlier discussion on this board, of larger versus smaller animals. Someone said that using more smaller rather than fewer larger animals in a hitch was more efficient, although grain wasn’t specifically singled out, the topic being more hay, I think. I wonder if generalized use of greater numbers of smaller animals would lead to less use of grain, to reduce both the financial expense to practitioners and the environmental costs associated with grain production.

[Carl Russell]

Countymouse;18343 wrote:

….. Personally, I like to be able to feel ribs, but not see them. Well, maybe the last one of two on a sunny day…..

That’s all I meant. Able to “know they have ribs”.

Carl

[mitchmaine]

http://www.draftanimalpower.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=1244&d=1273943611

john, one time a hundred years ago, amish and english farm models were one in the same. large families working in farming communities with animal power. when we went to fossil fuel and machines, we could eliminate the people involved, until one man and a son could farm 1000’s of acres.
and we understand the comparisons and wonder why its so difficult returning to the old model. i think it’s because we are trying to recreate the farm family without the family. most of us are trying to farm using animals, but lack the support of eight kids and a spouse and grandparents, and farming neighbors. that’s the beauty of amish farming to me. not the horse, but the support. thoughts, anybody? sure makes it easier with an extra pair of hands sometimes. mitch

[goodcompanion]

@mitchmaine 18470 wrote:

http://www.draftanimalpower.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=1244&d=1273943611

john, one time a hundred years ago, amish and english farm models were one in the same. large families working in farming communities with animal power. when we went to fossil fuel and machines, we could eliminate the people involved, until one man and a son could farm 1000’s of acres.
and we understand the comparisons and wonder why its so difficult returning to the old model. i think it’s because we are trying to recreate the farm family without the family. most of us are trying to farm using animals, but lack the support of eight kids and a spouse and grandparents, and farming neighbors. that’s the beauty of amish farming to me. not the horse, but the support. thoughts, anybody? sure makes it easier with an extra pair of hands sometimes. mitch

Certainly very true. Repopulating the farming landscape is pretty critical to a revival of sustainable farming. But there are huge challenges to making this happen, and this segues into a whole other topic, of course.

I don’t think the world has space in it for a new wave of amish-sized farm families coast to coast. While it’s convenient to have all those well-drilled kids around, this kind of family structure expects expansion into the indefinite future. Which to me is an ethical problem in a finite world.

So if people like me are to strive to repopulate our farms, maybe we have to do so with people who are not related to us. How then are we bound together? Not by necessity, at least not yet. By culture or religion? Hardly. And who follows whose direction? I grew up observing the first wave of back-to-the-land groups of unrelated adults have their projects dissolve in various kinds of mutual recrimination. Of all those well-meaning endeavors of the 70’s, I don’t know of a single one that survives in anything approaching its original form.

Not to say that it’s impossible. Right now I have four motivated adults on 110 acres, three of whom are teamsters, which is pretty good, I think, and the effect on the landscape is evident. But these arrangements are to be approached with extreme caution, to my view, and I’m reluctant to give up much “soverignty” if you will.

[jac]

Good thoughts you guys.. I hadnt looked at it that way. I think youre right that we are perhaps trying to recreate an “ideal”. Looking back at our own small farm, grandfather had 4 sons who would not be paid a proper wage as such, numerous grandchildren doing chores because it was fun all helped that small family farm.Hay time saw a few retired miners decend on the farm to help. Sheep shearing time had Uncle William away helping neighbours who returned the favour..no money ever changed hands… Same farm now has Uncle Alex at home doing most of the work himself with contractors at silage time.. dairy gone and a small beef herd now.. Aunt Jannete and cousin John both work off farm..
John

[goodcompanion]

Yeah, I guess it’s important to keep in mind that a lot of what we value in animal power originally came about as part of a whole cultural paradigm. Those of us using animal power in the contemporary world as it is are trying to make use of certain parts of that paradigm that we’ve chosen to take out and dust off, maybe leaving others on the shelf.

The virtue of animal power is that it can kind of function in the contemporary world. I say “kind of” because I don’t think many of us who are trying to use AP to earn a living farming or logging are having a terrific financial time of it. It “kind of” works for us well enough to keep us going, otherwise it would have entirely disappeared. But it doesn’t really function all that well absent the whole culture that surrounded it. Perhaps it’s better, morally, ethically, socially, spiritually than using gas power. But also maybe not–to return to the original topic, I would argue that a team of horses that does only occasional work yet consumes 8000 lbs of grain a year is not really part of the solution to the predicament of our failed agriculture.

There’s a great freedom in being able to pick and choose how we make our way in the world from the full range of options. Carl likes to fork every manure spreader load by hand–great! Another uses a bucket loader–super! I’m taking an interest in wet rice–why not? One teamster feeds no grain, another feeds a mountain of it. It’s all good. Whatever floats one’s boat.

But the real danger here, with each of us constructing our individual worldviews and practices more or less in a vacuum, is that without the stabilizing backbone of a real living culture, we can really go off in left field and who is there to set us straight? Not market forces. Not culture. Not religion. Not family. Not tradition. Donn Hewes put it best–each of us individually groping around in the dark for some notion of “sustainability” until the moment when it comes up behind us and whacks us over the head.

[jac]

Lynn Miller is quoted in his draft horse hand book that unless you grow you’re own horse feed, you may never benefit from the true value of draft horses.. I think he may be right.. I would like to think a team on 70cwt of grain a year would be used more than occasionaly but I see what you mean..
John

[mitchmaine]

the community we were talking about was much broader than family. it included harness makers, and wheelwrights, millers, and so on. we all have to wear too many hats on somedays.
when your grain was ripe, the threshin’ crew came through, took his ten percent and went on his way, saving you the cost of a lot of machinery and a couple days work.

mitch

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