Supplementing Your Horse During Winter

Valley Rural Supplies Horse SupplementsDuring the Winter months, the quality and quantity of feed drops off. Supplement feeding of dry matter often doesn’t cover your animal’s vitamin and mineral requirements. Supplementing is especially important for performance and breeding mares.

Here at Valley Rural Supplies we have many types of Vitamin and Mineral supplements. There are 2 basic ‘types’:

Powdered Supplements

Which are added to your animal’s feed and quantities are administered by you (Equilibrium, Livamol, Groom, Superior Mineral Mix, Magnesium Oxide, Kelp Meal)

Mineral blocks

This type of supplement is self administered by your horse. (Olsson’s produce a range of blocks for Cattle, Horses & Goats)

We have a range of both products in store, and some vitamin and mineral supplements are formulated based on the type of forage that is provided for the base of the diet (grass or legume hay, pasture, etc.).

Our friendly team can help you select a supplement to suit your and your horse’s diet.

TIP!
Don’t throw a rug on your horse in winter and leave it on for weeks on end without taking it off to check your horse’s body condition (and of course that it doesn’t have any injuries or sores that are covered by the rug).
Check your horses regularly specifically look at areas on your horse’s body such as the top of the neck, the wither, over the ribs and over the loin to assess the amount of body fat (which we call body condition) your horse is carrying.
So get rugs off as often as you can, daily is ideal so you can check to see if your horse is losing, maintaining or gaining weight, which will then allow you to adjust their diet quickly as soon as you detect an unwanted change.

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