Considering and Assessing Hay Health

🌾 Is Your Hay Healthy? 🌾

When keeping your horse on a track or similar system, hay forage can account for close to 100% of your horse’s daily intake. Indeed, in a traditional stabled system, your horse will be eating hay for around 15 hours per day. Hay is the preferred forage fed to equines in the UK (King 2012).

How do you know whether the hay you’re feeding is right for your horse? Have you ever stopped to question what exactly is in that bale or do you take delivery and feed away?

First of all we should address the quality of the forage. This will be determined by several factors including the conditions it is grown under, how and when it is harvested and how it is stored (Longland et al. 2011). Hay will always have a certain level of microbial presence but improper conditions at harvest, poor storage conditions, storing at the wrong moisture content and soaking practices can increase microbial activity by 500% (Moore-Colyer, et al. 2014).

Hay should always be checked for heat, moulds or foul smells before feeding and caution should be observed when soaking hay as the benefits of reduction in dust and water soluble carbohydrates (WSC) may be outweighed by the risk of greater pathogen numbers.

We also need to look at the types of grass present in your hay and when it was cut to assess maturity and therefore estimate nutrient levels. Younger plants will have higher levels of crude protein, starch and sugars in comparison to those which are more mature when harvested that will have a higher fibre content (Warren 2006). Get a feel of your hay, is it soft or is it much stalkier? Younger plants will be much softer and older, more fibrous plants, much spikier to the touch.

Modern rye grasses are a very popular choice for hay growers because they are bred for maximum production and they are very hardy. But because of this they are also often one of the more unsuitable grass hays to feed as they are too highly digestible and have high metabolisable energy rates.
A horse’s gut is evolved to utilise much more fibrous, stalky forage and to draw energy from it via the vast collection of bacteria, Protozoa and yeasts present in the horse’s caecum . In fact energy derived from this process (rather than from the digestion of soluble carbohydrates in the foregut) whereby volatile fatty acids (VFAs) and lactic acid are produced makes for a slower release energy source and therefore prevents large swings in blood sugar concentration (Van Der Veen 2015).

Choosing a selection of lower energy, more fibrous grasses for your hay will provide a more suitable nutritional profile for our horses. Grasses such as smooth and rough meadow grass, timothy, fescue, brome, Yorkshire fog, cocksfoot and false oat grass. Of course to know exactly what is in your hay nutrient-wise, it is advisable to have a hay analysis done.

🌾 Is Just Hay Ok? 🌾

This brings us to our next important point, variety. All plants, grasses, trees, shrubs and weeds have differing nutrient profiles. Some plants may contain potentially damaging toxins while others can be very useful.

You may have heard the terms ‘nutraceutical’ and ‘phytonutrients/phytochemicals’ in relation to plants that can help our horses.
Nutraceutical means a ‘functional food’ and is an umbrella term for a food that can provide a medical or health benefit. Phytochemicals are specifically, naturally occurring chemicals in plants that help to protect from disease, bacteria and fungi (and for the plant itself, insects and other threats).

For the body to function optimally, it makes sense to consume a range of vegetation to provide a range of phytochemicals which have shown to play an active role in the prevention of disease (Lugasi 2003). So, while providing suitable grass hay should form the main proportion of your horse’s daily intake, they should also have access to safe alternative vegetation to provide a broader range of useful nutraceuticals (whilst bearing in mind that green forage will have higher soluble carbohydrate and protein levels so shouldn’t be fed to excess).

This is really just the tip of the iceberg, the subject of hay is incredibly broad and we will be looking at other aspects of it in future blogs at Graveney Equine: Horse Track Livery System and at www.GraveneyEquine.Wordpress.com

© Lauren Johnson at Graveney Equine 2021

King, L. (2012) A survey of forage feeding practices in UK. BSc thesis. Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester Glos. UK.

Longland, A., Barfoot, C. and Harris, P. (2011) Effects of soaking on the water-soluble carbohydrate and crude protein content of hay. Veterinary Record: Journal of the British Veterinary Association. 168(23).

Lugasi, A. (2003) The role of antioxidant phytonutrients in the prevention of diseases, Acta Biologica Szegediensis, 47(1-4), pp. 119-125. Available at: http://abs.bibl.u-szeged.hu/index.php/abs/article/view/2358 [Accessed: 18October2021].

Moore-Colyer, M. J. S., Lumbis, K., Longland, A. and Harris, P. (2014) The Effect of Five Different Wetting Treatments on the Nutrient Content and Microbial Concentration in Hay for Horses. PLoS ONE. 9(11): e114079.

Warren, L. K (2006) Selecting Hay For Your Horse. Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, Florida. USA.

Van Der Veen, J (2015) Fiber Digestion in the Horse. Equisearch.com. Available at: https://www.equisearch.com/.amp/discoverhorses/fiber-digestion-horse-29575 [Acessed 18 October 2021].

(Attached photographs show a small range of safe, suitable and useful grasses, plants and hedging for horses).