nutritional analysis ugliness

["Michelle Fink" <michrowe@redwrench.com>]

Hi Folks,

I am trying to guesstimate how much pasture (in lbs) a horse consumes in a
12 hour visit at night.  Any good hints on coming up with a reasonable
number?  Based on the digestible energy content of grass, I'm expecting it
to be a fairly high number...

I tried to reverse engineer it because I know that my 1000 lb. horse who
does light work does fine on just 12 hours of pasture with no supplements.
That would be about 20.5 mCals per day required, I think.  Orchard grass
pasture has only .55 mCal DE per kg, but that comes out as 80 lbs. of
pasture per 12 hour period?  Does that sound even close or am I failing math
class again??

I feed my horse 6 different things (simple, right?), and when I plugged it
into
a spreadsheet to calculate DE, vitamins, minerals, etc. boy did it get ugly.

Thanks,
Michelle