Re: nutritional analysis ugliness

["Susan Garlinghouse" <suendavid@worldnet.att.net>]

> 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...

The number can vary quite a bit based on the quality and maturity of the
pasture and dedication of the horse <g>, but a reasonable estimate for good
pasture is around 3-4 lbs per hour of grazing.  So my guess for your horse
is probably closer to 35-50 lbs a night.  Remember a lot of that is water
weight.

Unless the quality of your pasture is really, REALLY poor (which I doubt),
the energy content is probably higher than .55 mcals/kg.  My guess is it's
probably closer to 1.6 - 2.0 mcal/kg or .7 - .9 mcals/lb, which would
provide plenty of energy and nutrients for most adult horses.

Susan G

>
> 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
>
>
>
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