Include the herb mix in your daily feed management
The Horse Therapist advises to include the herb mix as a daily feed in the horse's feed management in addition to giving (unlimited) roughage. The herb mix then replaces or supplements the concentrated feed. Giving a herb mix can solve and prevent many problems.
Grass or roughage alone is often not enough
Horses are collectors and not grazers. A lot of roughage, whether its hay or haylage, only contains grass and no longer the natural herbs that used to grow in the landscape. Often this grass is ryegrass, which is intended for cows to produce milk. Rye grass is beautifully green, but contains much more glucose and protein than other grasses and is not coarse-stalked, making it unsuitable for horses. When the grass is fertilized with fertilizer, this also has no positive effect on the horse's digestion. Fertilizing with natural products to feed the soil and grass is recommended! Often there is only little choice when it comes to roughage, unless you harvest it yourself.
Due to this one-sided diet, the horse can accumulate a surplus of proteins and glucose and a shortage of natural vitamins, minerals and many other important building materials and active ingredients. Feeding a herb mix provides a seasonal solution for this!
Advantages and disadvantages of concentrated feeds
Concentrated food is a great source of energy for the horse to perform. Many types of concentrates contain important building materials to feed the horse according to the RDA standard. To form a pellet it has to be heated high, as a result the vitamins that are used are often synthetic and more difficult for the horse to absorb and the minerals can be added in the wrong proportions. As a result, more than 50% of the horses have a magnesium deficiency!
Concentrated food can also contain sugars, starch, fillers, cloves and other ingredients that disrupt the intestinal function of the horse. Molasses is often used as an adhesive to form the pellet. If the intestinal flora is disturbed, the horse can no longer absorb the building materials it needs and can no longer ferment the roughage properly. In practice, you see horses lose weight instead of gaining weight when they are given a lot of pellet or muesli or they get fat with a hard mane comb and fat bumps and they are very stiff and rigid due to the waste products in the body.
Restore intestinal flora
Horses cannot handle concentrates. By (partially) omitting concentrates and giving a herb mix, they can recover and maintain themselves. With the nutrients in herbs, horses can build muscle and fat and have enough energy to ride at high level of dressage. In addition, we can easily measure additional (pure) products, if the horse still needs more energy.
Advice
Therefore, give your horse a new herb mix every 5 weeks. Each time the horse is measured again and therefore 100% customized to the condition of your horse at that moment in time, the season and many other factors. An advantage is that the horse gets a check-up every 5 weeks!
* written by Jente Driessen from HorseComplete and translated by Sharon Bronsveld from The Horse Therapist