It was all about equine nutrition on Tuesday, August 15, as Tiffany Wyman of Nutrena Feeds presented an interesting and informative discussion on that subject for about 50 people at the Edmond Town Hall.

Participants learned that the horse digestive tract is about 100 feet long and is meant to be working all day long (in the wild, a horse will eat for 20 hours a day). When man domesticated the horse, shut the animals in a stall, and fed them twice a day – that’s when the problems started.

In order to know how much to feed your horses, Ms Wyman said, you must first know how much the horse weighs. To estimate your horse’s weight, within 50 pounds, take a measuring tape and measure the heart girth (right where the girth would go, behind the front legs) and the body length from the point of the shoulder to halfway on the buttocks.

Next, multiply the heart girth by the heart girth by the body length and divide by 330.

According to Ms Wyman, you want to feed your horse no more than four percent per 1000 pounds of body weight. About 50 to 75% of this will be fed in hay (good hay has about 800 calories per pound). The average horse needs about 20,000 calories and a hard-working horse needs about 30,000 calories a day.

If you are lucky enough to have access to pasture, forage heights are best at about six to eight inches.

There was also lots of discussion about the horse’s hing gut (large intestine) – all 30 feet of it! The digestion of fiber (hay) goes on in the large intestine and since a young horse does not have a developed hind gut, it won’t eat a lot of hay.

At the end of the evening, Out Front Farms of Monroe raffled off one ton of Nutrena feeds.