Fibre or stud mix- what do I feed?

[No_Angel]

Im thinking about feed for a foal, is it better to start straight from scratch with fibre feeds, or feed the traditional stud mix?

[Mehitabel]

what kind of foal? baileys suregrow is good for the more 'normal' breeds and natives - stud mix is optimised for TBs destined for the racetrack, so is overkill for most leisure horses. you can get foal creep pellets too, which are less rocket fuel than stud mix.

[No_Angel]

appaloosa.
What are the advantages of feeding a stud mix type feed over a forage based feed?
the only foals ive worked with have been destined for the race track or showjumping, so all i have seen fed is stud mix.

[Mehitabel]

it's much higher levels of everything, promotes faster growth. TBs are designed to be close to their full height early on for the racing, so they can cope with that - in a slower maturing native/WB type, that can cause OCD and joint problems. so it's positively disadvantageous for a 'normal' hors to be fed a lot of stud mix as a baby.

also, i lied - suregrow is D&H, not baileys - http://www.dodsonandhorrell.com/uk/dh/horse/breeding/suregrow

[Wally]

I'd rather they had a good fibre based feed, with plenty of the right balance of trace elements.

Normal horses were designed to do well on bogg all.

[eventerbabe]

we took kes off stud cubes when we got him and onto a fibre diet. He came to me (at 2) on youngstock pellets, conditioning cubes, sugar beet and barley!! we had a job keeping weight on him til we swapped him onto hi-fi lite, speedi-beet and a good allround vitamin supplement. Now he holds weight much better. i don't like the idea of filling baby stomachs full of cereals if it can be at all avoided.

[Bronya]

In the wild they'd just eat grass, but they would also be weaned later than we do it. So logically domesticated foals might need a supplement of some kind + fibre. Ideally that would be a sort of feed balancer that you could give, so the energy comes from fibre but protein, calcium etc for growth is topped up a little in the balancer. I think some of the youngstock feeds are just balancers. Not sure, think Baileys has a balancer for youngstock, or maybe it's someone else...

[DizzyBlonde2007]

If i were in your situation i would contact dodson and horrel feed specialists and ask them about it i have used their advice before and it gave excellent results!:)

[puzzles]

yup, i ditto that!

:-)

xx

Blue Chip Original feed balancer can be fed to young foals on forage based diets, to provide all the essential nutrients.

You might find these contacts useful:

http://www.bluechipfeed.com/contact.htm
http://www.dodsonandhorrell.com/uk/dh/contact
http://www.baileyshorsefeeds.co.uk/about/contactus.htm

Good luck!