Ration Balancers

These commercial feed formulations offer unique benefits to horse owners. See if one might be beneficial for your horse.

Ration balancers—everyone’s heard of them, but have you fully considered whether one might be the right option for your horse? They’re a different kind of commercial feed, useful in ways that standard formulations can’t match, especially for horses that tend to gain too much weight or get “hot” on regular feeds.

Let’s take a look.

Let’s see what that all this can mean in terms of satisfying your horse’s specific nutrition needs.

• An easy keeper is at risk of getting fat on traditional feeds in the amounts recommended to provide a full complement of vitamins and minerals. And you can’t always depend on your hay or pasture to provide those essential nutrients (see “The Vital Extra?” at left). A ration balancer makes sure your horse gets the nutrition he needs without the extra calories.

• Ration balancers can meet the nutritional needs of horses with metabolic conditions (such as insulin resistance and laminitis risk) while minimizing the nonstructural carbohydrates that these horses should avoid. (Always check labels to be sure the product you choose is safe for your horse.)

• Horses that need more than hay/pasture but get hot when fed traditional commercial feeds can benefit from a ration balancer. If you simply cut back on the amount of complete or performance feed you give your horse, you’re cheating him of the vitamin/mineral and protein content of the feed. With a balancer, you give him a full complement of nutrition without the extra energy that he really doesn’t need.

• Young, growing horses can benefit from a feed that provides concentrated nutrition with fewer calories, all of which supports a slower, healthier growth rate. Stallions and newly pregnant mares can also benefit from this concentrated feed choice.