Selling a Horse: Success Begins with Quality Nutrition

Success Begins with Quality Nutrition

A lot goes into getting a horse ready for sale. Buyers will be looking at many factors including size, condition and coat—all of which are affected by nutrition and exercise. From foals to weanlings to yearlings to mares and stallions, we know plenty about supporting a horse’s health throughout its life with quality nutrition. And yes, we believe apropriate nutrition will help when it comes to selling a horse.

Balance Forage with Concentrates

While a horse’s overall nutritional needs will change over its lifespan, good quality forage should always be a part of its diet. In fact, forage is the most important part of the diet. Whether you choose legumes, like alfalfa or clover, or grasses, like timothy, you’ll need to complement it with a concentrate to ensure your horse has the appropriate nutrients needed for proper development.

Start Them Off Right

A foal’s rapid growth demands proper nutrients to ensure healthy development. Once it has been weaned, ensuring it has the right mix of calories, protein (about 14%-16%), vitamins and minerals will help build strong bones and muscles. Horse owners should rely on Hallway Feeds to properly balance the feeds and provide feeding directions. Getting all of the nutrients balanced on your own would be very tricky. Too much of one nutrient may interfere with the ability to absorb another.

As a leader in equine nutrition, we’ve developed feeds that easily meet a foal’s needs, including Staminoats, Special 13, Edge 14, RG14, OO16, Super 16 and Super Staminoats. If your plans include selling a horse, adding these feeds to your program at an early age can support good health and balance the overall ration to raise healthy horses.

One of our notable innovations, Edge Technology, is especially beneficial for developing horses. Since the insulin produced during cereal grain digestion could alter a growing horse’s proper skeletal development, our Edge Technology replaces cereal grains with a combination of “superfibers” and vegetable oil to reduce the “spike” of glucose after a meal resulting in an increase in insulin production. We’ve put this Edge Technology in both our Edge 14 and RG14 feeds.

Special 13 and Staminoats are designed to be very similar products, but differ in feed form for the owner or manager to choose which they prefer for their management situation. Special 13 is a textured feed and Staminoats is a ½” pellet. They have similar protein, vitamin and mineral levels and properly balance nutrition for growing horses.

Our OO16, Super 16 and Super Staminoats are all 16% protein. Each of these nutrient-dense feeds eliminates the need to supplement with additional vitamins and minerals, making it easy to ensure proper nutrition. Super 16 and Super Staminoats are essentially the same feed, they differ in form mainly. Super 16 is a textured product and Super Staminoats comes as a ½” pellet. OO16 is also a ½” pellet, but its calorie sources come from oats only, hence the name OO16.

Ration Balancer

As horses grow, their nutritional needs shift. While most will need to remain on a feed that provides all the nutritional needs and the calories to keep them growing, some individuals may grow too fast or have growth disorders that need to eliminate a high intake of calories from the diet. This can be done by incorporating Stamm 30 into the ration.

Stamm 30 is a highly concentrated source of proteins, vitamins and minerals. One of the ingredients, Buffered Mineral Complex, acts as a gastric buffer, hindgut buffer, and improves bone density. If you have a young horse with physitis, contracted tendons, osteochondrosis, or other growing disorders you can feed Stamm 30 on its own to provide all the nutrients necessary without adding calories to the diet.

Prepping for the Sale

As time approaches to start prepping your horse for sale, a switch to one of our specially designed prepping products would be a good choice. We created Prep 14 to provide 20% more calories than conventional textured feeds, which helps increase body condition. The highly digestible fiber and fat make it an exceptional “calming and cooling” mix, and it’s already fortified with Stamm 30, so you don’t need to supplement it with other proteins, vitamins or minerals.

You may also consider Luminance, which can be fed alone or mixed with feed (depending on the horse’s age, condition and activity). Our experts created this as a source of “cool calories,” to add energy to a horse’s ration. It also provides omega-3 fatty acids, minerals and vitamins and includes ingredients such as ground flax.

If you prefer a pelleted product on your farm and want to continue to feed a pellet during sales prep, you should consider Quantify. Based on Staminoats as a foundation, Quantify has been raised to 8% fat to add the calories to build body condition, provide energy for exercise, and the oil to clean up a coat.

Selling a Horse Successfully

When you know you’ll be selling a horse, make sure you take a look at your feeding program. Ensuring the proper nutrition from the start improves your chances of having a strong, healthy horse when it comes time to sell.