Our forage analysis showed a really unhealthy imbalance of minerals with manganese being particularly high and copper and zinc being particularly low. Copper and zinc have been shown to be crucial in developing strong healthy hooves!
The so called ‘bespoke supplement’ had gone no way near to addressing these imbalances indeed it had added to the horses manganese overload. In amazement we started looking for a feed on the market which would ‘balance’ our horses forage but one did not exist and at that point a light bulb came on in Sarah’s head.
There is no such thing as a balanced supplement off the shelf, only a supplement which is balanced if that’s all you feed.
What the supplements and commercial mixes we can buy don’t do is to take account of the imbalances in the major portion of the horses’ diet, which is always unique to that horse or group of horses. More they use a kitchen sink, throw everything at the horse approach in the hope that some of the stuff the horse is getting will do some good. In the Performance Barefoot horses case some of it will have added to our problems quite significantly.
Once we were aware of this we could start to look at the imbalances revealed in the forage analysis, crunch some numbers, refer to the 2007 Nutrient requirements for Horses and work out a real bespoke supplement based on actual need rather than kitchen sink, scatter gun nonsense.
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