Yes, you can absolutely feed a horse balancer on its own.
Horse balancers are highly concentrated supplements designed to provide essential vitamins, minerals, and high-quality protein without adding significant calories. This makes them an excellent choice for ensuring your horse receives a complete nutritional profile, regardless of their workload or body condition.
How Horse Balancers Can Be Fed
Balancers offer flexibility in how they can be incorporated into your horse's diet:
- Fed by Hand: For horses that don't require the additional calories of a traditional feed, balancers can be given directly by hand, often mixed with a small amount of palatable fibre like chaff to encourage consumption. This method is ideal for "good doers" or horses on a calorie-restricted diet.
- As Part of a Forage-Based Diet: While suitable on their own, balancers are also perfectly designed to complement a primarily forage-based diet. This includes common roughage sources such as hay, grass, and various other fibre types. In this scenario, the balancer effectively fills any nutritional gaps that forage alone might present, ensuring a well-rounded and complete intake of micronutrients.
Benefits of Feeding Balancers Independently
Choosing to feed a horse balancer on its own, especially alongside a robust forage program, offers several key advantages:
- Precise Nutrient Delivery: Balancers provide a consistent and targeted supply of vitamins, minerals, and amino acids crucial for overall health, strong hooves, a healthy coat, and muscle maintenance, without the bulk or calories of a traditional feed.
- Weight Management: They are particularly beneficial for horses that are good doers or those in light work, as they deliver essential nutrients without promoting unwanted weight gain.
- Simplified Nutrition: For horses with straightforward dietary needs, using a balancer can streamline the feeding routine while still guaranteeing comprehensive nutritional support.
- Support for Specific Needs: They can help support various aspects of equine health, from immune function and bone density to healthy digestion, by providing all necessary building blocks.
This approach ensures that your horse receives all the vital nutrients required for optimal health and performance, even when a full-spectrum concentrated feed is not necessary.
