[AT] Hey Ralph!

[Indiana Robinson]

On Sun, Nov 22, 2015 at 6:20 PM, Carl Gogol <cgogol at twcny.rr.com> wrote:

> I'm told that alfalfa is not kind to horses.  Hay dealers around here use
> grass based hay (no or only minor amounts of legumes).
> Carl
>
>

Actually alfalfa is fine for horses (here). I don't know about other areas,
things vary a lot around the country. The biggest alfalfa problem around
here is people feeding it straight to stalled horses and it can about make
them nuts if they can't get out and run it off. Most other clovers won't
hurt them but will make them slobber in amounts that will shock you. Not
harmful but can make it really hard to keep them in dry bedding. Few of our
borders buy alfalfa due to the cost. Most of them just want something that
used to be green and as cheap as possible.
:-)
We haven't even bought any hay for our 6 for a couple of years. I have them
running on about 75 acres through the winter and they get fat on it. We do
feed them alfalfa cubes a bit but mostly as snacks, about a pound or less
as the weather gets colder. In the spring, summer and fall they may only
get a few cubes and sometimes none. When the snow and ice get bad we bump
them up to about 3 pounds a day but when the white crap melts we drop them
back down to about a pound a day. Our horses are on pasture 24-7-365 and
only have an area the size of about 4 good sized stalls as an open run-in
shed. Some days they hang out in it and sometimes they might go a week
without even going inside. Sometimes they go in on a nice day then stand
out in really awful weather.
:-)



-- 

Francis Robinson
aka "farmer"
Central Indiana USA
robinson46176 at gmail.com