The baseline
A horse needs roughly 1.5–2% of its body weight in forage every day.
For a 1,000 lb horse, that’s about 15 to 20 lbs — and it should be spread across the day, not dumped in two piles. Horses evolved to graze nearly continuously. Long gaps with an empty stomach cause problems on their own.
By September, a lot of SoCal pasture is done for the year. Turnout that carried horses through spring is now dirt and stems, and barns don’t always adjust the hay ration to match. The horses do the math for you — you just have to know what you’re looking at.
Seven signs to watch for
1 The manure changes
This is usually the earliest signal and the easiest to miss. Fewer piles per day, smaller balls, drier and harder than normal. Fiber intake drives gut motility — when fiber drops, everything slows down and dries out.
If you’re mucking noticeably less than you were a month ago and nothing else changed, that’s your answer.
2 Weight comes off the topline first
Ribs get the attention, but the topline goes earlier. A hollowing along the spine and a flattening over the croup and hindquarters usually shows up before you can count ribs from across the aisle.
Body condition scoring monthly catches this. Eyeballing horses you see every day does not — gradual change is nearly invisible up close.
3 They start eating things that aren’t food
Wood chewing on fences and stall boards. Eating bedding. Eating manure. Stripping bark. These are chew-drive behaviors — the horse needs to be processing fiber and doesn’t have any, so it finds a substitute.
Barn managers often treat this as a vice to be corrected. Nine times out of ten it’s a feeding problem wearing a behavior costume.
4 Feed time gets tense
Pawing, pacing the fence line, banging buckets, standing at the gate an hour early. In group turnout, watch for pinned ears, kicking, and horses running each other off piles.
Hungry horses guard resources. If your quiet herd got scrappy, look at the hay before you look at the horses.
5 Hay is gone hours before the next feeding
Walk the barn two hours after you feed. If every pile and net is licked clean and horses are standing around with nothing to do, they’re going to spend a long stretch with an empty stomach before the next meal.
The total pounds might be right on paper. The distribution isn’t.
6 Ulcer-type behavior shows up
Girthiness, sensitivity to grooming over the barrel, picking at grain, general crankiness under saddle, a dull coat. Horses produce stomach acid constantly, and chewing forage is what buffers it. Long empty stretches leave the stomach unprotected.
Ulcers need a vet to diagnose and treat — but forage gaps are one of the most common contributing factors, and they’re fixable at the feed room level.
7 More colic than usual
Low fiber intake plus low water intake is the classic setup for impaction colic. If you’ve had a couple of episodes in the same barn in a short window, look hard at forage volume and water access together.
Any suspected colic is a call to your vet, not something to manage from the feed room.
It isn’t always about how much you’re putting out
Sometimes the ration is correct and individual horses still come up short. Worth checking:
- Teeth. Quidding — dropping half-chewed wads of hay — means a horse is trying to eat and failing. Seniors and horses overdue for dental work can lose condition on a full ration.
- Herd hierarchy. The bottom horse in a group eats last and eats least. Extra piles, spaced well apart, fixes more problems than extra pounds.
- Hay quality. Stemmy, over-mature, or weathered hay means horses sort through it and leave a lot on the ground. You’re paying for pounds they aren’t eating.
- Waste. Feeding on dirt or sand, in wind, or without nets can lose a meaningful share of every flake before it reaches a horse.
What to do about it
Weigh what you’re actually feeding — an actual scale, not a flake count, since flake weight varies wildly. Compare it to each horse’s body weight and adjust from there. Add a feeding rather than adding volume to existing ones, so the day has fewer empty gaps. Then reassess body condition in three to four weeks.
If you make a significant change to what or how much you’re feeding, make it gradually over a week or two. The horse’s hindgut microbes need time to adapt.
Where cubes fit
Alfalfa cubes are a straightforward way to close a forage gap, especially when pasture is finished and hay quality is inconsistent. They’re weighable, so you know exactly what each horse is getting. There’s very little waste — nothing to sort through and drop on the ground. And they store in a fraction of the space of the equivalent tonnage in bales.
They also soak well, which matters for seniors, hard keepers, and any horse that isn’t drinking enough. Cubes and water in a bucket, fifteen minutes, done.
Feeding a barn that needs more forage?
Paramount Cubing has been manufacturing alfalfa cubes in Southern California for over 50 years, and we sell direct to barns, boarding facilities, rescues, and private stables — no distributor in the middle. Premium Alfalfa Cubes are 100% alfalfa. Preferred Protein Cubes are 50% alfalfa and 50% wheat straw. Super sacks or 50lb bags on pallets, two-pallet minimum, free delivery throughout Southern California.
