Is Your Horse’s Diet Like Fast Food? Understanding Equine Nutrition

Have you ever wondered if your horse eats more like a family living on fast food, a family with only lettuce, or a family with a balanced, home-cooked diet? Just like us, horses can thrive, or struggle, depending on the variety, freshness, and quality of their nutrition.

To explore this, let’s imagine three families describing their diets to their doctor.

Family One: The Fast Food Lovers

“We have a busy lifestyle so we eat quick, high-energy foods. Mostly ready meals. We don’t buy many fruits and vegetables because they spoil too fast. But don’t worry — we take a daily multivitamin.”

This is like the diet of many performance and sports horses. They might have some turnout, often in monoculture ryegrass fields, but most calories come from high-energy processed feeds. These feeds are designed to be palatable, energy-dense, and convenient, but they are also unnatural in this context, much like human processed food.

High-starch, high-sugar horse feeds are strongly associated with:

• Equine metabolic syndrome (EMS) (Frank et al., 2010)

• Obesity (Geor & Harris, 2009)

• Laminitis (AAEP, 2023)

• Gastric ulcers (Andrews et al., 2015)

• Hindgut acidosis (Richards N, 2006)

Like people who rely on processed diets may face higher risks of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, horses on these diets face long-term welfare challenges.

Family Two: The Lettuce Diet

“We only eat gem lettuce, iceberg lettuce, red leaf lettuce, tomato, and cucumber. But we’re fine — we take a multivitamin every day.”

This is very similar to the diet of many horses at pasture. UK pastures are often sprayed, fertilised, and overseeded with a handful of grass species, such as ryegrass, fescue, cocksfoot, timothy, and meadow grass (DEFRA, 2019).

When fresh grass runs out, hay is offered — but it’s usually the same limited species, just dried. While hay is often lower in sugar (a good thing), it’s also lower in vitamins and minerals (Harris et al., 2017). Horses are then given a daily balancer or supplement, just like the multivitamin.

A diet of eight grass types plus a balancer isn’t diverse enough to support the horse’s full nutritional needs or gut microbiome (Dougal et al., 2014).

Family Three: The Balanced Foodies

“We eat a variety of seasonal fruits and vegetables, cook our own meals, and buy from local farms. We still take multivitamins just in case, but our diet is rich, fresh, and diverse.”

This is the diet we’d all like — and it’s the one horses evolved to eat. Horses in wild, feral or conservation herds forage across diverse landscapes, eating not only grasses but also herbs, shrubs, tree bark, and wildflowers (Duncan, 1992). Their diets are high in fibre, diverse in plant types, and naturally balanced with proteins, fats, vitamins, and minerals.

Unfortunately, very few domestic horses get this kind of variety today.

Connemara grazing on grass. There are edible bushes but they are not within reach. In the wild of Ireland's Connemara region, this breed of pony would have eaten heather, gorse, scant grass, and seaweed.

A small herd of horses living on Family Two's lettuce diet.

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Why Diversity Matters in the Equine Diet

• Protein and Amino Acids Horses need protein for growth, muscle repair, and tissue health. Of the 20 amino acids that make proteins, 9 are essential. Horses cannot make them and must obtain them from food. Lysine, threonine, and methionine are especially important and often limiting in standard forage diets (Hoffman, 2019).

• Fats and Oils Omega fatty acids are essential for joint, skin, coat, and immune health. Modern cereal-based diets are often too high in Omega-6 and deficient in Omega-3. Fresh forage is the horse’s best natural source of Omega-3 (O’Connor et al., 2007).

• Vitamins and Minerals Balancers and supplements help, but they cannot replace the variety and synergy of nutrients in fresh plants (Harris et al., 2017).

• Gut Microbiome Horses rely on a diverse hindgut microbiome to digest fibre. A limited, grass-only diet reduces microbial diversity, which may increase risks of colic, ulcers, and metabolic disorders (Dougal et al., 2014).

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Practical Ways to Improve Your Horse’s Diet

• Provide Turnout: Fresh forage is always best — let horses graze where safe and appropriate. But if your pasture is dominated by ryegrass or a handful of sown grasses, it won’t provide the diversity their digestive system has evolved for.

• Increase Woody Fibre: Plant edible hedges and trees for shelter and forage. Or, offer pruned branches like willow in stables and paddocks.

• Add Variety with Wildflowers: Natural grasslands contain only 60–80% grasses; the rest is herbs and legumes (Hopkins & Wilkins, 2006). Overseeding with a horse-safe wildflower mix, like the British Rewilding Mix, can restore natural diversity to grazing. If you don’t own the land, you can grow in pots or trays of forage herbs that can be moved with your horse. Alternatively, grow in your garden and harvest fresh forage to add to your horses bucket.

  

  Owner of a horse on a livery yard grew the British Rewilding Mix in her garden and pulls it to add to her horses feed each day

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The Takeaway

Just like us, horses thrive on a diverse, fresh, and minimally processed diet. While processed feeds and limited pastures may be convenient, they cannot fully support long-term health, welfare, or the gut microbiome.

At Hoof & Habitat, we’re working to improve animal welfare, soil health and the health of the ecosystem. Our British Rewilding Mix is designed to bring diversity back into horse grazing, supporting both equine wellbeing and biodiversity.

British Rewilding Mix

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References

• AAEP. “Learn to Recognize the Signs of Laminitis,” AAEP Client Resources PDF. Accessed 2023.

• Andrews, F. M., et al. (2015). Gastric ulcers in horses. Equine Veterinary Journal, 47(2), 139–150.

• DEFRA (2019). Improving Grassland Management in the UK. Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs.

• Fernandes KA, Kittelmann S, Rogers CW, Gee EK, Bolwell CF, Bermingham EN, et al. (2014) Faecal Microbiota of Forage-Fed Horses in New Zealand and the Population Dynamics of Microbial Communities following Dietary Change. PLoS ONE 9(11): e112846. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0112846

• Duncan, P. (1992). Horses and Grasses: The Nutritional Ecology of Equids and Their Impact on the Camargue. Springer.

• Frank, N., et al. (2010). Equine metabolic syndrome. Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine, 24(3), 467–475.

• Richards N, Hinch G, Rowe J. The effect of current grain feeding practices on hindgut starch fermentation and acidosis in the Australian racing Thoroughbred. Aust Vet J. 2006 Nov;84(11):402-7. doi: 10.1111/j.1751-0813.2006.00059.x. PMID: 17092327.

• Geor, R. J., & Harris, P. A. (2009). Obesity in horses. The Veterinary Clinics of North America: Equine Practice, 25(1), 67–82.

• Harris, P. A., Ellis, A. D., Fradinho, M. J., Jansson, A., Julliand, V., Luthersson, N., Santos, A. S., & Vervuert, I. (2017). Feeding conserved forage to horses: recent advances and recommendations. Animal, 11(6), 958–967.

• Hoffman, R. M. (2019). Protein in Equine Diets. Kentucky Equine Research.

• Hopkins, A., & Wilkins, R. J. (2006). Temperate grassland: key developments in the last century and future perspectives. Journal of Agricultural Science, 144(6), 503–523.

• O’Connor, C. I., et al. (2007). Dietary omega-3 fatty acids in horses. Journal of Animal Science, 85(8), 2183–2191.