Sometimes it seems like my horse has a bottomless pit when it comes to food. How much can a horse really eat?
A guideline number is that a horse will eat 1.5 to 3.5% of its body weight. What does that mean? For every 100 lbs of the horse s weight, it will eat 1.5 to 3.5 lbs of the food. A 1000-lb horse will eat 15 to 35 lbs of feed per day. The voluntary intake (i.e. the amount of food a horse chooses to eat) depends on the palatability, the density and the processing of the food. Tasty, palatable feeds will be eaten in much higher amounts than less palatable or spoiled feeds. For example, horses will eat about 2.5 lbs of alfalfa for every 100 lbs of body weight but will only eat 1.8 lbs of mature slough hay for every 100 lbs of body weight. Horses eat more pellets than long hay.
