Prepping Your Horse for Winter: A Complete Guide

As the leaves begin to fall, we know winter is just around the corner. With colder temperatures, wetter conditions, and shorter days, we know it’s time to focus on winter horse care.  Cold weather brings challenges such as increased energy needs, reduced grazing, and vitamin deficiencies. Horses vary greatly in their individual needs; however, all need basic winter support: shelter, clean water, appropriate forage, and a high-quality vitamin-mineral supplements to fill any gaps in their diet.

Hard Keepers: How to Maintain Weight in Winter

For horses that struggle to maintain weight during winter, it’s essential to provide extra calories to help them reach and maintain a healthy body condition. These “hard keepers” require different management than the average horse. Without special care, they can become even more challenging to keep at a healthy weight during the coldest months.

The first step is to evaluate caloric intake. Horses, like humans, lose weight when they burn more calories than they consume. A horse that maintains good body condition in mild weather will need additional calories as temperatures drop since they expend more energy staying warm.

Ways to Increase Caloric Intake:

• Increase hay consumption: Offer free-choice hay to allow your horse to eat gradually throughout the day. This not only helps meet energy needs but also reduces stress.
• Provide calorie-dense hay: Horses should ideally consume about 2% of their body weight in forage daily. For a 1,100-pound horse, that’s approximately 22 pounds of hay. If your horse already has access to free-choice grass hay, consider adding calorie-dense options, such as alfalfa, to boost energy intake.

Use Fat-Based Concentrates if Needed

• If forage alone isn’t sufficient, consider adding grain or high-fat, low-carbohydrate concentrates.
• Fat provides 2.25 timesthe energy of carbohydrates and can safely make up to 15% of a horse’s diet without causing palatability or digestive issues.
• Feeds rich in fat, like extruded soybeans, offer a safe way to increase energy density while reducing the total amount of feed required.

Easy Keepers: Avoiding Weight Gain in Winter

With reduced exercise during winter, “easy keepers” often gain unwanted weight. Because they naturally store more fat, they use fewer calories to stay warm, making 

weight gain more likely. For these horses, it’s usually best to provide only forage along with a vitamin-mineral supplement, avoiding high-calorie concentrates.

Why Vitamins and Minerals Matter in Winter

Even when horses aren’t working as hard in winter, they still require essential vitamins and minerals. If supplementation stops during winter, deficiencies can persist well into spring and summer.

For example, horses fed only selenium-deficient hay for four months and then supplemented with 3 mg of selenium for another four months still didn’t reach adequate selenium levels. This means if supplementation stops from November to February and resumes in March, deficiencies could remain until June.

Vitamin Loss During Hay Storage

• Protein and minerals remain relatively stable over time.
• Vitamins, however, degrade quickly.
• Vitamin C can lose up to 50% of its content within 24 hours of curing after cutting.
• Vitamin E levels drop steadily after baling, with research showing up to 80% loss after six months of storage.

These losses make year-round vitamin-mineral supplementation critical. For hard keepers, this is even more important because fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, and K) are stored in body fat. Horses with low body fat cannot store adequate amounts, leading to deficiencies that can impact the effectiveness of other nutrients. For instance, vitamin E works synergistically with selenium to support muscle function and immunity.

A comprehensive vitamin-mineral supplement, such as Horse Guard, ensures your horse’s micronutrient needs are met while allowing you to adjust calorie intake based on individual needs.

Support Digestive Health with Prebiotics & Probiotics

A horse’s gut flora is highly sensitive—especially in hard keepers. Changes in feed, ambient temperature, or water temperature can disrupt the microbial population in the hindgut. These stresses can kill beneficial bacteria, release endotoxins, and allow harmful bacteria to thrive, leading to digestive issues.

Because hard keepers already struggle to maintain weight, disruptions to gut health make it even harder for them to extract nutrients from their feed.

• Probiotics introduce beneficial microbes into the hindgut.
• Prebiotics feed those beneficial microbes, helping them flourish.

Providing both prebiotics and probiotics is crucial to maximizing nutrient absorption and ensuring that hard keepers receive the full benefit of their feed.

Choosing the Right Winter Supplement

• For Hard Keepers: Super Weight Gain is an excellent option. It provides a vitamin-mineral supplement, probiotics and prebiotics, and a base of full-fat extruded soybeans for added calories.
• For Easy Keepers:Horse Guard delivers essential vitamins and minerals without unnecessary calories.

Winter Horse Care Checklist

Here’s a quick overview of what your horse needs this winter:

✅ Free-choice, high-quality forage
✅ Clean, unfrozen water supply
✅ Shelter from wind, rain, and snow
✅ Balanced vitamin-mineral supplement
✅ Added calories for hard keepers
✅ Probiotics/prebiotics to support digestion
✅ Regular body condition monitoring

Help Your Horse Thrive This Winter

Ensuring your horse’s diet matches their caloric needs during winter is essential for maintaining a healthy body condition. A consistent vitamin-mineral supplement supports overall health and helps prevent deficiencies from carrying over into spring. Finally, providing shelter and a dry, comfortable place to rest helps protect your horse from the elements, keeping them healthy and comfortable all winter long.