For those feeding hay cubes

[HGFarm]

How long do you soak them before feeding? What consistancy are they by the time you feed them?

We used to feed them unsoaked to our full sized horses once in a while, but I have not used them in about 25 years. Due to not being really happy with the recent quality of hay, and also storage issues, I thought about trying the cubes with the Minis.

They are so hard and large though, for a Mini- I would assume that soaking is required, but wouldnt want to soak them til they are mush or fermented, LOL!!

I am refering to actual cubes, not pellets.

 

[Jill]

I'm not currently feeding cubes, but when I did, I did soak them.

Some brands are WAY more compressed than others. Those take much longer to soak than the ones that are more loosely pressed. So, some brands I could have soakd in about 20 minutes, others maybe an hour or more. Hot water will make them all soak much faster than cold, but you shouldn't leave them to soak all day especially in hot weather as they go sour FAST.

When I was done soaking mine, they kind of looked like wet grass clippings.

 

[chandab]

While I'm not currently feeding cubes, I have in the past, and always soaked them long enough for the cubes to really break apart (hot water gets the job done faster, than I add cold to cool them off), kind of the consistency of lawn clippings.

If you can get them where you are, try timothy/alfalfa mix cubes as they tend to be less hard than the straight alfalfa cubes. [Any grass/alfalfa mix will probably be easier to break apart than straight alfalfa.

Where you are, you might be able to get Mountain Sunrise brand cubes/pellets; while I can't get them here, I've only heard good things about the company. They only have straight alfalfa cubes, but do have grass and mix pellets. http://www.mountainsunrise.com/pellets.html [Link is to the pellet page, but you can get anywhere on the site from there; they even have a dealer locator.]

 

[whitney]

Jill is spot on.

In Michigan where the temp is usually in the 50's at night I soak the morning feed all night. Night feed soaks for about 1 1/2 hrs. In the winter I can soak them for 30 minutes in hot water. I put their ration balancer in with the cubes. I feed timothy/alfalfa in the summer and straight alfalfa in the winter.

I don't think I would be comfortable feeding them without soaking them first they are like CEMENT.

Mine also look like wet grass clippings.

 

[HGFarm]

So they are pretty much mushy then when done soaking them. Do you soak them in with Beet Pulp or do they have to be soaked in seperate buckets because one needs less soak time than the other???

 

[whitney]

Never tried it together but can't see why it wouldn't work.

I used to feed beet pulp but it made my fat minis FATTER so I switched to hay cubes.

You'll just have to figure out how much water to add to get everything soaked good.

How much beet pulp and how much cubes are you going to be soaking? I do mine in individual buckets.

1 pound of cubes and 2/3 cup of TC-30 and 1 gallon of water.

 

[waconda valley]

I do soak my cubes and beet pulp together in hot water. It works great, only takes 15 minutes to soften everything when using hot water. I use a separate bucket for each horse. Some of my horses are funny though, they prefer their wet mush to be fed seperately from their grain.

Peg Balthazor