Good Prenatal Nutrition Important for Healthy Foals

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What you feed your mare is important to the health of her foal. In their article that appears in the March edition of The Horse, Bettina Cohen and Dr. Ray Geor interview a scientist and a feed company executive who offer suggestions about proper prenatal nutrition.

"My recommendation is to make sure you feed the mare well in late pregnancy in terms of trace mineral supplementation," says Dr. Joe Pagan, president of Kentucky Equine Research, a nutrition consulting company in Versailles, Ky. "If that was done, don't be real concerned about trace mineral supplementation of the foal until he is 90 days old. Start to feed the foal fairly small quantities of a well-fortified 16% protein grain mix (about one pound of feed per month of age) about a month before you're going to wean him. I think there's a risk of overfeeding the suckling foal in an effort to try to ensure it has adequate mineral intake."

Jeff Pendleton, general manager of Hallway Feed Company, also emphasizes proper prenatal nutrition for the mare in her final months of pregnancy, especially when it comes to trace minerals, selenium, and vitamin E. Research shows feeding these nutrients to the young foal cannot compensate for poor nutrition of the mare during pregnancy. "If the mare was not supplemented properly, particularly in the last three months, you can't make up for that lost ground, no matter what you feed the foal," Pendleton says.

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