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Is your horse on pasture?
PC-Horse allows you to select a grazing mode for your horse. In order to calculate grass intake and formulate a ration, information about the quality and abundance of the grass, and how long the horse is on grass every day must be provided. The program contains three pre-defined qualities of pasture grass. You must have one (and only one) pasture grass in the horse's feed list in order to activate the pasture function. In addition, you can select any number of other feeds. Click the
"Plentiful" means that there is a lot of high quality grass in the pasture. Although possible, you should not change this intake manually, but rather define new pasture grasses of different qualities if relevant. You can also change the hours spent on pasture. If you wish to use automatic optimisation of the ration (not yet active), information on nutrient intake from pasture will be kept constant, while other feeds will be part of the optimisation. Calculation of feed intake on pasture always involves uncertainty. It is therefore strongly recommended that the body condition of grazing horses is watched carefully and that the feeding of concentrates is regulated to avoid the horse becoming too thin or too fat. Please observe that the quality of pastures change through the summer as the horses use them. It is necessary to adjust the selection of pasture grass and the amount of grass in the pasture as the seasons progress. It is difficult to calculate intakes of vitamin A and vitamin D during the grazing season because of variation in the quality of the pasture grass. Since vitamin D is formed by the direct action of sunlight on the horses skin, vitamin supplies from the feed are probably not critical. When a horse is defined as grazing, PC-Horse will not show red lines for vitamin A or D, even if the calculated intakes fall outside the optimal area.
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