Foal Nutrition Guidelines: Please note that PMU Foal Acquisition Network offers the following information as a guideline only. If you have other information that aids in foal development and feel that it may contribute to our organization, please send it to: info@pmufani.org and we will try to post it here.

Thanks, PMU FANI

FEEDING YOUR FOAL FOR SOUND AND SAFE GROWTH

In the old days they advocated high grain diets for the babies cos it made them grow faster. But we now know that the high starch and sugar content of normal horse feeds sets these babies up for epiphysitis and OCD. So the latest recommendation is a LOW GLYCEMIC DIET. An LG diet is one that is high in fiber, with adequate protein, vitamins and minerals for a growing baby.  Your key words here are Low Glycemic, It isn't the same as just adding fat to a normal high glycemic ration and calling it a draft horse feed which is what many feed companies are doing.
A low glycemic diet is high in fiber (see hay, sugar beet pulp, soy hulls or chopped hay, with good hay as the first choice).
Feed mostly hay, grass hay the best quality you can find. Add 1 good quality vitamin/mineral source. I recommend a balancer pellet, that is a pellet that is high in the essential minerals and vitamins and protein and low in starch and sugar.
I make one called LinGro Buckeye feeds make one called Grow 'n' Win KER make one called something like Balancer pellet!
Youu feed a small amount of the balancer pellet with the hay. They are more expensive than the standard feed because they have much less cheap filler in them and hence you feed less. Like 4 oz to 2 lbs per day depending on the
make.
STAY AWAY from the standard adult horse feeds and anything with molasses inn it like Equine Junior. Those feeds are okay for TB and QH foals (though even those breeds show a lot of joint problems when fed them) but are bad news
for draft cross babies. Just adding fat or oil to a standard ration will help a bit, but it is not the best answer. Use a balancer pellet and don't over feed.
IF the foal needs it, add in a high quality protein supplement. This is most important in the first winter and becomes less important over time as the bulk of the growth gets done. *0% of all growth is done in the first year so once you get to a long yearling (18 months old) the need for very high class protein is considerably less.
Check my web site for an article on Nutrition and OCD.
Stick to a LOW GLYCEMIC DIET. Stay away from molasses and grain.

Written by :Melyni Worth, Ph.D.
Equine Nutritionist

From Dr. Worth's website, Question and Answer page:
Q: How do you best maintain proper nutrition for a youngster, specifically a WB, balancing the need for encouraging growth while avoiding OCD, etc. especially during the growth spurts? R:  This is a a surprisingly common question. And the truth is we really don't know for sure. So the best I can do is give you an educated guess, you will have to watch the young horses closely and react according to what you see. In general with young horses genetically destined to be big, as most young warmbloods are, the rule is let em grow slowly. Make sure that the mineral/vitamin levels are adequate but keep the energy level down.  We used to think in terms of these horses getting too much protein, but I now wonder
if in fact what they are getting is too much carbohydrate esp soluble CHO. SO feed them principally grass hay, the best quality you can find, with a small supply of a high protein, high vitamin low CHO mix.   You can use alfalfa hay or cubes as part of this high protein supply but keep the amounts down.  Make sure they have access to a good quality mineral mix and do not over feed the grain mix. If the protein is around 14% then they will only need a pound or so a day on top of the grass hay. There area a number of proprietary mixes available for young horses, Buckeye feeds for example do a good one, called Grow'n'Win, add this mix to the hay diet and don't feed too much. Or you can get you own mix made up by a qualified and experienced nutritionist, make sure the nutritionist knows about Warmbloods though. Judge the young horses using the body score system. I can send you this separately if you like. Do not worry about the 'grass belly' keep your eye on the top line instead. A young WB should be a 5 or a 6, and preferably not a 7, certainly not an 8. Allow them time to grow slowly and keep them out as much as possible. Make sure they have access to a mineral mix at all times. To improve bloom or weight, add fat in the form of corn oil rather than increasing the carbs in the diet.
Developmental Orthopedic Diseases such as OCD, and how to avoid them:
Nutrition: the latest findings
Intro:
At the KER Equine nutrition conference in Lexington KY May 1st, Dr Joe Pagan presented some very interesting findings into the possible causes of DOD and its relationship with nutrition. Development Orthopedic Disease (DOD) is a term that encompasses a group of conditions that affect young horses. These include Physitis (often mistakenly called Epiphysitis), Osteochondrosis, Osteochondritis Dissecans (OCD). Wobbler Syndrome, and acquired flexor deformities. It used to thought that these were caused by imbalance or deficiencies in mineral nutrition, and yet even when the mineral status of young growing horses was drastically improved the condition, though it got less frequent did not go away. In 1994 Glade et al., and in 1995, Sarah Ralston of Rutgers University implicated high blood glucose and the corresponding insulin response to incidence of OCD. Following up on this research, KER presented at the 2001 conference a paper on incidence of OCD and Glycemic Response in Thoroughbred yearlings.
Background:
How bones grow: The long bones of the skeleton grow by first forming a kind of cartilage, then the cartilage changes in nature (matures) by forming a collagen protein matrix into which minerals are deposited to form the crystalline structure of bone.After the collagen matrix has been produced it has to mature before it can be mineralized. This maturation process is
controlled by thyroid hormone, thus in hypothyroid foals bone maturation is impaired.
Once the collagen has matured, it is mineralized. For this process Calcium, Magnesium, Phosphorus & Vitamin D (Cholecalciferol) are all required if varying amounts. Very high levels of one mineral may interfere with the use
of the others hence very high phosphorus will interfere with calcium and may cause a mal-formation of the bone. Low calcium levels will also cause malformation.
As the bone becomes mineralized it does so in a pattern of where the cells surrounding the blood vessels into the cartilage become ossified first. If there are insufficient blood vessel going into the cartilage then there will areas of insufficient ossification, called osteochondral lesions (OCD lesions).
Osteochondral lesions can occur in two ways:
The first reason is when the matrix fails to form properly, and hence cannot support the normal formation of bone. This may have a nutritional cause such as copper deficiency, excess energy intake, and calcium or phosphorus imbalance. Also problems with the amounts of growth hormone or thyroid hormone may be involved here.
The second reason for osteochondral lesions may be if the normal blood supply to the growing cartilage is impaired. If the nutrient supply is interrupted proper bone formation may not occur.A paper in 1997 by Henderson et al., on the effects of insulin and insulin-like growth factors on the growth of fetal and neonatal chondrocytes, showed that insulin affected the maturation of the cartilage at the pre-mineralization stage.
Carbohydrate digestion and Glycemic response
Carbohydrates occur in feed stuffs in several forms the simplest of these are the sugars and starches. Sugars and starches are digested and absorbed in the small intestine and are referred to as NSC (Non Structural Carbohydrates) as the sugars are absorbed across the small intestine wall the amount in the blood stream (blood sugar) goes up. As the blood sugar
rises, the body releases insulin from the pancreas. The insulin controls the amount of sugar in the bloodstream by causing the various cells of the body to absorb it and to store it. Thus the rise in blood sugar is followed shortly by a rise in insulin levels. The glycemic response is a measure of how much the blood sugar rises in response to a meal, and thus an indicator of how much of that feedstuff is NSC. IF one takes a known foodstuff as a baseline and calls it 100 then by comparing all the other feeds to this, it is possible to calculate a Glycemic Index, EG. How much (or little) a feed will raise the blood sugar as compared to the baseline feed. In horses the baseline feed in usually whole oats. Part of a KER study was to make a glycemic index for several common horse feeds. Most glycemic indices used in the past were based on human studies and thus not always applicable to horses, which not only digest a little differently but also eat very different feeds.

Glycemic Response of some common horse feeds:
Whole Oats 100
Sugar Beet (hydrated) 72.2
SB rinsed 34.1
Dry SB w molasses 94.8
Corn 104
Sweet Feed 107
Alfalfa 52
Sweet Feed w/oil 52
Timothy Hay 32

An important observation done here is that forages, hay, old grass (not new spring grass) alfalfa etc do not have high glycemic indices, e.g. they don't raise the blood sugar much.
Another important point is that in the KER study addition of fat to a grain ration lowered the glycemic response. So the same amount of sugar was slowed in digestion by addition of fat.
KER recently did a large study of TB weanling/yearlings, looking at their response to carbohydrate feeding (Oral glucose tolerance test) and incidence of OCD. They also tested the Glycemic response to the feeds being used at the various farms in the study, using mature horses at their own research facility (see earlier).
In this study they compared the glycemic response of the yearlings to a meal and compared that with the incidence of OCD. They also compared incidence of OCD to bodyweight and to body scores of the weanlings.
On a farm by farm basis, they found considerable difference in incidence of OCD, one farm having zero cases and one farm 33% OCD.
They also found a very high correlation between yearlings with a high glucose (and hence insulin) response and incidence of OCD.
There was a high correlation between each farms mean (average of all the yearlings) glycemic response and the farms incidence of OCD. There was alsoa high correlation between the GI (Glycemic Index) of the farms feed (as
measured on KER's own horses) and the incidence of OCD. There was also a high correlation between the body score of the yearlings and incidence of OCD.
What does all this mean?
Bottom line appears to be; Feed feeds that have a low glycemic index to weanlings and yearling that might be at risk of OCD. This in a practical sense means forages, or feeds based on forages, minimal grain. If grain has
to fed, take advantage of the effect of added fat in lowering GI, and add oil to the feed.
Keep the babies lean! Remember that body score index!
Keep the minerals up and balanced and keep the carbs low. No doubt even as we speak/write the nutrition companies are hard at work formulating rations low in glycemic index for growing babies, but until they have them ready for the market, stay away from high GI feeds for your babies.
A number of companies now offer 'forage balancers' a low volume feed designed to fed with hay only, which supplies all the protein, minerals and vitamins that hay may lack. It might be wise to switch the babies and the pregnant broodmares over to a diet based on forages with a balancer like LinGro (note from editor: other ration balancers include TDI 10 and 30 and Buckeye Grow n' Win)