What to Feed Your Mare Before, During and After Pregnancy 

Breeding a mare is rarely just about timing, semen quality, or how the ultrasound looks. One of the most overlooked pieces, and one of the easiest to fix, is whether her diet and body condition actually match what her body is doing at each stage. Get that wrong and the best breeding management in the world still struggles. Get it right and you have removed a whole category of problems before they start.

A mare's nutritional needs don't flip overnight. They follow a slow, fairly predictable biological pattern, and once you see the pattern, feeding her stops feeling like guesswork. There are four periods that matter: the fertility phase before she is in foal, the long quiet stretch of early and mid pregnancy, the last trimester when the foal does most of its growing, and lactation, which is the most demanding stretch of the whole cycle.

Here is the honest part. You do not need an exotic feeding program. You need a consistent routine that gets the basics right: energy balance, enough good forage and fibre, decent protein, and the right minerals and vitamins, especially late on. Below is how I work through it as a vet, stage by stage.

Start with body condition score

Before you change a single feed or reach for a supplement, score her body condition. Mares in good condition tend to conceive in fewer cycles and hold their pregnancies better than mares that are too thin [1]. Aim for a BCS of 5 to 6 on the 1 to 9 scale.

Too thin (below 5) usually means fewer or irregular cycles and very little buffer for early pregnancy and early lactation. Too heavy is not the safe option people assume it is. In experimental pony mares, overfeeding has been linked with a higher risk of early embryonic death [2]. So fatter is not automatically more fertile.

Build the ration from forage

For every mare, forage is the foundation. Her nutrient needs shift across reproduction, but her gut physiology does not. Steady forage intake keeps the hindgut working and lowers colic risk. A practical starting point is 1.5 to 2.0% of body weight per day as forage on a dry matter basis, then adjust for condition, hay quality, and stage [3].

Before pregnancy: lay the foundation

Fertility is not only about catching the right ovulation. Egg cells mature slowly. Hormones need to be balanced. Antioxidant defences in the reproductive tissues have to be in place well before conception, not scrambled together the week of breeding. This is why I usually want nutritional support started early, ideally a good three months before you plan to put her in foal.

It mirrors human prenatal care, where folate is recommended before pregnancy rather than after, precisely because it supports the very earliest stages of development [4]. Fresh & Fertile fits the same logic: a prenatal supplement with active folate, folic acid, choline and antioxidant support to protect reproductive tissues and help egg maturation and early embryo division. Start it three months before breeding and keep it going into early pregnancy.

Protein quality matters here too. If your hay is thin on protein, this is the moment to start thinking about it. Cover vitamins and minerals with ESTE Balancer at 250 g daily as the foundation every mare needs.

During pregnancy: less changes than you think

Once she is in foal, the most common myth is that she now needs a lot more feed for the whole pregnancy. She doesn't. Her needs stay fairly flat early on and only climb noticeably near the end.

Months 1 to 3: keep the prenatal foundation

Energy requirement is only marginally above a non-pregnant mare. Foetal growth is minimal. Keep the same base she was on before breeding: forage, ESTE Balancer and Fresh & Fertile. These early weeks are still a critical window for embryo development, so this is not the moment to change what is working.

Months 4 to 8: swap Fresh & Fertile for Guts & Glory

The embryo is established, so the focus shifts from reproductive preparation to gut health and steady growth. Swap Fresh & Fertile out and bring Guts & Glory in. It supports the mare's hindgut microbiome, backs digestion and nutrient absorption as foetal growth picks up, and the immune support it provides feeds through to the foal via the placenta. Keep forage and ESTE Balancer steady throughout.

Months 8 to 11: the last trimester

This is when it matters most. Up to 75% of foetal growth happens in these final months, and the foal lays down a large part of its birth weight. Energy needs do rise, by something like 25 to 30%, but the bigger story is protein, calcium, phosphorus and micronutrients, which all peak now [6]. People fixate on energy and underfeed the nutrients that actually build the foal.

There is a physical catch. As the foal takes up room, her stomach capacity drops. She simply cannot eat large volumes of forage late on. So you want smaller meals carrying more nutrition per mouthful. This is exactly where Grow & Glow earns its place: low feeding volume, high caloric density from omega-rich fat rather than sugar, holding condition without overloading the gut.

After foaling: the hardest stage

Now she is doing two jobs at once. Recovering from birth and producing milk. This is the most nutritionally demanding stage of the entire cycle, and it is the one people most often underestimate.

Lactating mares typically need 2 to 3% of body weight per day in total feed. For a 500 kg mare that extra demand works out to roughly 11,500 to 14,500 kcal a day. To put that in perspective, it is about the energy of 35 to 45 minutes of steady galloping, every day, on top of maintenance.

Some weight loss in early lactation is normal, even in mares that started well. But a mare who begins lactation below BCS 5 is far more likely to struggle, and that delays rebreeding and drags down conception rates [6]. The condition you build before foaling is the condition she spends afterward.

"Whatever condition your mare has going into foaling is what she has to make milk with. You can't fix that by feeding more after the foal is born. The preparation has to happen before."Curafyt veterinary team

The short version

Feeding a broodmare does not need to be complicated. It needs to be planned by stage. Three months before breeding: forage as the base, ESTE Balancer 250 g daily, Fresh & Fertile 15 g daily. Keep that going through months 1 to 3 of pregnancy. At month 4, swap Fresh & Fertile for Guts & Glory and hold steady until the last trimester. From month 8, add alfalfa for protein, increase ESTE Balancer by 20%, and bring in Grow & Glow at 100 ml daily. Then in lactation, push everything to meet peak demand: alfalfa 2 to 4 kg, Grow & Glow 200 ml, Guts & Glory for gut support, and taper back as milk production falls around month four. That is the whole job.