I'm a European specialist in equine internal medicine. I tested the balancers on the market against my own horses' bloodwork, then built a better one.

I'm a veterinarian, osteopath and European specialist in equine internal medicine. I look at horses all day, and for years something kept nagging at me.

Even in well-fed horses already on a balancer, I kept seeing the same quiet signals: a coat that never quite shone, hooves that crumbled, performance that was good but never quite right. Small things. Together, they are the difference between a horse that is fine and one that is truly healthy and performing at its best.

So I did the obvious thing. I ran bloodwork on all of my own horses.

Wild horses roam wide territory and eat dozens of plants on varied soils, which gives them a broad spread of vitamins and minerals on few calories. Our horses get small worked pastures, one or two grasses and the same hay all winter.

That mismatch shows up in the ration. Hay is low in vitamin E, and its minerals just mirror the soil, so an excess of one blocks the absorption of others. Forage rarely delivers the right balance of amino acids either, so a horse can look protein-sufficient on paper and still lack the building blocks for muscle.

Most people patch this with supplements. But each targets a single problem with a high dose of one or two things, not a balanced base, so without a blood test to justify them they can tip the ration further off.

That bloodwork was the turning point. I set out to build a balancer from measurable data: real blood values, plus hay analyses from Belgium and the Netherlands.

I mapped the most common deficiencies and built one formula to cover them all.

A balancer is not a feed. It fills only the nutrients forage cannot supply, without adding calories, which is why it suits easy keepers and horses in light work. Need more energy or protein? Adjust the forage (leafy hay, alfalfa, beet pulp, a little oil), not the balancer.

This is the part the feed shelf rarely says out loud: most horses do not need concentrates at all. Good forage, fed from a minimum of 1.5% of bodyweight, covers the energy and fibre a horse in light work needs. Grain mostly adds starch and sugar, which is exactly what drives gastric ulcers, hindgut acidosis and laminitis risk [1].

So how hard must a horse work before grain is justified? Far harder than most people assume. Leisure horses usually work only a few hours a week and meet their energy needs on forage alone. Research goes further: Standardbred trotters in full race training have stayed healthy and performed on forage-only diets, with no oats at all [2,3]. For nearly every horse, the gap forage leaves is not calories. It is the vitamins, minerals and amino acids a balancer supplies.