Beyond the Bale: Practical Hay Alternatives for Horses

Forage is the foundation of every horse's diet, and nothing else in the feed room can stand in for it. It keeps the gut moving, buffers stomach acid, and gives horses the chew time they need to stay settled. Most of the year, grazing and decent hay cover that need between them. But hay is not always there when you want it — a dry spring, a poor harvest, a price rise, or a veteran whose teeth have simply worn out can all leave you short. When that happens, hay alternatives for horses are how you stretch what you have or replace it altogether.

This guide covers every option a UK or South African owner can realistically buy, what each one does well, what it does badly, how much of it to feed, and how to make the change without landing your horse with colic. The numbers in it are attributed to the feed companies, charities and researchers they came from, so you can check them.

Why Forage Has to Come First

A horse's digestive system is built for a steady trickle of fibre, not for meals. The stomach is small and secretes acid continuously, whether or not there is anything in it to work on. Chewing is what produces saliva, and saliva is what buffers that acid. The hindgut then ferments fibre into energy, protein and B vitamins, and generates a useful amount of heat while it does it.

The British Horse Society puts the horse's natural pattern at chewing for up to 18 hours a day, and makes the same point about the consequences: enough forage satisfies the need to chew, reduces the likelihood of gastric ulceration, and helps prevent stereotypical behaviours. Take the forage away and the risks stack up fast — an empty stomach, a slowing hindgut, and a raised chance of colic and laminitis.

That is the bar any hay alternative has to clear. It is not enough for a product to supply calories; it has to supply fibre, and ideally some chewing as well. If you want to know what you are actually replacing, our guide to the nutrients in hay is the place to start, and the hay entry in our terminology library covers the basics of what the word does and does not mean.

When to Consider Hay Alternatives for Horses

Hay alternatives are not just a drought measure. Four situations account for most of the yards using them, and the right product is different in each.

The Veteran With Worn or Missing Teeth

This is the single most common reason. A horse grinds long-stem forage between its cheek teeth, and when those teeth wear down, develop gaps, or fall out, the horse can no longer do it. Baileys Horse Feeds lists the early signs in its forage replacement guide: quidding — dropping half-chewed balls of feed — along with eating slowly, hypersalivation, foul breath, loose droppings, gradual weight loss, and long fibre appearing in the droppings. Baileys' own benchmark there is useful because you can check it in the field: fibre in the droppings should generally be shorter than 1.5cm. Longer than that and the horse is swallowing forage it has not chewed.

Baileys is blunt about where that leads if it is left alone — an increased risk of choke and a significant increase in the risk of impaction colic. The dental side of this is worth understanding properly; our guides to horse dentition and dental floating cover what a routine examination should be finding, and ageing a horse by its teeth explains why the grinding surfaces change with the years.

A Hay Shortage or a Poor Harvest

Forage supply in Britain has been genuinely tight in recent seasons. The BHS, writing on concerns for UK hay supplies, notes the driest spring recorded in 50 years in the UK, with England seeing its driest spring in more than a century, and the reduced grass growth and higher prices that followed. Spillers, in its September 2025 article on hay shortages, puts the same spring as the sixth driest since records began in 1836, with rainfall 40% below the long-term average — while making the fair point that panic bulk-buying is itself part of what creates a shortage.

Partial replacement is the sensible response here. Swapping part of the daily hay ration for a bought-in fibre feed makes the bales you have go further, and it does not require your horse to be unable to eat hay. South African owners face the same arithmetic in a dry season with teff and Eragrostis, and the same options apply — lucerne, chopped fibre and soaked beet pulp are all available locally.

Laminitis, EMS and the Good Doer

Here the alternative is not filling a gap, it is solving a problem. A horse with equine metabolic syndrome, a history of laminitis, or PPID needs its water-soluble carbohydrate intake controlled, and a rich hay may not be suitable at all. Low-calorie chopped fibres and soaked beet products let you keep the gut full and the chew time long without the sugar. This overlaps heavily with equine obesity management, and getting there starts with honest body condition scoring rather than a guess.

Dust, Spores and the Coughing Horse

A horse with equine asthma, and particularly one with heaves at the severe end of that spectrum, reacts to the respirable dust and mould spores in conserved forage, not to hay as such. Bagged and packaged fibre feeds are processed and packed to a consistent standard, which makes them far more predictable than a bale of unknown provenance. That is a real advantage, and it is one of the reasons owners of horses with respiratory disease end up using them year-round rather than seasonally.

Hay Replacer or Forage Replacer? The Distinction Matters

You will see both terms on bags and in advice columns, and they are not quite interchangeable. Dengie makes the case for the second one in its guide to forage replacers for horses, and the reasoning is sound: a horse that cannot chew hay will usually struggle with haylage and straw too, and if its incisors are also going, it will be taking in less grass at pasture than you think. Replacing only the hay in that situation leaves a hole in the ration you have not measured.

The practical version: work out the horse's total fibre intake from every source — grazing, hay, haylage, chaff, beet — and replace what is actually missing, not what you happen to have stopped feeding. Dengie also splits its products into full forage replacers, which can be fed ad-lib in place of the entire hay ration, and partial ones, which it caps at up to 1kg per 100kg of bodyweight. That distinction is on the bag and it is worth reading, because feeding a partial replacer as though it were a total one is one of the easier ways to unbalance a diet.

The Main Hay Alternatives for Horses

There is no single best hay replacer, and in our experience a ration built from two or three products works better than one built from a single bag. Baileys recommends the same approach — a combination of two or three fibre alternatives, for variety, particularly for horses that are stabled a lot. Here is what is actually on the market and what each one is good for.

Chopped Fibre and Chaff

Chopped forage — long-stem hay, dried grass, straw or lucerne cut into short lengths and bagged — is the closest thing to hay you can buy in a sack, and for most horses it is the first thing to try. Because it retains real fibre length it preserves chew time, which is the property most other processed forages lose. In British and Irish yards this is usually sold as a chaff, and the category runs from very low-calorie straw-based products for good doers up to molassed, oil-coated versions aimed at putting weight on.

Spillers' first recommendation in its guide to feeding hay replacers is exactly this: where possible, choose short chopped fibres to help extend eating time. Made from good forage, a chaff can replace the entire hay ration. The thing to watch is the label rather than the product — straw is often included to bring the calories and the cost down, and molasses is often added to bring the palatability up, and neither is obvious from the front of the bag.

Hay Cubes, Blocks and Compressed Forage

Hay cubes are chopped forage compressed into dense cubes, usually from lucerne, timothy or a grass mix. Compressed blocks are the same idea at a larger size — Simple System's Meadow Brix, for example, are mature timothy pressed into 1kg blocks intended to be fed whole and dry so the horse has to work at them. Both can replace hay entirely, and both sit between long-stem forage and pellets for chewing effort.

Soaking cubes softens them and lowers the choke risk, which matters for any horse that bolts its feed or has dental problems. One caveat specific to lucerne-based cubes: lucerne is the crop most associated with blister beetle toxicity, where beetles crushed into the crop at harvest carry cantharidin into the finished feed. It is rare in the UK and a genuine concern in parts of the Americas, so if you are buying imported lucerne products it is worth knowing the risk exists and buying from a supplier who can tell you where the crop came from. Our guide to alfalfa hay covers the crop's nutritional profile in more detail.

Grass Pellets, Grass Nuts and Hay Pellets

Pellets are the most processed forage option: the crop is dried, ground and pressed, which makes them easy to store, easy to digest and quick to soak into a mash. What the grinding removes is fibre length, and with it almost all the chewing. A horse fed pellets alone and nothing to chew will often find something else to chew — wood, bedding, or the top of the stable door.

Grass nuts and dried grass pellets are made from grass cut earlier than hay and dried artificially, so they are greener, higher in protein and higher in energy. That suits poor doers and hard keepers. It does not suit laminitics, and Baileys says so plainly: be wary of dried grass products, as these are naturally higher in sugar. Spillers goes further and advises avoiding grass-based products for laminitics altogether, on the grounds that they may contain high levels of water-soluble carbohydrate.

Sugar Beet Pulp

Beet pulp is what remains after sugar is extracted from sugar beet, and it is one of the most digestible fibre sources available to horses — fermented in the hindgut much as forage is, rather than digested like a cereal. Modern quick-soaking versions are ready in minutes rather than hours. The BHS counts sugar beet as a forage in its own right, and lists soaked sugar beet among the hay replacements owners should consider in a shortage.

Its limits are real, though, and they are the reason it should not be the whole answer. It provides very little to chew on, and Spillers is explicit that sugar beet — along with pure lucerne pellets and chaffs — is suitable only as a partial hay replacer, not a total one. If your horse is sensitive to sugar, buy an unmolassed product and check the bag rather than assuming: plain beet pulp and molassed beet pulp are very different feeds.

Soaked High-Fibre Mashes

Mashes are the answer when a horse can no longer manage even short chopped fibre. They are high-fibre blends — beet, grass, lucerne or a mixture — milled fine enough to soak down into something a toothless horse can eat, and the better ones carry added vitamins and minerals so the ration stays balanced without a separate supplement.

Spillers' recommended order of preference is worth following: short chopped fibre first, and only if the horse can no longer manage that, move to something soakable. A mash is a step down in chew time, so it is a step you take when you have to, not as a default. Check the vitamin and mineral content before you add anything else to the bucket — Spillers' warning is that stacking fortified products can push some minerals to levels that are harmful when over-supplied.

Complete and Senior Feeds

Complete feeds combine the forage and the concentrate portions of the diet in one bag, formulated to be fed without hay. They are usually marketed at veterans. Because they are carrying the whole ration, the daily quantity is far higher than anything you would feed out of a bucket as a hard feed, and that surprises people — this is a feed you weigh out in kilograms per day, not scoops. Follow the manufacturer's rate for your horse's bodyweight and workload, split it across several meals, and do not treat the label figure as a starting point to improve on.

Straw

Good clean straw is the cheapest way to add bulk and chew time to a diet while holding the calories down, which makes it genuinely useful for good doers and overweight horses. Oat and barley straw are the ones normally recommended; wheat straw is coarser and less palatable.

Two named figures are worth having. The BHS advises that for a horse with good dental health, good-quality oat and barley straw could replace up to 50 per cent of the hay ration, especially for horses prone to weight gain or on calorie-controlled diets. Spillers gives a range for the same job — replacing 30 to 50% of a good doer's forage ration with clean barley, wheat or oat straw. Both attach the same condition: the horse must have good teeth, because straw is tough to chew, and both say to introduce it gradually. Straw should never be the only forage — its protein is low, and it needs balancing with a suitable feed or balancer to meet nutrient requirements. If you are feeding oats as well, our piece on the pros and cons of feeding oats is worth a look.

Haylage

Haylage is grass cut and wilted to a higher moisture content than hay, then sealed in plastic and preserved by fermentation. It is softer, usually cleaner in respirable dust terms, and often easier for fussy horses. It is also the most misunderstood forage on the yard, and Spillers corrects two of the myths directly: haylage is not automatically higher in calories or sugar than hay, and its water content changes the maths. Haylage can contain up to 30% water, so 10kg of haylage is not 10kg of hay on a dry matter basis — the horse is eating less fibre than the scales suggest.

The trade-off is the wrapping. A damaged bale, a slow-fed bale, or poor handling raises the risk of mould, spoilage and botulism. We have a full guide to feeding and storing haylage, and the haylage terminology entry covers how it differs from silage. One further point for anyone managing a laminitic: haylage is not the low-sugar option it is sometimes assumed to be — see the soaking section below for what the research actually shows.

Hydroponic Fodder and Sprouted Grain

Fodder — cereal grain or grass sprouted hydroponically in trays over a few days — appears regularly in online discussions as a hay replacement. It is fresh, palatable and pleasant to feed. The problem is dry matter: sprouted fodder is mostly water, so a horse has to eat a very large volume to take in the fibre it needs, and the nutrient content varies with how it was grown. For a yard with a few horses it is rarely practical as a forage replacement, though it can work as a green supplement alongside one.

Hay Alternatives Compared

A quick reference. "Full" means the product can replace the entire hay ration; "partial" means it should not.

Option	Chew time	Full or partial	Best for	Watch out for
Chopped fibre / chaff	High	Full	Almost any horse; first choice	Straw and molasses in the mix
Hay cubes and blocks	Medium-high	Full	Bulk feeding, good doers	Choke if fed dry to a bolter
Grass pellets / grass nuts	Low	Full	Poor doers, veterans	High sugar; not for laminitics
Sugar beet pulp	Low	Partial	Hydration, digestible fibre	Molassed versions; must be soaked
Soaked high-fibre mash	Low	Full	Horses with no functional teeth	Stacking fortified products
Complete / senior feed	Low	Full	Veterans needing one-bag simplicity	Large daily quantities; follow the label
Straw	High	Partial (to 50%)	Good doers with sound teeth	Impaction risk; low protein
Haylage	High	Full	Fussy eaters, dust-sensitive horses	30% water; mould if wrapping fails
Hydroponic fodder	Medium	Partial	Green variety in the ration	Very low dry matter; variable quality

How Much Hay Replacer to Feed

This is where most rations go wrong, and it goes wrong in the same direction every time: owners under-feed forage replacers because they think of them as bucket feed. They are not bucket feed. Dengie's instruction is the one to hold on to — think of them as forage, not hard feed, and expect to feed far larger quantities than you would of a cereal-based product.

The Floor: 1.5% of Bodyweight in Dry Matter

Both major UK feed companies publish the same minimum. Dengie states that at minimum all horses should have 1.5% of their bodyweight on a dry matter basis of fibre-based feeds, and works it as 7.5kg for a 500kg horse. Spillers states the same floor — total forage intake should not be restricted below 1.5% of current bodyweight per day on a dry matter basis.

The two figures you will see quoted look different and are not. Spillers puts the practical amount at around 8.5 to 9kg of hay replacer per day for a 500kg horse with no grazing, and explains the gap: all forages and forage replacers carry some water, and that water does not count towards the horse's forage intake. Dengie's 7.5kg is the dry matter; Spillers' 8.5 to 9kg is roughly what you actually put in the trug to deliver it. Both stress these are minimums, and some horses need more.

Baileys frames the same calculation across the whole ration rather than the forage alone: total forage plus concentrate should come to 1.5 to 2.5% of bodyweight on a dry matter basis — 1.5% if you are aiming for weight loss, 2% to maintain condition, 2.5% for weight gain. For a 500kg horse at rest holding its weight, that is 10kg of dry matter a day, less whatever hard feed, chaff and beet are already in the bucket. If putting weight on is the goal, our nutrition guide to feeding horses for weight gain goes into the rest of it.

Weigh It, and Weigh It Dry

Hay replacers do not come in flakes or slices, and scoops lie. Spillers gives the numbers that make the point: a Stubbs scoop of short chopped fibre weighs approximately 300 to 500g, while the same scoop of a pelleted product such as grass nuts or lucerne pellets weighs approximately 2kg. That is a four- to six-fold difference by volume for the same container. Spillers' rule, and it is the right one, is always to weigh feeds before soaking — the water you add is not forage.

The BHS makes the complementary point about the hay end of the ration: invest in hay scales. For a very small outlay you can weigh out what your horse actually needs each day rather than guessing, which cuts waste and stops over-feeding. Once both ends are weighed, swapping is simple — Spillers' general guide is that 1kg of hay replacer can be used to replace 1kg of hay.

Don't Forget the Grazing

Grass counts, and if you ignore it you will over-feed a good doer and wonder why. Baileys gives a rough working method: estimate intake as the target percentage of bodyweight multiplied by the proportion of the day spent grazing. For a 500kg horse at 2% turned out for six hours — a quarter of the day — that is 0.25 × (2% × 500kg) = 2.5kg of grass dry matter, which comes off the replacer total. It is crude, and Baileys says so, but it is a great deal better than treating turnout as zero. Our guide to turning a horse out for pasture time covers the management side, and grass harrowing is worth reading if you are trying to get more out of the grazing you have.

To Soak or Not to Soak

Soaking gets used for three different jobs, and they have very different evidence behind them. Worth separating.

Soaking to Make Feed Chewable

This one is straightforward and not in dispute. Cubes, pellets and beet pulp soften into a mash that a horse with poor teeth, reduced chewing ability or a history of choke can manage safely. Any horse that bolts its feed is in the same category. A horse with sound teeth and no choke history usually does not need its feed soaked at all, and soaking it costs chew time for no gain.

Soaking to Reduce Sugar

Soaking hay does leach water-soluble carbohydrate, but the amount is far less predictable than the advice usually implies. Moore-Colyer and colleagues at the Royal Agricultural University measured it directly across three hays at four soaking times (PLoS One 2020;15(1):e0227151, PMID 31986161): mean WSC losses were 18% after 1.5 hours, 38% after 9 hours and 42% after 16 hours. The variation around those means was wide, and the authors' conclusion was that soaking causes inconsistent WSC leaching. In practice that means soaking is a useful tool for reducing sugar, but not a substitute for having the forage analysed if you are managing a laminitic horse on a fine margin.

The same study found something less often repeated: soaking increased the bacterial load on the hay and altered its bacterial profile unpredictably, and the authors warned it may decrease the hygienic quality of the fodder. Long soaks in warm weather are not a free lunch. Tip the water away, soak for the shortest time that does the job, and do not let the bucket stand.

If it is the insulin response you are managing rather than sugar in the abstract, there is a direct comparison. Carslake and colleagues at the University of Liverpool fed 12 ponies matched meals of soaked hay, dry hay and haylage in a crossover trial (The Veterinary Journal 2018;235:83–89, PMID 29704944). Soaked hay produced the lowest insulinaemic and glycaemic responses; dry hay was intermediate; haylage produced the highest. Ponies with insulin dysregulation responded more strongly to every forage than those without. That is a useful ordering to have in mind, and it contradicts the yard assumption that haylage is the safer option for a laminitic.

Soaking to Add Water

This is the weakest of the three claims, and we would rather say so than dress it up. A soaked feed obviously carries water into the horse, and it is a sensible thing to offer in cold weather or to a horse that drinks reluctantly. What we have not found is good evidence that it raises a horse's total daily water intake, as opposed to shifting where that water comes from — and we are not going to quote a figure we cannot trace to a paper. Treat soaking as a chewing and safety measure that happens to add moisture, keep clean water in front of the horse regardless, and watch for the actual signs of dehydration rather than assuming a wet bucket has covered it.

Hay Replacers for Horses With No Teeth

A horse can live a long and comfortable life with almost no functional grinding teeth, but only if the ration is rebuilt around that fact. The order to work through is Spillers' and it is sensible: start with short chopped fibre, because it preserves the most chewing; if the horse can no longer manage short chop, move to a feed that soaks into a mash.

• Watch the droppings. Baileys' 1.5cm benchmark for fibre length in the droppings tells you whether the horse is really processing what it eats.
• Keep some pasture in the picture where you can. Baileys notes that grazing can often be managed for longer than hay or haylage, provided the incisors are still sound — cropping grass and grinding hay are different jobs.
• Split the ration properly. Several small meals, in wide trugs, spread as far across the day as the yard routine allows.
• Check the vitamins and minerals. Not every fibre feed is fortified, and two that are can add up to too much of something.
• Get the teeth looked at anyway. Conditions such as EOTRH and tooth abscesses are painful and treatable, and a horse in dental pain eats badly whatever you put in front of it.

Weight loss in an old horse is often blamed on age when the real cause is that it can no longer eat its forage. Score the condition, weigh the ration, and read our guide to horse life stages for what to expect of a veteran.

Hay Replacers for Laminitic Horses and Good Doers

For a laminitic or an insulin-dysregulated horse the brief is the opposite: maximum chew time, minimum sugar and starch, and no long gaps without forage. Restricting a good doer down to nothing is not the answer — the 1.5% of bodyweight floor exists precisely so that weight-loss diets do not tip into gut trouble.

• Avoid grass-based products. Spillers advises against them for laminitics because of potential water-soluble carbohydrate levels; Baileys' version is to be wary of dried grass products as they are naturally higher in sugar.
• Straw is your friend, within limits. The BHS puts it at up to 50% of the hay ration for horses with good teeth; Spillers gives 30 to 50% for good doers. High fibre, low calorie, and it takes a long time to eat.
• Choose low-calorie short chops. Straw-based or straw-and-alfalfa chaffs give bulk and chewing without the energy.
• Soak the hay you do feed — accepting from the Moore-Colyer data that the reduction is real but variable.
• Do not assume haylage is safer. On Carslake's data it produced the highest insulin response of the three forages tested.
• Get the forage analysed if the horse is on a fine margin. Spillers makes this point about hay generally, and it matters most here.

Our full guide to understanding and treating laminitis covers the clinical side, and any change to a laminitic horse's ration is a conversation to have with your vet before you make it, not after.

How to Feed Hay Alternatives Safely

Change the Diet Slowly

The hindgut microbiome adapts to a diet over days, not hours, and a sudden switch is a well-recognised colic risk. The BHS's guidance on managing a hay shortage is specific: introduce any changes to your horse's diet gradually over 10 to 14 days to help reduce the risk of colic. Dengie says the same in slightly looser terms — build the quantity of the new feed up over a couple of weeks. Spillers' first rule for hay replacers is simply that all of them should be introduced gradually. Three separate sources, one answer: take a fortnight over it.

Split It Into Small Meals

Spillers' instruction is to divide hay replacers into a minimum of four meals for horses without access to grazing, and to push the first and last meals as early and as late in the day as the yard allows, so the overnight gap without forage is as short as possible. Dengie's reasoning is the same — smaller meals reduce the time the gut spends empty. Feed in a large trug, or better, several of them in different places, which encourages the horse to move between them and forage as it would at grass.

Protect the Chew Time

Chewing is the part that processed forages take away, and it is not a minor loss. The BHS links adequate forage directly to preventing stereotypical behaviours, and a horse that has run out of things to chew will find its own outlet — wood chewing, crib biting, box walking, or the persistent pacing described in equine stall walking syndrome. These are hard to reverse once established, which is a good reason to design them out rather than manage them later.

Practical ways to keep the chewing up: keep some long-stem forage in the ration for as long as the horse can physically manage it, favour short chops over pellets wherever there is a choice, use compressed blocks the horse has to work at, and slow the eating down. Dengie's trick for that is a large football or a few big smooth pebbles laid on top of the feed so the horse has to work around them.

Buy and Store Well

Bagged forage keeps well but not indefinitely. Check dates, keep bags off a damp floor and sealed against vermin, and do not feed anything that smells sour or looks dusty — the whole point of a packaged product is that it is more predictable than a bale, and a badly stored bag throws that advantage away. Soaked feeds go off quickly in warm weather, so make them up fresh and tip out what is not eaten. If you are also making or buying hay, our UK guide to making hay covers what good hay should look and smell like.

Keeping the Cost Down

Bagged forage is more expensive per kilo than hay, and in a shortage year that gap narrows but rarely closes. A few things genuinely help:

1. Replace part, not all. If your horse can still eat hay, a partial replacer makes the bales last without moving the whole ration onto a bought product.
2. Use straw for the good doers. Within the BHS and Spillers limits above, it is the cheapest fibre on the yard.
3. Weigh what you feed. The BHS's point about hay scales is as much about waste as accuracy — hay trodden into a bed is money.
4. Order early and share deliveries. The BHS suggests yards with several owners using one supplier, which makes deliveries easier and often cheaper.
5. Buy the plain version. Unmolassed, un-oiled products are usually cheaper as well as more suitable for anything with a metabolic problem.
6. Compare on dry matter, not bag weight. A 30%-water haylage and a dry chaff are not comparable per kilo, and the sums change once you account for it.

Forage is usually the largest single line in a horse's running costs — our breakdown of what it costs to own a horse puts the rest of it in context.

When to Call the Vet or a Nutritionist

Most forage swaps are ordinary yard management and need nobody's permission. Some are not. Speak to your vet before, not after, if the horse is losing weight and you do not know why, if it is quidding or showing any other sign of dental trouble, if it has laminitis, EMS or PPID, if it has ever choked, or if it is showing colic signs of any kind. The BHS's own advice for a horse needing a total forage replacement is to involve a vet or a nutritionist, and most of the UK feed companies named in this article run free advice lines staffed by qualified nutritionists — Spillers, Dengie and Baileys all do.

Used properly, hay alternatives for horses will carry a yard through a bad forage year, keep a toothless veteran in good condition for years longer than hay alone could, and give a laminitic something to chew on that will not hurt it. The principle underneath all of them is the same one you started with: fibre first, chewing wherever you can get it, and changes made slowly enough that the gut can follow. If you want the wider picture, horse feeding 101 covers the rest of the ration.

Frequently Asked Questions