Feed & Diet

    Overview

    Feed & Diet is the feed-room whiteboard, kept properly. It holds what each horse actually eats — feed by feed, line by line — so that anyone tipping feed into a bucket gets it right, and so that you can see what the ration is doing to the horse over time.

    It has four parts, and they build on each other:

    What it's for
    Feed card The ration itself: each feed of the day and what goes in it. Shareable with anyone, no login needed.
    Condition Body condition scores and weights, so you can tell whether the ration is working.
    Coach Reads the ration against the horse's workload and bodyweight and says what stands out.
    Feed shed What you actually have on hand — days of stock left, a shopping list, and what it all costs.

    This is general feeding information, not veterinary advice. Check any change with your vet or an equine nutritionist, and make diet changes gradually.

    Opening Feed & Diet

    1. Go to My Horses (/rider/horses).
    2. Click the green Health button on one of your horses.
    3. Choose the Feed & Diet tab.

    Inside it you'll find three chips — Feed card, Condition and Coach.

    Your Feed shed isn't there, because it isn't per-horse: one bag of chaff feeds all of them. It lives at the bottom of the Care Assistant page (/rider/care), alongside the assistant you use to keep it topped up.

    The feed card

    The Feed & Diet tab for a horse, showing the row of three chips (Feed card selected, then Condition and Coach), a "Feed card" heading reading "2 feeds a day · updated 28 Jul 2026" with an Edit button, then two cards headed Morning and Evening. Morning lists 2 kg Hygain Balanced Oaten ("damp down before feeding"), 2 biscuits Lucerne hay and 30 g Kohnke's Cell-Vital ("mix through feed"). Evening lists 2.5 kg Hygain Balanced Oaten and 3 biscuits Rhodes grass hay ("soak 30 min"). Below are a "Feeding notes" panel, a "Per day" panel showing $11.27 / day · $78.89 / week with the note "Covers 3 of 4 feeds — price the rest in the Feed shed for a full total", a "Share this card" panel with a link and Copy, Replace link and Stop sharing controls, and a collapsed "Feed changes (2)" section

    Each feed of the day — morning, midday, evening, night, or one you name yourself — holds its own ration lines: hard feed, hay, supplements and medication, each with an amount and any instruction like "soak 20 min" or "hide the bute".

    Setting one out

    Click Create (or Edit on a card you already have). You get one block per feed; + Add item adds a ration line, + Add a feed adds another feed of the day.

    The feed card editor. Two feed blocks — Morning and Evening — each with a Feed dropdown, an optional custom name, an optional feed instruction, and ration rows with Type, What, Amount, Unit, an instruction box and a "Sugar+starch %" box. Below them are an "+ Add a feed" button, a ticked "Laminitis / EMS / PPID" checkbox with a "Sugar + starch limit (%)" field, a "Plan notes (optional)" box, and Cancel and "Save feed card" buttons

    Amounts are in the units yards actually use — kilograms, grams, litres, millilitres, scoops, dippers, biscuits, cups, handfuls, sachets, pumps, or ad-lib for free-choice hay and pasture. You can copy an existing whiteboard across word for word without translating it. Scoops and dippers are kept apart on purpose: they're different containers in most feed rooms, and the card should read back in the words you use.

    Plan notes are for anything that isn't tied to one feed: allergies, "soak all hay", water additives, feeding order, a nutritionist's remarks.

    Every change is logged

    An expanded "Feed changes (2)" section with the caption "Every change to this card, kept so you can trace diet against condition and energy", listing two entries: "Changed Hygain Balanced Oaten in the evening feed from 2 kg to 2.5 kg; Updated the instruction on Rhodes grass hay in the evening feed" dated Tue 28 Jul 2026, and "Added the morning feed (3 items); Added the evening feed (2 items); Updated the plan notes"

    The card records what changed and when, in the words a feeder would use. Feed handovers go wrong when nobody can say what changed, and sudden diet changes carry real colic risk — so the history is kept, and it can't be edited away.

    Sharing the card — no login needed

    Whoever is tipping the feed into the bucket needs to read the card, and they usually don't have a Horsify account.

    The "Share this card" panel reading "Anyone with this link can read the ration. It shows no cost, stock, history or your details. Shared since 28 Jul 2026", with the link in a read-only box, a Copy button, and "Replace link" and "Stop sharing" links

    Choose Create share link and you get a web address anyone can open — an agistment yard, a relief feeder, someone minding the horse while you're away. It's designed to be printed and stuck on the feed room wall.

    The shared feed card page as a feeder sees it: a "FEED CARD" eyebrow above the horse's name, "2 feeds a day · updated 28 Jul 2026", a Print button, a "Read first" panel with the feeding notes, the Morning and Evening ration cards, and a footer reading "This card is shared read-only and reflects the owner's current plan. If something here looks wrong for the horse in front of you, check with the owner before feeding" and "General feeding information only — not veterinary advice"

    The shared page shows the ration, the instructions, the medication and a plain warning if the horse is on a low sugar and starch diet. It shows nothing else — no costs, no feed stock, no history, and nothing about you. It stays current automatically as you edit the card.

    • Replace link issues a new address and stops the old one working — that's how you cut off access when someone moves on.
    • Stop sharing turns it off entirely.

    Sugar and starch (laminitis, EMS, PPID)

    If your horse is laminitic, EMS or PPID, tick Laminitis / EMS / PPID in the editor. You can set your own sugar-and-starch (NSC) ceiling, or leave it blank for the usual 10%.

    The Feed & Diet tab for a laminitic horse, with the Feed card chip selected. An amber "Sugar & starch check" panel reads "Economix pellets is 19% NSC, above this horse's 10% limit" and "No sugar/starch figure recorded for Hygain Zero — check the feed tag or have hay analysed", with a footer "General feeding guidance only — not veterinary advice. Check with your vet or nutritionist." The Morning feed lists 4 kg Rhodes grass hay ("soak 30 min, drain well") and 1 kg Hygain Zero; the Evening feed shows "1.5 kg Economix pellets" with an amber 19% badge beside it. Below, a "Feeding notes" panel reads "Laminitic — on box rest with a soaked-hay diet since April…"

    Enter the NSC figure from a feed tag or hay analysis on each line and the card flags anything over the limit. A feed with no figure recorded raises its own prompt to go and check the tag — an unknown is never treated as safe. Medication is never flagged, because it's dosed by your vet, not chosen for its sugar.

    Condition

    The "Condition & weight" section reading "4 checks · last 26 Jul 2026" with a "Log check" button. Two tiles show CONDITION "5.5 / 9 — Moderate · down 0.5" and WEIGHT "524 kg — Weight tape · down 14 kg". A guidance panel reads "Within the ideal 4–6 range. Keep doing what you're doing and re-check regularly. Re-check about every 30 days. General guidance only — not veterinary advice." Below is a "Score trend" bar chart with a dashed shaded band marking the ideal 4–6 range, then a History list of the four checks with dates, scores, weights and notes

    Log a body condition score (the standard Henneke 1–9 scale, with 4–6 the ideal range) and a weight, and watch the trend. Bars sitting inside the shaded band are in the ideal range; a bar above or below it is coloured to say so.

    If you don't have scales, enter the horse's heart girth and body length and the weight is worked out for you — and recorded as an estimate, so it never reads as a weighbridge figure.

    Logging a condition check also completes any body condition reminder you have set, so the Care Assistant stops nudging about a job you've just done.

    The Feed Coach

    The "Feed coach" section, captioned "How this ration reads against this horse's workload and bodyweight". A Workload panel reads "Not known — No entries or lessons recorded in the last four weeks. Horsify only sees competition entries and riding-school bookings, so a horse ridden at home won't show up here — set the workload yourself", with a "Set it yourself" dropdown. A panel headed "A day's ration, by weight" shows Total 4.53 kg (0.86% of bodyweight), Forage "—" (not recorded in kg) and Hard feed 4.5 kg (horse 524 kg), noting "Covers 3 of 5 measured lines". Below are three insight panels: "Workload not known", "Forage isn't in kilograms" and "Partial totals"

    The Coach reads the ration against how hard the horse is working and what it weighs, and tells you what stands out: whether the total is in the usual range for the horse's bodyweight, whether there's enough fibre, and whether any one feed has more hard feed in it than a horse's stomach really wants at once.

    It works out the workload from your competition entries and lesson bookings. It only sees what goes through Horsify, so a horse you hack out at home looks like it's doing nothing — which is why, when there's nothing recorded, it says "workload not known" rather than assuming. Set it yourself and your answer is the one it uses.

    Two things it deliberately won't do

    • It won't convert scoops or biscuits into kilograms. That needs to know what one holds, which varies between yards and between bales. So if your hay is in biscuits, the Coach says the totals are partial, tells you how many lines they cover, and shows the forage figure as — rather than as zero. It will never decide a well-fed horse is underfed because it couldn't count the hay.
    • It won't do calorie maths. Working out whether a ration meets a horse's energy requirement needs the energy density of every feed on the card, which Horsify doesn't hold and can't guess from a product name.

    The feed shed

    The "Feed shed" section at the bottom of the Care Assistant page, reading "3 feeds · 1 running low" with an Add button. A settings panel holds two checkboxes: "Count feed as it's used" (unticked) and "Low stock alerts" (ticked). An amber "Running low" panel lists "Hygain Balanced Oaten — 4 days left (18 kg)". Three feed rows follow, each with edit and delete buttons and a collapsed "Stock history": Hygain Balanced Oaten (18 kg on hand · using 4.5 kg/day, 4 days left · $8.66/day, highlighted amber), Kohnke's Cell-Vital (2.4 kg on hand · using 0.03 kg/day, 80 days left · $0.89/day) and Lucerne hay (36 biscuits on hand · using 2 biscuits/day, 18 days left · $1.72/day). A final row reads "Feed cost, all horses — $11.27 / day · $78.89 / week"

    Record what's actually in the shed — the feeds you have, how much is left, pack size and price. From that you get days of stock remaining, low-stock warnings, a shopping list, and what the ration costs per day and per week.

    Feeds are matched to your feed cards by name, so spell a feed the same way in both places. Units don't have to match where they mean the same thing: a supplement fed at 30 g a day is counted against the 3 kg tub it comes out of, and millilitres against litres. Scoops and biscuits stay separate from weights, because there's no way to know what one holds.

    The shed belongs to you, not to one horse — one bag feeds several — so usage is added up across every feed card that lists it. Where a feed has no price recorded, the summary says how much of the ration it could actually cost rather than presenting a part figure as the whole.

    Keeping it up to date without opening the app

    A feed shed is only useful if the numbers are current, and nobody wants to open an app in the feed room. So the shed is maintained by telling the assistant, by text message or in the chat box at the top of the Care Assistant page:

    • "got 2 bags of Hygain Balanced" — stock in
    • "picked up a bale of lucerne, $28" — stock in, and the pack price is remembered
    • "half a bag of chaff left" — stock corrected to what's actually in the bin
    • "out of copra"
    • SHOP — the shopping list: what's low, how many bags, roughly what it'll cost
    • SHED — everything on hand and how long it lasts
    • UNDO — reverses the last change

    Say bags, bales or tubs — not kilograms. Horsify converts using the pack size on that shed line, and the first time it meets a feed whose pack size it doesn't know, it asks once and remembers the answer.

    Every movement is kept: what came in, what went out, the balance after each, and what you actually said. Open a feed's history in the shed to see it.

    Counting feed as it's used

    There's a setting in the Feed shed — off until you switch it on — that takes off what your horses' feed cards say they eat, once a day. That's what turns "days remaining" from a figure you last updated in March into a live one.

    It's opt-in on purpose. It changes a number you own, and it's only ever as accurate as your feed cards are: if the card says 2 kg but the scoop is really 3, the shed will drift away from the bin. Turn it on once your cards reflect what you actually feed, and correct it any time with "about 5 kg of chaff left".

    Low stock

    Horsify checks the shed once a day and sends one message when something drops below your warning level — never one per feed, and never the same warning every morning. It escalates as things get tighter (low → very low → out) and resets the moment you restock. You can switch these off in the Feed shed settings.

    Riding schools

    A school horse's detail page showing a "Feed card" panel reading "2 feeds a day · updated 28 Jul 2026" with an Edit button, Morning and Evening ration cards, a "Feeding notes" panel reading "Quiet feeder — leave him to it, he will not eat with people in the yard. No hard feed on days he does not work", and a collapsed "Feed changes (1)" section

    Riding schools get the same feed card on each school horse's page, under the horse's details. It's the same card and the same change log — the difference is only that school staff reach it through the organisation rather than as the horse's owner.

    The school card has no cost panel and no share link: the feed shed belongs to a rider rather than to a school, so pricing a school's ration against someone's personal inventory would be wrong, and sharing the card is the owner's call.

    Any feeding notes recorded against a school horse before this feature existed have been carried across into the card's notes, ready to be broken out into feeds. They were deliberately not guessed into structured rations — free text like "2 scoops chaff am, hay pm" can't be parsed safely, and a wrong ration is worse than an unstructured one.

    FAQ

    Why won't it total my hay? Because it's recorded in biscuits, and a biscuit isn't a weight — it varies a lot between bales. Weigh a few typical biscuits once, then record the hay in kilograms and the totals will cover it.

    It says my horse isn't in work, but I ride most days. Horsify only sees competition entries and riding-school bookings. Hacking and schooling at home leave no trace, so the Coach says it doesn't know rather than guessing "not in work". Set the workload yourself on the Coach and your answer wins from then on.

    Why is the daily cost marked as partial? Because at least one feed on the card has no pack size and price in the Feed shed. The figure only covers what could be priced, and says so, rather than presenting part of the cost as the whole.

    Who can see the shared link? Anyone who has the address — it isn't listed or indexed anywhere. It shows the ration only. Use Replace link to invalidate an address you've handed out, or Stop sharing to switch it off.

    Can I feed a supplement in grams but buy it by the kilo? Yes. Record the card line in grams and the shed item in kilograms, spell the name the same way in both, and the days-remaining and cost figures work it out.

    Does logging a condition check do anything else? It completes any body condition reminder on the Care Assistant, so you don't get nudged about a job you've just done.

    I texted "2 bags" and it asked how big a bag is. Because it doesn't know yet, and a 20 kg bag and a 40 kg bag are very different numbers to guess at. Reply with the weight once — "20kg" — and it will never ask about that feed again.

    Why won't it change a medication line without asking? Because a misheard word or a slipped decimal point on a drug dose isn't a data problem. Anything involving medication is always read back for you to confirm, however clearly you phrased it. The same goes for a change that would push a horse past its sugar and starch limit.

    Can it undo a feed card change? UNDO covers stock changes only. Feed card edits are all listed in the card's change log with what changed and when, so you can see exactly what happened and put it back yourself.

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