Diet

Fiber, fiber fiber! Keep the gut active with roughage, (free choice grass hay if at all possible), soaked beet pulp with no molasses, low sugar/low starch food (i.e. Triple Crown Low Starch), and you do NOT need to over-protein a friesian! Friesians not in heavy training do not NEED more than 10% protein in their overall feed. Friesians under the age of 3 can have a little extra protein (i.e. 2-4% more), but DO NOT overprotein a friesian or you will risk OCD. Stay away from a heavy grain diet, fortify with mostly soaked beet pulp, stabilized rice bran, and/or essential oils (like soybean or cocasoya oil) for overall health. If concerned about essential vitamins and minerals due to a lack of grain, you can balance the ration using a balancer pellet like All-Phase (made by Kentucky Equine Research, also known as Micro-Phase and available worldwide), or Platinum Performance or Omega Horse Shine. For coat enhancement: To "keep the black horse black" and a shiny overall coat, you can use various suppliments. Ground flax is best for overall shine and a natural source of omega fatty acids in the diet. Paprika is the main ingredient in "Black-as-Knight" and helps some horses retain their coat color when fed before the sunfade starts ( i.e. early spring). It does contain capsacians, though, and will cause a horse to test positive for them and most be taken out of feeds 2 weeks prior to recognized competition. Black Oil Sunflower Seeds are also helpful, but come with a few caveats. Copper deficiency has a lot to do with black horses turning red/orange, especially during time of the year when coat fade is not typical. I've found that feeding the All-Phase balancer pellet, the friesians get the proper copper content without overloading on selenium, which can have serious if not fatal complications. Be aware of the selenium content of your grass before choosing any supplement.

BOSS (Black Oil Sunflower Seeds)

Many "Friesian people" feed it with great results. Between that and the paprika, a black/dark horse is less likely to fade. The cons are that it is a REALLY high fat, high calorie food, and my friesians are already butterballs as it is. It also is a bit pricey, depending on what grade of seed you get. If you don't get better milled seed, you get bin run sunflowers that often contain sticks, dirt, cocklebur and other debris. In addition, they often contain up to 20% hulls with no sunflower meat. So it's inconsistant and filler if you get the cheap stuff, and expensive to get the better grade sunflower. It does have a lot of the same properties as the All-Phase, to include a high natural copper content, so that's likely why it works so well to fight the fade. It does the same thing as All-Phase and offers many of the same trace mineral content, to include selenium (we're on the border of a low selenium grass content area, so it's ok to feed SOME selenium in the diet--just have to be careful not to overdo it in the total feed content, as horses can suffer from selenium poisoning) and phosphorus. You have to be careful not to feed too much of it and throw off a horse's calcium to phosphoros ratio. Remember you want at LEAST a 1:1 ratio of calcium to phosphorus. Sunflower seeds (and most cereal grains) are VERY high in phosphorus and very low in calcium. What this means is that for every gram of phosphorus ingested in the diet, the body must match that with another gram of calcium before the phosphorus can be absorbed through the intestinal wall into the bloodstream. If the required calcium is not available from the diet, the body will obtain it from wherever it can---such as from the storage deposits in the bones. So, feeding something so high in phosphorus can be detrimental to a horse's bone health later down the road. While you can balance alot of it out with grass, grass based hays and beet pulp, for those horses who are on rice bran and regular grain (which usually inverts a calcium to phosphorus ratio) it can be just enough to push the ratio under 1:1. You can balance out an inverted calcium to phosphorus ratio by feeding alfalfa (I feed soaked cubes), beet pulp, grass hays, and vegetable oils.