To save y'all some time, I can summarise what's written below quite easily: horses eat A LOT. If however you would like more info on how I have managed to feed my boys, strap yourself in and keep reading!

The thing I spent the most time researching before setting off on this trip, and the thing that I have worried the most about since leaving, has been how to feed my horses on the road. I grew up with horses on a large farm in Tasmania, surrounded by ample space and pasture. I hardly had to spare a single thought to feeding them. Chuck em a bit of hay in winter, maybe a bit of hard feed if I was doing a lot of riding, make sure they had a balanced mineral supplement, and hey presto, horse feeding taken care of! But life on the road is a far cry from pleasant days of undisturbed pasture grazing, especially when you are riding through semi-arid areas. So how to keep your horses alive and healthy on the road? I did a lot of research and idle reading online, on articles about horse digestion, different opinions, and any info I could gather from other long-distance riders... and there wasn't much of anything useful from the latter!

Firstly, let's just reiterate horses eat A LOT! An idle horse ie not in work, of average size, requires about 69,000KJ per day. That's the equivalent of about 28 hamburgers. Per horse. Add another 10 hamburgers or so if your horse is growing, needs to put on weight, or is working hard. That's a lot of hamburgers. But horses don't eat hamburgers (although I'm sure Mr Richard would have a go!), they eat roughage, which is basically salad. So the problem we are looking at is how to get the energy equivalent of 35 odd hamburgers out of salad. Hmm, that's a lot of salad, I hear you say... damn right it is!

Horses' digestive systems are amazing and complicated. I highly recommend this article on the Hygain website. The site also has lots of other great info on horses and their nutritional needs, so why not get lost down the rabbit hole!

I won't go into much detail here as I am not an expert, but basically roughage gets broken down in various stages as it moves through the digestive system, and the fibre gets fermented in the hindgut where bacteria break it down for energy and create volatile fatty acids as a waste product that get metabolised by the horse – how freaking cool is that! #fermentationislife

Horses evolved to be grazing almost constantly, browsing on a variety of different foodstuffs as they moved across the vast steppes of Central Asia. As such, they need to eat a lot of roughage every day. Hard feed obviously has more energy per gram than something like hay, but a horse MUST consume 1-2% of its bodyweight in roughage each day... which is about 5-10kg, for a horse Micky's size. If they don't get this, their digestive system can’t function properly and they can get colic and stomach ulcers. So to supply his daily energy requirements, an average horse needs to eat about 10kg of good quality hay. If being fed a mixture of hard feed (oats, barley etc) and hay, he still needs at least 1-2% of his bodyweight in roughage. That is a lot of food. When we had to carry all our own feed for sections along the Murray between Robinvale and Renmark, and then in sections in the Riverland in SA, it was just the BULK of feed that was so difficult. I found I could push for 5 days of feed, but that was getting pretty desperate and having the boys on starvation rations. No one likes that; Mr Richard sure knows how to run a guilt trip!

So, what have I fed this trip? I'll break it into three scenarios: 1. The Lands of the Living. 2. Mallee Country 3. The High Life aka Having Vehicle Support 4. The Wheatbelt

1. The Lands of the Living.

By this I mean green fertile farmlands where grass was not a problem and we could graze every night and multiple times during the day. I didn't carry very much feed at all here. I would stop for 10min every hour or so, or whenever we came across a lush patch of grass, and let the boys graze. When we set up camp, they are always super hungry, so I set them up, let them graze, then moved them to a fresh patch just before I headed to bed. I always carried a little bit of oats or similar (often buying 1kg bags from tiny supermarkets in small towns!) that I would douse in about 500ml of vegetable oil for each horse. I would probably only feed a kg or maybe two of oats per horse per day. Then everything else they had to find for themselves. I found the boys didn't lose weight on this regime, but I couldn't get Micky to put weight on.

2. Mallee Country.

By this I mean land where there is basically zero feed to be had. Occasionally we might stumble upon a patch of roadside lucerne or native grass by the river, but it was never more than a few mouthfuls. And oh boy, this kind of country proved to be the most taxing, emotionally on me, and both physically and emotionally on the boys. Like I mentioned above, we could JUST carry 5 days worth of feed, but it was starvation rations. The hardest was getting enough roughage. 10kg of hay per day is a lot of hay. The best by far was lucerne. Energy dense, delicious, it was great! I would put a bale on the top of the pack saddle (which looks ridiculous, but needs must). I also discovered MultiCube hay pellets were great! Dense and easy to transport, I would soak them and the boys loved them! Then I would also feed as much hard feed as I could: Mirconised barley, oat-free mueslis, or whatever had the most energy per gram that I could find. I would often be buying from small feed stores without much range of stock, so trying to get some kind of consistency with what I was feeding was sometimes tricky. Then heaps of vegetable oil, about 500ml each. And that just about kept them ticking over. I would feed about 5 times per day, as horses need regular small meals often. Definitely the worst times were when Scenario 1 became Scenario 2 without warning, catching me unprepared... sad times for hungry horses!

3. The High Life aka Having Vehicle Support.

This was basically Port Augusta onwards to Esperance. I did feed drops from Port Augusta to Wudinna, dropping them off in scrub where I was planning on camping. I fed 5kg/horse/day of lucerne, mostly MultiCube as it was easy to transport and store in a drop, plus about 5kg/horse/day of Johnson's Everyhorse Weight Gain, which is a pellet consisting of mostly oat and lurcerne hay with oils and minerals and vitamins, plus the regular 250-500ml of vegetable oil for each horse. I found Johnson's Everyhorse Weight Gain be THE BEST hard feed I fed out. The boys loved it, it was easy to digest, and I finally started to put some weight on Micky. And then Alex joined us with 25 bales of clover hay! From there until Esperance, I was feeding much the same but with clover hay instead of lucerne. I filled up my van and any spaces in the float with hard feed, mainly Johnson's Everyhorse Weight Gain, micro barley, Speedibeet, and soy meal, of which I gave each horse about a cup each day. The boys got about 2/3 of a bale between them each day, with a lunch of soaked Speedibeet, which was really great in the midday heat as it was cool and damp.

4. The Wheatbelt

This gets its own title because it definitely wasn't the Lands of the Living, and yet I carried very little feed. All throughout this part of WA, from Esperance to Margaret River, there was almost no roadside grassy feed. Fortunately for us, there were literally thousands of hectares of ripe barely and wheat… And so that was what my boys lived off for 5 weeks! Surprisingly they actually did really well on it, as long as I made sure they got enough.

Just a note on feeding lucerne. I found it to be the best roughage on the road, but I wouldn't recommend feeding it to a horse unless they were in heavy work. It also makes them drink heaps of water (I think due to the high protein?), which is something to consider if you are in dry country.

Another awesome product that made a huge difference was InsideOut. This is a kind of probiotic supplement you can add to feed. I started using it about 1,700km into the trip on a friend's recommendation (thanks Bernie!). Initially I was highly sceptical about it, as it is not cheap, but after a few weeks, I really started noticing a difference, particularly in Micky. He actually started filling out and bulking up. This was probably a combination of using InsideOut and just feeding more hard feed, but I would definitely recommend it if trying to put on condition.

I think one of the main things I noticed is how your whole life on the road revolves around your horses' eating. There was nothing so demoralising and heartbreaking than having hungry horses with nothing to feed them and not knowing when or where we would find more feed. Setting up camp on barren ground and feeding out meagre rations made me feel like a professional horse torturer. Luckily horses forgive easily and are definitely a hell of a lot tougher and braver than we usually give them credit for.

EDIT: I forgot to mention how I worked out where there was grass and when we would be entering mallee country! I used Google Earth to look at the terrain and amount of feed available. So far it has been incredibly accurate and effective. Looking at satellites, it is very clear where there is grass (the satellite is bathed in green) and where there isn't (the satellite is russet coloured). It is also easy to see where there are forests, which obviously don't have any feed for hungry horses!