On a yard of horses, feeding from memory drifts. Scoops creep, supplements get doubled or forgotten, haynets vary with whoever fills them, and nobody can say when a particular horse started leaving his feed. A written feeding and weight record per horse keeps the ration the horse actually gets the same as the ration on paper — and makes every deliberate change traceable.
One record per horse
Give each horse its own page or entry, headed with the basics: age, type, current work level, and any feeding quirks that matter, such as being a good doer, a fussy hay eater, or a horse who gets overexcited on rich feed. Under that, write the current ration as it is genuinely fed — the forage offered, the hard feed by the scoop or measure your feed room actually uses, and supplements by the name on the label. The words 'as fed' matter. A record of the intended ration becomes fiction within a fortnight, while a record of the real one can be adjusted sensibly, because it describes what is in the manger rather than what was planned in the office.
Log every change, and its reason
Rations should change — with the seasons, with workload, with condition — but each change needs a date and a reason on the horse's page. 'Increased as his work stepped up.' 'Reduced after condition crept on over the summer.' 'Changed after he started leaving the previous feed.' A sentence like that turns later puzzles into simple reading. Without it, when a horse's weight or behaviour shifts, nobody can reconstruct what he was eating at the time, and every adjustment from there is guesswork. Note refusals and leftovers too. A horse quietly leaving part of his feed for several days is information, and it belongs on his page, not in a passing remark at the yard gate.
Weigh-tape and hands-on checks
Weigh each horse with a tape at regular intervals — monthly suits most yards — always the same way, on level ground, and write the figure down with its date. Pair it with a hands-on condition check, feeling over the ribs, neck and quarters, because the tape alone cannot tell condition from gut fill, and a thick winter coat hides a great deal from the eye. Neither measure is exact, and neither needs to be. What you are building is each horse's trend line, and a steady drift up or down across three readings is a clear instruction to adjust the ration recorded on his page.
Reading the yard as a whole
Once every horse has a page, yard-level patterns appear. You can see which horses gain on spring grass and need watching, which older horses slip condition every winter and need their ration raised earlier, and how much forage the yard genuinely gets through in a month — a figure that feeds straight back into ordering. The record also protects horses when staff change or a horse is fed by someone new: the page, not a hurried handover conversation, carries the detail, so a relief feeder gives the same feed as the regular one.
KinsLe's Care Teams lets those feeding routines be assigned horse by horse to whoever is on duty, with completed feeds marked off with a timestamp, so the ration written on the page and the feed in the manger stay one and the same thing.