02/03/2026
With the struggle to find hay this year I found it interesting to read how we coped in the war.
I've been doing some research on horse feed rationing during World War II, mainly because it's mentioned in Diana Pullein-Thompson's A Pony for Sale. Guy mentions they don't have oats because of rationing.
This all seems quite pertinent at the moment when hay is in desperately short supply.
During the war, the emphasis was on feeding humans, not animals. Even farmers were only supposed to keep those animals for which they could grow their own feed. When war broke out, there was a pretty swift effect on prices, with imports from Europe almost completely stopped.
Here's what happens to Jean in Joanna Cannan's More Ponies for Jean when she comes home from school at the outbreak of the war:
"I tactfully said that of course I would look after the hens if we had them, but where would they live? and Daddy said, “In the orchard.” I said, “They’ll spoil the grazing,” and then he said an awful thing: he said that with a war on I wouldn’t be able to keep two ponies. The corn merchant’s bill had been enormous, he said; the price of hay was going up and Mummy was spending all her time and wasting gallons of petrol rushing from corn merchant to corn merchant trying to get it. He said that I could keep one pony but that a second was unpatriotic and unnecessary."
Matters soon became worse.
Rationing of livestock feed, including horses, was introduced in 1941. Working horses had an allowance, as did thoroughbreds and light working horses. Riding horses did not. There was no restriction on how much hay or chaff you could feed, but the expectation was that you would grow your own.
Articles appeared in the horsy press with tried and tested alternatives for what you could feed instead.
Here is Major Faudel-Phillips (the first Chairman of the Pony Club) on what he did in the winter of 1941:
"There is not the slightest doubt that the owners of light horses and ponies are going to be faced with a big problem as to how to feed them this coming winter.
Are we going to get a ration for them? I do not know. [...] I suppose at any rate you have looked ahead enough, either to make, buy or come by, sufficient hay. That at any rate will beat starvation,unless it’s very bad hay."
As well as experimenting with straw, cut short he had also:
"boiled all my garden refuse. I mean outside leaves of cabbage, brussel sprout tops – really anything. Of course, any potatoes that are damaged, or carrots or beettroots, parsnips, celery tops. Boil them all up and mix a stiff mash with oat straw chaff. A good bucket full, because mind you, it’s not grain, so what we lack in quality we must make up in quanity. A mangold raw to munch at is always good."
I don't know where you'd get mangolds these days. I do have a picture somewhere of my godfather, who was a farmer, in his mangold field, which had done very well, but I can't lay my hands on it at the moment.
The illustration is by Anne Bullen, from More Ponies for Jean by Joanna Cannan.
