I know your pain, we had a severe drought last year. So, now this year, we've completely run out of what hay we did put up, and, I've been buying some commercial compressed hay bales to get to the new hay crop (beautiful rain this year, so crops are looking good, just not cutting quite yet); the compressed bales are 4x more expensive than regular baled hay. I've fed far more commercial feed this past winter and into this spring to have decent nutrition and enough feed for them all.
Do you have access to commercial feeds that you can give the horses? Meadow and Louie would probably do fine on a commercial feed of some sort, I just don't know what you have in Ireland. I've come across a few UK feed company websites on the various groups I'm on on-line; if you tell me what companies you have access to, I'm sure we can come up with an acceptable and hopefully affordable feed plan.
