I've never had a hard keeper, but I have boarded a few. One thing I always have done is kept a salt/mineral block in the pasture at all times. Sometimes we'd get a horse in and they'd spend hours at the block. For older hard keepers you can cook their grain- mix up the feed and pour hot water over it, let it sit until it's cooled enough to eat and is the consistency of oatmeal. Beet pulp, rice brain, oil (I used corn oil- YMMV), alfalfa pellets. And always good quality pasture/forage.

Something I will say that I have seen and considered, hard keepers with a good quality round bale often get a hay belly but still look poorly. If you break that hay bale up and throw out multiple piles in the pasture, they seem to gain weight more evenly overall.

 
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Horse and I, we're dancers in the Dark

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