Teff (Tiffany?) Hay and Weight Gain : Px

[[Sorry about large picture sizes, photobucket takes about 20 minutes to resize them, they will shrink soon]]

Alrighty so about two months ago I moved from a stables that had a very poor idea about how much the average horse was to be fed, and their idea of healthy weight was bad. =\ At 2 flakes of bad alfalfa a day (Bad as in mixed with a lot of grass and a lack of nutritional goodness) my horse dropped weight considerably, because of his heavier workload. Even with stall rest and a lot of grain wasn't helping. Long story short, before I could arrange to move my horses to another stables that I could afford, they looked like this :





He is a very heavy build horse (not draft thick, but a thicker), that before I brought him to the stables was built like a tank. Now we have been at the new stables for about a month and a half and the horses have been on 4 flakes of healthy alfalfa, strategy and rice bran. They have been gaining the weight back. They now look like this :





Now my question is that I still want more muscle to build up, I want his top line stronger and to fill out in his flank and back where he lost the most muscle at the other stables. But I would also like to get them off of straight alfalfa. The only other option is Teff Hay and the BO swears by it. I know nothing about it. Its supposedly a type of nutritious grass hay. Now while I am still trying to get 50lbs more of each horse should I stick with alfalfa or is it okay to switch to 50/50? They will still get 4 flakes a day and their grain. If knows about it I would love to figure out your experiences with it. My gelding has a bit of a sensitive stomach and gets diarrhea with any hay change. So I just switched them today to a 1alfalfa/1teff in the morning and 2alfalfa at night to start getting him adjusted.

And one more pic of my lovely boy. I can't help but show him off.

Tifton hay is a prolific bermuda hybrid grass. It is heavily fertilized and grows extreemly fast. Because of that, it tends to be higher in protein and other nutrients, lower in fiber, tender and very palatable. It's going to be slightly lower in calories, Ca and protein than the alfalfa but perfect for a mature horse. I wouldn't worry about adding it.

Teff hay is one of the most over-advertised - absent of hybrid bermudagrass, that there is. There is nothing magical about it - it is a warm season grass hay. Actually, it is one of the more expensive hays to grow - alfalfa is much easier.
Glowing claims about the wonders of a particular type of hay are baseless without a forage test to validate them. Then when you have that forage test, that test is good only for the hay tested in that lot, baled that day, on that farm, and on that particular field. The quality of a particular hay is paramount to the quality of the soil underneath that hay and is not endemic to the species of grass itself.
Buy all your hay from producers who test it! You don't go to the feed store and buy Johnny's Wonder Feed with no label and full of mystry ingredients, so why do you buy hay that way?