Nikki Alvin-Smith - 10/15/2024 Health

Grand Meadows Cares Series: Should You Stop Feeding Grain To Your Horse?

A scoop of mixed grains marekuliasz

Newsdate: October 10, 2024 - 11:30 am
Location: Orange, California

If there was a nose to tail travelogue that took a trip through your horse’s digestive system would you be interested in reading it? Imagine it up on the big screen. Would you like to see it? And if you would, what do you think you might find?

Basics of horse nutrition - hay, grain, and a red apple representing supplements.

You’ll be surprised at how barn owners and horse trainers number one horse health concern, that of equine digestive issues with gastric ulcers, can be better handled to support the well-being of the horse.
© 2020 by Equine Guelph New window.

It is highly likely that the findings would depend on what year the ‘guidebook’ was published. Horse owners all understand that gastric ulcers in their equine charges are a frequent issue, today more than ever before. The racehorse population suffers the worst, with their high grain diets and lack of forage first nutrition, and performance horses of all types come a close second. Perhaps it is time to figure out why Equine Gastric Ulcer Syndrome {EGUS] is debilitating our horses and fix it.

Grains and History

In London the 1960’s were known as the Swinging Sixties, and according to many American scholars the ‘cultural decade’ was a time of robust change in the 20^th Century. Those changes were not just in Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, Counterculture and the rest.

As an outgrowth of post WWII the ‘golden age’ that was promised came transformations across many industries. These changes included farming and the feed industry where the continued 1940’s and 1950’s pelleted feed rations were developed and became increasingly complex.

The history of how the grain we feed our horses today became a conveniently pre-mixed extruded compound in a bag is an interesting one, aptly noted here by the University of Cambridge, UK.

And not only did the well-meant practices of not just providing grains, but also including a ‘one source fixes all’ feed with vitamins, minerals, amino acids and the rest, become popular as an answer to nutritional management of horses, in the 1960’s and 1970’s farmers also started discovering other helpful production growth practices, such as the widespread use of fertilizers, chemical pesticides. Yummy.

The advent of NIR technology and incorporation of other technologies should theoretically make the feed mill itself smarter. Toxins should be readily identifiable before the feed leaves the premises rather than later discovered by the horse owner when their animals become unwell or die, and digestive modelling systems should help define nutrient interactions and values.

Trouble Is….

The continued research and development that spun forward from heavy sugared sweet feed concoctions that found popularity in horse barns in the 1960’s on to what you can buy in today’s horse grain marketplace hasn’t been explained to the horse’s digestive system. The trouble is, “no-one told the horse.” Adapting to the ongoing somewhat ‘unnatural’ synthetic formulations of certain vitamins for example is not something easily monitored in the horse as a factor in its well-being.

Think about the chemicals that find their way through the food chain, that should perhaps be ‘Rounded Up” themselves and eliminated from use, rather than just renamed, reframed and rebranded.

As an organic hay farmer myself for the past 24 years, I am obviously much biased toward keeping things as horse-friendly as possible. As a horse breeder of performance horses and professional horse trainer competing and producing horses from birth to Grand Prix for three decades together with my similarly qualified husband Paul, I am extremely proud to mention that none of our horses have ever exhibited any signs of EGUS.

I’m not saying there couldn’t be a single case I could have missed. I’m just saying I’m aware of the disease and its symptoms and have not seen it in our horses. I’ve seen it evidenced when giving clinics in other people’s horses, and of course am aware that a horse can develop it at any time. Neither has any horse we’ve sold from our breeding or training program that received a pre-purchase endoscope exam been diagnosed with the disease.

A forage first diet( given it is clean and green, organically grown and also importantly, and dry forage is organically harvested/cured and stored, and certainly not pre-mixed and preserved with chemicals) is a horse-friendly diet. We all know that. At our farm we feed minimal amounts of grain.

Our home-produced hay is always available to stabled horses on an ad lib basis. Ad lib because actually our belief in, and need for, top quality organic hay, was why we started the business and moved to our present farm with south-facing tillable land in the first place and we understand the horse’s need for plenty of it. Additionally our horses enjoy life grazing and living outside as much as possible, including the advanced level ones, on carefully managed (read dewormed, topped/harrowed/organically limed and annually tested) pastures as much as possible.

I Can’t Explain It All – But Nick Hartog Can. And Does.

I admit that part of being a horse owner for me, and indeed a human being on this temporal plane, includes an acknowledgement that earlier in life I may have had some ‘wannabe’ moments. And perhaps I do like to ‘disrupt’ by bringing controversial topics to light.

I was for sure, always interested in animal nutrition and farming.

As a ‘wannabee’ in my idealistic late teen state, I wanted DDT spraying to be banned following my read of Rachel Carson’s iconic Silent Spring title, a controversial read back then. I also endeavored to follow a career to help mitigate world hunger (I was an avid reader of National Geographic and still am).

This ‘wanna make a difference’ person that was my younger self had such ideas squashed rather abruptly after I spent a year working as an Assistant Scientific Officer at the U.K. Ministry of Overseas Development. The mission of that government entity was partially to help developing countries figure out more productive farming protocols that were less damaging to the environment but would produce much needed food for their populations.

I won’t mention the obvious political side to this effort that of course I was to realize as I grew up a bit and discovered the bigger picture.

There was certainly a point when I was a ‘wannabe veterinary surgeon or doctor of human medicine’, and those interests have never left me. Even if the illusion that I had the grades and mental toughness to qualify for those esteemed professions faded when my A-level results hit the street.

The point is, that we all strive to make the world a little bit better. And as a horse owner, that’s where I landed – I was always a writer at heart with a passion to share knowledge. So here I am. Trying to share what I’ve learned to make things better.

And based on that, I urge horse owners everywhere to take a few moments each day and hit up your social media to learn for yourself ‘what tracks’ in resolving EGUS and other issues in our horses, in the informative “Supplement Savvy” series hosted by Grand Meadows President Nick Hartog.

About Grand Meadows

Founded in 1989 by visionary Angela Slater, Grand Meadows is a leading horse health product and equine supplement manufacturer driven by the guiding principle of providing affordable, extremely high-quality science-backed horse products to help ensure horses look and feel their best.

For the past 35 years the company’s mission has been honored and developed further, by President Nick Hartog, who among other accomplishments is one of the founding members and current board member of the National Animal Supplement Council (NASC), an organization that has a profound impact on the safety, transparency, and legitimacy of the animal supplement industry.

Grand Meadow products are widely used and trusted across the entire horse community from Olympic medal winning competitors and successful horse racing trainers to backyard horse owners. Their equine supplements are highly regarded for their excellent quality resourced ingredients and completely accurate labelling and effective formulations. Learn more at https://www.grandmeadows.com/

About Nikki Alvin-Smith

Please visit https://www.horseinakiltmedia.com/ and https://nikkialvinsmithstudio.com/ to learn more about her affordable services.