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 Elite Veteran
Posts: 851
  
Location: West Texas | For horses, oats are superior to corn in every way, except energy (but that is really a mute point). The only reason to add corn to an oat mix is to make it cheaper and to add margin in the feed for feed companies. That is why it is done, no other reason, regardless of what the feed rep or nutritionist tells you.
Every nutritionist will say oats are a better horse feed, then most of them go right around and put corn in many, many products. It is not right. Even fat supplement feeds like Purina Amplify and Nutrena Empower Boost contain ground corn. Why? There is no good reason except a little cheap (cheap for them, not for you) energy to pad their pocket books a little more.
Edited by Tdove 2016-04-25 10:42 AM
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  Whack and Roll
Posts: 6342
 
Location: NE Texas | I too feed less than a pound of oats, with a cup of BOSS once a day, and mix in my Cur-OST. Mine get a flake of alfalfa once a day right now given that our grass as pasture is plush. In the winter they get alfalfa twice a day, but I still only grain once daily. I have young horses to aged horses on this program and they all thrive and do well.
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Red Bull Agressive
Posts: 5981
Location: North Dakota | Yeah definitely don't add corn. It is the most worthless feed out there for horses. I love whole oats though. I would recommend adding a little alfalfa (I do pellets or cubes) to help balance the calcium:phosphorous ratio. Beyond that you can add flax and/or rice bran (or preferably Renew Gold). Currently the amounts I feed per day are 2lbs oats, 4lbs alfalfa pellets, 1/2lb Renew Gold, 1 scoop flax supplement, and Cur-Ost. I've adjusted it over time depending on the time of year, how much work my horse was in, etc. but right now this is what's working for us. | |
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 Expert
Posts: 2013
Location: Piedmont, OK | I feed whole oats, alfalfa, flax seed and Animal Element Mineral 201 and Detox | |
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 Accident Prone
Posts: 22277
Location: 100 miles from Nowhere, AR | FLITASTIC - 2016-04-24 7:03 PM readytorodeo - 2016-04-24 7:50 AM A little corn doesn't hurt. You are feeding very little. I would not feed rice bran. It can cause the calcium/phosphorus to be put of balance. It you want one to shine then add Vitalize High Performance. You will get a shine and you also get protection against ulcers and colic with the pre and prebiotic. Saves money on feed and supplements. Not always true. If your rice bran is stabilized (mine is ) it has the calcium and phosphorous ratio stabilized. Only time you run into that is when you feed unstabilized.
Stabilization and calcium fortification are 2 different processes often found in the same product, but you can find rice bran with one and not the other. I feed stabilized but unfortified rice bran with alfalfa. | |
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Expert
Posts: 1695
Location: Willows, CA | I was the one who started putting calcium in stabilized rice bran. We sold it for years without doing that, but I got frustrated with trying to explain to people why it really did not make any difference whether added Calcium was in there or not. It was just easier to balance the cal/phos ratio in the product. Unlike grain based feeds that can be fed at very high levels, the imbalance in Stabilized Rice Bran is such a small contribution to the entire diet that, in the majority of cases, it is basically meaningless. You change how much calcium and phosphorus in the diet more by the variation in how much hay you grab when you feed, than by the small amount that is found in a normal feeding of Stabilized Rice Bran. If the diet is upside down based on your hay and what else you feed, Cal/phos balanced SRB is not going to fix that. If your diet is cal/phos balanced overall, then SRB with no added calcium is not going to mess it up. We all learned that alfalfa is high in calcium and grass hays are high in phosphorus. While this was true many years ago, in doing thousands of hay analysis tests, I rarely see a grass hay these days that is not also higher in Calcium. If you are feeding five or more pounds of grain based feed that has not had calcium added, along with straight grass hay that tests close to equal cal/phos you might have a reason to consider an added calcium source in the diet. But, if SRB is fed as intended, without adding it to a large grain ration and straight grass hay added calcium is very rarely needed. In that case it is more important to know that it was properly stabilized than if it had calcium added to it. | |
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