Nutrition - Feeding for Optimum Health

As feeds from The Pure Feed Company were originally designed for use on a private stud, the usual conventions of formulating a commercial feed were not taken it to consideration. We didn’t need to add globs of molasses to stick the feed together and to lure the horse to eat it. We didn’t use Barley as the primary ingredient simply because it had been the primary ingredient of horse feed for decades. And we didn’t include ingredients such as maize, peas or flaked carrots simply to make the feed look nice to the human eye. Instead Robert and Lou had the freedom to develop feeds without compromise, “we could really look at the physiology of the horse and the way they have evolved over centuries and apply this to our feed”, Lou remembers. “Indeed a look through the horse’s digestive system told us just what was needed”.

At every stage of the horse’s digestive tract we see the evidence that horses have evolved to eat a high fibre, low starch, low sugar diet. The horse’s teeth grow continually to allow him to grind the course forage that he needs and chewing is doubly important as a horse only produces saliva when he chews. This saliva has two roles, one as a lubricant to ensure that the feed slips easily down the oesophagus, the second is that it acts as a buffer to the acid always present in the stomach. A horse’s stomach is surprisingly small, making it suited to trickle feeding and it is certainly not designed to accommodate large meals in one go.

Although the horse can digest starch and sugar, the small intestine is the only place that he can safely do this. Once the energy from such soluble carbohydrates enters the horse’s blood stream it is a form of instant energy which at best can lead to excitability, or at worst can lead to feed related issues such as azoturia (tying up) or laminitis.

The major area of the equine digestive tract is the large intestine and this is where fibre digestion takes place. The horse itself is unable to unlock the energy stored in the fibre he eats, so he relies on the billions and billions of good bacteria that inhabit the hind gut to do this for him. These bacteria break down the ingested fibre and produce volatile fatty acids, which the horse can absorb and safely store until they are needed for work or maintenance.

To ensure that we produced a feed that met the physiological needs of the horse and not simply the emotional or aesthetic needs of the owner, out went the molasses and all other sticky binders, out went the high levels of starch and in came lots of lovely fibre based energy sources, together with high levels of conditioning oil.

But simply getting the basics right is only the first part of the story. Modern management regimes mean that optimum or even adequate levels of essential vitamins and minerals are not provided either in the forage your horse receives or in the pasture he is grazed on. To compound the nutritional stresses that our horses’ face still further, the extra work load that we place upon them requires extra sources of vitamins and minerals unobtainable from hay and grazing alone. This is why we developed Pure Balance. Added to all our feeds, Pure Balance is a comprehensive vitamin and mineral supplement that not only supplies the optimum levels of vitamins and minerals needed by your horse, but also provides Profeed®, an essential ingredient that acts as a feed for all those billions of beneficial bacteria and helps to ensure that they work with your horse to keep him fit and healthy and able to derive maximum nutritional value from his feed.

As Robert remembers “it was so refreshing to be able to formulate a feed with the horse placed at the heart of the process. I was really allowed to put the horse first in everything I did, rather than have to follow the crowd”. The result is the Pure Feed range, a range of feeds that has truly revolutionised the way horses are fed today and that can revolutionise the way you feed your horse too, for the better.