At the risk of abusing JFK we would like to suggest to you that instead of asking: "How can I save money on supplements?" you should ask
"How can supplements save me money
on feeds?"
Replacing concentrates with supplements, hay and oils Diesel prices have skyrocketed, food and feed costs are on
the up and who knows how much further the increases have to run?
Already consumers are cutting back on luxuries in the supermarkets and no doubt many are looking at cost savings with their horses too.
With
grain prices going through the roof the value of feeding concentrates is no longer what it was. And more and more we are discovering that grain based feeds are the origin of so many horse problems (laminitis, colic,
ulcers, tying-up etc.) so that maybe this is the time to move away to higher fibre feeds and more oils where horses need more energy.
At first sight it may seem strange to feed oils to horses. It doesn't seem a
very natural thing to do. But actually it is less odd than you may think. When horses eat fibre - their truly natural diet - the beneficial bacteria in the gut convert that fibre to fatty acids. So the horse is actually
well designed to absorb and utilise fats in its system.
So feeding more hay, haylage and chaffs probably has the dual benefits of saving money and providing healthier and more natural feed for our horses. But the
drawback of cutting out concentrates is that for many years these products have been supplemented to a greater or lesser extent with vitamins and minerals which the manufacturers would claim roughly convert them
back to the nutritional value of reasonable quality pasture. However the word 'concentrate' is somewhat misleading in that respect. In fact these products are quite weak by supplement standards.
Taking vitamin A
as an illustration a typical 'concentrate' may contain 12,000 ius (international units) per kg and our Essential Daily Care contains nearly 1.5 million ius per kg. So it isn't rocket science to work out that for every
kilogram of concentrate you currently feed you only need about 10 grams of Essential Daily Care. This dramatically reduces the starch input into your horse and the diesel required to shift the vitamins and minerals
around the country.
So if you just look at that foundation vitamin and mineral type supplementation supplied by concentrates fed at recommended levels you will probably find it is costing you somewhere between
£1.00 and £2.00 a day depending on the product used and your horse's workload. Feed Balancers cost roughly the same. Our Essential Daily Care costs about 38 pence a day!
Essential Daily Care provides a broad
spectrum of vitamins, minerals and essential amino acids and should provide excellent nutrition for muscle, coat and hoof production as well as general health and wellbeing. But many of you are also using supplements
for joints, behaviour, digestive function and many other issues.
Comprehensive supplements are far cheaper that lots of different products for different problems Our Problem Solver range of
products includes what we believe are absolutely top quality products in these categories and many of them use quite unique nutritional approaches to the age old issues. In our experience these targeted supplements work
better if combined with a broad spectrum foundation like Essential Daily Care so we have developed our Combination Range products to simplify the feeding of multiple supplements and save you a little more at the same
time.
The more problems your horse has or the higher your goals, the more supplements you may need to use. Three supplements at an average of 70p a day is £2.10 a day plus your concentrate! We can nearly always
beat that sort of price comfortably by developing a plan based on mixing products from the Problem Solver range with the Combination range or easier still by using WINNINGEDGE. WINNINGEDGE products are basically 10-12
targeted supplements for the price of two or three conventional supplements.
We will be delighted to calculate the costs of the various permutations for you and help you find the most economical and most
beneficial supplement package for your horse. Ring us or email our advice service:0845 230 1086
013453 836974
advice@EquiFeast.com Or we have developed a little downloadable 'cost saving' spreadsheet that helps you test out the cost of the various different permutations yourself. |
