Feeding sugar beet in winter

annagain said:
There's not much in sugar beet, it's mostly just fibre with a lot of added sugar if it's molassed.

If you're trying to ensure her tummy's nice and full you'd be better off giving her plenty of hay, even now if there's not much grass and she's looking hungry. If you can do it the field, great, but if not you might have to get her used to coming in every night.

If she needs more calories to keep weight on her, you'd be better of with a low sugar and low starch feed that will give a slow release of energy. You could up the Hi-Fi to Alfa A, introduce high fibre cubes or cool mix, or add some oil to her feeds.
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I would not be without S/B in my feed room, although mine is non-molassed. From my nutrition bible.

S/B pulp 9-11% protein that is same as oats, barley 9-10%.

Calcium 6g/kg that is 6 x higher than oats and barley.

A friend was advised by an equine dentist, to feed her aged SJ who always had the trots, loose droppings, to feed JUST well soaked s/b. He thrived.
 
It's interesting hearing people's reasons for not feeding Sugarbeet. People have become so foot and event line obsessed.

Sugarbeet was fed to every horse and pony I worked with, in yards with 100 plus horses with no negative effects. We rarely ever had a lame horse, most were shod, stabled 24/7, were trotted on roads and fed pure oats or barley. Supplements were a rarity

What were we doing wrong?

None of my riding school horses and ponies had problems, they lived out 24/7 on dairy grass, the fatty ponies lived on a more heavily grazed short grass but the rest had good grazing with no lameness, or sickness. Hacks were shod, ponies not. Only when they worked were they hard fed - Oats or Barley and Meadow chaff, they would have had Sugarbeet if it could have been bought in NZ at the time.

I cannot understand why all of a sudden there are so many sickly horses around apart from people over feeding and that includes all the supplements they give horses.

End of rant!

The
 
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Sorry the way I wrote about sugar beet being "just fibre" wasn't the best way of describing it. What I meant was, hay would be a better way of filling up a hungry tummy if that's what's needed and there are other feeds that are better for weight gain / maintenance if that's what's needed.

I too used to feed Speedibeet and was very happy with it until my horse developed a sugar intolerance. They don't state the level of sugar in their nutritional advice but given it provides quite a bit more energy that Fast Fibre, but contains less fibre, less oil and only slightly more protein, you would have to surmise that some of that extra energy must come, at least in part, from a higher level of sugar. Fast Fibre is 2.5% sugar and my horse can tolerate this.
 
annagain said:
I too used to feed Speedibeet and was very happy with it until my horse developed a sugar intolerance. They don't state the level of sugar in their nutritional advice but given it provides quite a bit more energy that Fast Fibre, but contains less fibre, less oil and only slightly more protein, you would have to surmise that some of that extra energy must come, at least in part, from a higher level of sugar. Fast Fibre is 2.5% sugar and my horse can tolerate this.
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Speedibeet do give the sugar content on their website, it is 5% as I stated in my post - link to nutritional analysis here:

http://www.britishhorsefeeds.com/company-products/speedi-beet

If you have a very sugar intolerant horse like yours then I can understand wanting to opt for a lower sugar option such as Fast Fibre, but for the majority of horses that level of sugar is not a problem and is less than is in many grasses, grass nuts and hay.

The reason why Speedibeet is so much more calorific than Fast Fibre is because the fibre in it is of a highly digestible kind, plus it is heat treated which helps to increase the digestibility of the fibre even more. Fast Fibre is lower in calories because it is based on a mix of unmolassed beet and ground straw. Straw contains a high proportion of indigestible fibre which the horse cannot use, so not all the fibre in Fast Fibre can be utilised. So it does make it a useful feed for greedy horses as filling but not too calorific.
 
Glyphosate is a multi billion dollar industry. It has been classed as "probably carcinogenic" in humans and it creates sarcoids and tumours in rats. It has been banned in several countries for these reasons. Several large companies have been found guilty of falsifying lab results which claim it is not harmful.
It takes five years to degrade in soil and has been proven toxic to aquatic life by quite a few independent studies.
There are genetically modified crops in which uptake is lessened but I'm not sure if these are only in the U.S.
Yes, almost everything is sprayed in it. There has been a huge increase in it s use in recent years and many, wonder if this is the link to increased incidences of many equine related diseases .....laminitis, metabolic disorders and cushings to name a few.

My advice is to do your own research, look at it with an open mind and draw your own conclusions from independent studies not the ones produced by the companies which manufacture it and those who rely on it as means to increase income.
 
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Achinghips said:
Glyphosate is a multi billion dollar industry. It has been classed as "probably carcinogenic" and banned in several countries. Several large companies have been found guilty of falsifying lab results which claim it is not harmful.

There are genetically modified crops in which uptake is lessened but I'm not sure if these are only in the U.S.
Yes, almost everything is sprayed in it. There has been a huge increase in it s use in recent years and many, wonder if this is the link to increased incidences of many equine related diseases .....laminitis, metabolic disorders and cushings to name a few.

My advice is to do your own research, look at it with an open mind and draw your own conclusions from independent studies not the ones produced by the companies which manufacture it and those who rely on it as means to increase income.
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The thing is burned toast is more than probably carcinogenic ;). Realistically like most things in life it is all a question of levels.

Honestly do you have any links to independent studies on residue of chemicals on processed sugar beet? - my reading only today also seems to suggest beet is quite sensitive to many herbicides so use has to be minimal in the years before and during growth.
 
yes it is only the sugar % missing from one?

'The beet roots are washed, mechanically sliced into thin strips called cossettes, and passed to a machine called a diffuser to extract the sugar content into a water solution.

Diffusers are long vessels of many metres in which the beet slices go in one direction while hot water goes in the opposite direction. The movement may either be caused by a rotating screw or the whole rotating unit, and the water and cossettes move through internal chambers
In all cases, the flow rates of cossettes and water are in the ratio one to two. Typically, cossettes take about 90 minutes to pass through the diffuser, the water only 45 minutes.'

so they are washed first, chopped and then washed in renewing hot water for 90 mins. I honestly struggle to see much residue remaining on the plant at that point, so are we only talking residue held structurally within the plant?
 
TGM said:
The analysis is the same on both sites, but one just shows more info (ie starch/sugar) than the other??
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That's what I meant by different things - as in different constituents (for want of a better word) rather than different values. I would have thought if they show it all on one site, they would also show it all on the other.
 
annagain said:
That's what I meant by different things - as in different constituents (for want of a better word) rather than different values. I would have thought if they show it all on one site, they would also show it all on the other.
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Different feed manufacturers have different formats for the analysis of their range of products - the majority will put DE, protein, fibre, ash and oil on their sites. The interest in sugar/starch levels in feed is a comparatively recent development, so not all manufacturers have got to the stage where they publish this info as standard - Baileys seem to be one of those, whereas Dengie put both sugar and starch on, and Spillers publish the starch content but not the sugar. Speedibeet is actually made by British Horse Feeds who choose to publish the sugar/starch content on their own website, but they seem to have an arrangement for Baileys to market the product, so the info on the Baileys page for Speedibeet sticks to the Baileys standard analysis which doesn't show sugar/starch.
 
TGM said:
Different feed manufacturers have different formats for the analysis of their range of products - the majority will put DE, protein, fibre, ash and oil on their sites. The interest in sugar/starch levels in feed is a comparatively recent development, so not all manufacturers have got to the stage where they publish this info as standard - Baileys seem to be one of those, whereas Dengie put both sugar and starch on, and Spillers publish the starch content but not the sugar. Speedibeet is actually made by British Horse Feeds who choose to publish the sugar/starch content on their own website, but they seem to have an arrangement for Baileys to market the product, so the info on the Baileys page for Speedibeet sticks to the Baileys standard analysis which doesn't show sugar/starch.
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Ahh that explains it then. I have really struggled to find sugar info on a lot of feeds which is a pain now that I have to keep a really close eye on it. Even when I did find a really low sugar feed I had to order it in which took ages. I got so fed up of waiting weeks for D&H Equine Sensitive at my local feed store that I switched to Saracen's Re-leve. They have a bags in stock sometimes but even this is hit and miss and I have to order it in now and again, although it seems to arrive quicker than the D&H.
 
Tnavas said:
It's interesting hearing people's reasons for not feeding Sugarbeet. People have become so foot and event line obsessed.

Sugarbeet was fed to every horse and pony I worked with, in yards with 100 plus horses with no negative effects. We rarely ever had a lame horse, most were shod, stabled 24/7, were trotted on roads and fed pure oats or barley. Supplements were a rarity

What were we doing wrong?

None of my riding school horses and ponies had problems, they lived out 24/7 on dairy grass, the fatty ponies lived on a more heavily grazed short grass but the rest had good grazing with no lameness, or sickness. Hacks were shod, ponies not. Only when they worked were they hard fed - Oats or Barley and Meadow chaff, they would have had Sugarbeet if it could have been bought in NZ at the time.

I cannot understand why all of a sudden there are so many sickly horses around apart from people over feeding and that includes all the supplements they give horses.

End of rant!

The
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Quite entitled to rant Tnavas! I agree that we have become unfortunately both increasingly neurotic and ignorant about equine management in some ways.

However, the thing is that we do now know that event lines are indicative of some dietary 'event' and that healthy horses don't have them - though they are not the end of the world in themselves! Also, agricultural management practices have changed enormously even over the last 30 years and so has our understanding of equine health and behaviour. In the good old, bad old days even dairy pasture was not as intensively farmed, ferted etc as it is today, modern rye-grass, only developed in the last 30 years, has huge amounts more sugar and not an awful lot else than the rye grass sown in my teens. We know sugar is not great for horses and we have always known that. Commercial feed also has all sorts of rubbish included in it in the name of economy.

As for our horses, more people are breeding - perhaps unsuitably and generally people breed for 'performance' (whatever that is!) rather than necessarily constitutional soundness. There are many more people new to horses and novice horse owners as horses as a leisure industry has grown: those people are not always in a situation to manage their horses easily and are very susceptible to seduction by feed and supplement companies. We have a greater understanding of why some horses mis-behave too. When I was growing up horses that were grumpy or bucked , reared etc were generally described as naughty and were either sold on (to goodness knows where) or you just put up with them and were considered a 'good rider' ! Many of those horses were probably showing signs of allergy/discomfort which we now understand more.

I believe those are some of the reasons why we appear to have more sickly horses with allergies and sensitivities.

I too remember a time when life seemed simpler and horses coped better and were less 'fussed over'. But, maybe in fact we knew less, saw and understood less and had a generally much healthier environment for horses.

Now that's my rant over!
 
Lottiexloo said:
Hi all,
Would feeding sugar beet benefit my pony in winter? She is a 14yo 13.2 Welsh A cross Dutch Warmblood. She is usually fed Dengie Hi-Fi original and Baileys Lo Cal Balencer however the grass quality in her field is quite poor and I can tell the horses are beginning to get hungry, Hay is put into the field in winter and she is brought only a few nights a week as she is not keen on staying in. She is quite fine but relatively hardy.
Have tried googling the pros and cons of sugar beet but nothing helped, thanks��
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You might want to try feeding Simple System Purabeet and Lucerne nuts. This is what I feed my Shetland on, he can't eat hay so just gets two feeds of this in a day, I also give him simple system Top Nosh with it too, keeps him full and very happy, its all cereal and molasses free so only the good stuff. :)
 
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