Sugar Beet - Which Type?

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vicm2509

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My horse comes in for the night on 1st november and I would like to start adding some sugar beet to his diet.

He is currently on the soaked oats diet. He has one round scoop of soaked oats and about 1 1/2 round scoops of alfa oil. Biotin, garlic, carrots and apples. When he comes in he will get about half of this again but the whole lot will be split into two feeds.

I plan to keep him on hay throughout the winter as haylage seems to make his poo even more sloppy than it is. He will be on grass throughout the day.

Problem is when I last had horses there was only the one type of sugar beet, now there is speedi beet and the alfa beet. Which stuff is best?

He is in light/medium work, fully clipped seems to hold his weight ok. It is possible I will be taking him off the soaked oats diet and putting him on blue chip for a while (with alfa oil) to try and build him up a bit muscle wise.

So what type of sugar beet is reccomended? I am not too worried about heating effects as he is quite a lazy, laid back horse.
 
If, like me, you can never remember to put the sugar beet on to soak then get the speedibeet as it only takes 10 mins. The alfa beet is speedi beet and alfa mixed together there is some advice on the website but don't take any notice of he feeding qtys even speedibeet "expert" tom shurlock couldn't work it out!
 
Sugarbeet is either mollassed or unmolassed. The mollassed kind can be heating as it is high in sugar. The unmollassed is high in fibre and is a source of slow release energy. Both mollassed and unmollassed can be bought as pellets which need soaking for 24 hours before feeding. Speedibeet is unmollassed and needs soaking for approx 15 mins. Alphabeet is a mix of alfalfa and unmollassed sugarbeet ( I am not sure of the soaking times). There are various others on the market. If you are only feeding one horse, I would probably go for the speedibeet. If you are feeding a few horses, I would go for unmollassed pellets as they are cheaper.
 
I use bog standard molassed sugarbeet cubes, never forget to soak them as it is in my feeding routine, as I add the beet to the feeds I immediately soak the next days beet. I used shreds before but prefer the cubes. Can't comment on speedibeet, never used it.

I have no worries about hotting her up - wish it did!!!
 
all sugar beet is high in fibre. it is a feed which is midway between a cereal and a forage feed in that it is digested in the gut rather than the stomach. it has a feed value of 9 or 10 mj. (midway between pony nuts and competition mix).
Its usualy much cheaper to buy the mollassed nuts as they are readily available ( farmers feed them to stock) . I pay £3.33 for a 25kg sack. If you want to remove most of the molasses then soak in too much water and drain with a plastic colinder. this way much of the mollasses stays in the water. which stays in the soaking bucket!
 
Hia,
i think the main benifit of speedy beet apart from soaking time is that it has no heating qualities at all.
as normal sugarbeet is molassed, it can heat up some horses!
i prefure the speedybeet because of that! x
 
I didn't like Speedibeat that much. The sack I had smelt funny and none of the horses seemed to like it.

I like the pellets. I find them very easy to use and you can rinse most of the molasses off.
 
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