Supplement made for your horse......please help with reasearch :)

TopTotty

TopTotty

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Hi, If you could buy a supplement specially made to balance YOUR haylage or hay would you be interested? The haylage would be analysed then the supplement made up accordingly so that you could feed a balanced diet without the need for hard feed. Obviously this could be adapted around how much work the horse was doing and size etc
If you needed to feed hard feed, for weight gain or competition then ehis would be taken in to account aswell.
Please can you let me know what you think.
Many thanks and Happy Christmas :):)
 
Nice idea, but lots of people will be buying in forage from different suppliers, even hay from different fields on the same farm will give a different result. Especially in winters like this where we are all using lots more hay than normal. How would you (or more to the point your potential clients) deal with this? Lots of people don't have much storage space so only buy in a few bales at a time. By the time you'd analysed it and made up the supplement they would be on to the next delivery, with a different composition...

Leaving aside balancing the micro-nutrients necessary, how would you include carbs, proteins, etc. to make hard feed unnecessary for those horses that do need more than hay will provide? Or am I misunderstanding your post on that bit?

Can you guarantee that no prohibited substances can get into your products?

Not wishing to put a downer on your idea, which would be great if it could work, but I see more problems than answers and think it would cost you more than you could persuade a significant number of clients to pay.
 
Hi,

Thanks for your reply. Where I am we have a professional haylage maker ?? who supplies a lot of people in the area. I would work closely with companies like this and yes I appreciate that I would need to get everything analysed correctly and keep it updated. Possibly by working with the companies and offering it to their clients initially I would get a feel of how it was working or how many would be interested.

Protein and carbs are provided by the haylage and are all calculated within my anaylsis so when I adjust the diet to withstand exercise etc this is covered. If an owner wants to feed hard feed too then the supplement would take this into account. That is upto them. What I would offer is a balanced diet provided by haylage and supplement to those that would like it.

I have no idea whether this is a viable idea but I do it for my horses and just wondered who else may be interested in it. Just seems to me that people spend too much money feeding things they do not really need to.

Or maybe I will put it to bed! :)
 
Many of the big feed companies already offer this service. Why hay/lage supplements? Why not just dietary information? D&H already offer an analysis of your hay/lage AND grass from the field for a very reasonable price. They will also design a comprehensive feed programme for your horse taking into account not only grazing/hay but any health problems your horse may have, however serious. They designed a complete tailored diet for my rescue mare who was very very ill with ragwort poisoning. Absolutely no charge for this service. To be honest, broadly speaking, I think that the only people who might use your service would be owners of horses with health problems. For healthy horses and ponies, there's plenty of info and guidance already out there and it's easy enough to work out your own feeding regime. Money is tight these days.
 
Notjustforxmas said:
Thats Sarah Braithwaites company. Sells individual minerals like zinc magnesium etc and also lysine.
Click to expand...

Yes but the idea is that you get a full analysis done so that you feed what your horse is lacking / deficient in - therefore supplementing specifically for each individual horse depending on its grass / haylage nutrient value, just like tho OP is saying.
 
while it is a good idea, something to consider from a commercial point is the potential pit fall of supplying a wide range of individual supplements for every different horse, assuming you would be blending a supplement rather than just providing the individual components, you would need to individually blend every product, which commercially becomes very costly. if you were just to analyise the forage & provide recommendations of levels, you'll struggle to compete with big companies that are buying minerals in huge volumes. (FYI (if you don't already know) it's widely done in the cattle industry & the margins are tiny because the volume is there, i would be concerned about the volume in the equine industry) but a good idea in principle
 
Interesting! I was wondering whether anyone was using this way of feeding? What have your experiences been? Am toying with the idea of getting my hay analysed as we make it ourselves.

Interesting about the margins but on reading the Forageplus site it seems that you only feed what is lacking in your forage, like you make up what is not covered but don't feed the stuff which is there like in any of the stuff you buy from shops. Or am I mistaken?
 
Your are correct. The feeding plan is to balance the minerals in your horses diet. Its not only about amounts but ratios to allow absorption.
 
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