I’ve bought bagged feed from local mills before but never had a custom blend made. I have the opportunity to do that and am anxiously awaiting to speak with the mill on Monday to find out what ingredients are available.
Since most of my boarders are seniors, I would like a high fat low starch high fiber high protein mix, if that is possible.
Any suggestions for my conversation with them?
TIA~
R.
Our local mill does not want small orders, they say it doesn’t mix well with those small quantities. Small for them is under 400#. So plan to buy in good size amounts, both to save on mixing fees and to have the ingredients well mixed to go in the bags. If you really need LARGE amounts, the Elevator will deliver and put your grain into a storage location for you, but of course there is a charge.
You need to know how much of each ingredient you want in your mix, so you can tell them when ordering. If it is a percentage of the whole mix, YOU need to know what poundage will equal that percentage for the order total.
I always get 10% soybean meal, figured on the total quantity of other ingredients. So for 400# of my grain mix, I add 40# of the soybean meal, which makes the entire total equal 440#.
I have gotten my grain mixed for years at various locations where I lived. I have never used commercial feeds except for one Senior horse with bad teeth. I do not like molasses in my grain, like being able to order grain that is sugar free, more or less fattening to it as needed, no unknowns in there. We have a number of small Elevators around us, which are actually mills. They will do grain mixes for folks, not hard to find them. I have my recipe, call it in as needed, pick up the bagged mix. I do ask for 50# bags now, tired of fighting with the 100# bags the Farmers get their grain mixes in. Does make for a lot of bags, which I can return to the Elevator like pop cans!
Our Elevator is associated with Kent Feed, has an “expert” that I can call if I have questions about anything to do with feed. He has been helpful in the past.
Wanted to add that from my feed education, horses will only use a certain amount of protein. Buying more in the feed is not going to make horse use it in their body. Older horses especially, only use about a 10% protein quantity, pee off the rest.
So having a high protein mix may be wasted money for you to spend, if horses won’t utilize the extra in the grain mix.
I did a custom mixed feed for a few years but have since changed to Safe Choice for a few reasons.
I took a ticket for the feed equivalent I wanted to the mill, told them I wanted a textured mix to match the analysis of Triple Crown performance. They worked their magic, came back with a price I was happy with (comparable to Safe Choice original), and I started ordering it. Had to do a ton at a time, which was fine. I feed between 3/4 of a ton to a ton and a half a month, depending on the time of year etc. Things I didn’t like is that it was textured. Reason I went with textured over pelleted is because I knew the pelleted would be made with by-products. I was trying to avoid by-products and thought if I knew each grain that went in to it, it would be fine. Problem is with the amount of protein I had requested, they had to add a protein pellet, which the first ingredient in the pellet was byproducts. Something that bothered me coming from a mill that processed all sorts of feed for different animals, and I had no way of knowing what kind of byproducts were going in to my feed. Turned out I didn’t like how my horses were maintaining on it; not keeping the weight they should have, weanlings and yearlings not growing out like they should. A friend of mine suggested I go back to a pellet due to better absorbability. I switched, and have seen a huge difference.
So ask some questions, see if the mill and their grains are something you’d be happy with, compare prices, etc. In the end, I’m not spending any more for my commercial grain and getting better results, even though my custom feed was supposed to emulate a higher quality grain.
I have never even considered to do it. Yes the bigger feed companies spend a lot on marketing but they also have the systems in place for better quality control than smaller mills. Not to mention testing for aflatoxins in the corn they use.
Now with all the cross contamination occurring with cattle antibiotics in horse feed it would be nice to have access to feed coming from a mill that only does horse feed. I doubt you will find that in a small mill.
I agree with SusanO. I highly recommend looking in to it, but be very very skeptical. I too worry about cross contamination and did occasionally get a bag with something else in it, usually just a bunch of horse cookies (oddly enough). But I worried about getting mixed bags of medicated cattle or pig feed. Yes it’s a possibility with commercial grains too, but I would expect they have better quality assurance protocol than a small local mill.
We have our feed custom mixed by a mill in Kansas (50 miles north of our farm in Ok.). Hopefully the mill manager you find will be a well educated nutritionist like ours is. Tell him what you need…what you want…and he will offer ingredient suggestions. Our feed is a simple mix of oats (steam rolled), ground corn, alfalfa pellets for protein (instead of soy meal), a vitamin/mineral mix (comes in a bag to be added to one ton of feed) and enough liquid molasses to bind the feed, but not make TB’s looney!!
We have been feeding this for years and our horses - 34 years old to sucklings, broodmares, stallions, performance horses ALL look fantastic on smaller amounts of grain than anything else we’ve ever fed!!
goodhors, your math is off. If you want your completely mixed feed to be 10% soybean meal, you will have 40 lbs of soybean meal and 360 lbs of other stuff.
40/400x100=10%
If the total completely mixed feed is 440 lbs, including 40 lbs soybean meal, the equation is:
40/440x100=9%
[QUOTE=Palm Beach;8448540]
goodhors, your math is off. If you want your completely mixed feed to be 10% soybean meal, you will have 40 lbs of soybean meal and 360 lbs of other stuff.
40/400x100=10%
If the total completely mixed feed is 440 lbs, including 40 lbs soybean meal, the equation is:
40/440x100=9%[/QUOTE]
Thanks for the math correction. Not paying close enough attention.
I wanted to add after crosscreeksh said that they added the vitamins and minerals to their feed, that there can be problems feeding this way. Insuring that EACH animal of all the various sizes and ages mentioned, gets the correct amount of vitamins and minerals will depend on them all getting the same amount of grain daily.
I am pointing this out, because I used to have my vitamins and minerals mixed in according to the formula, but then we were not feeding that amount of grain daily, so my horses were deficient in Seleinium and Vit E with their work load.
These days we top dress all supplements, Vitamins, the Selenium and Vit E, so we KNOW each animal got their correct amount along with their different sized servings of grain. Top dressing is much better for this reason, no one is going to be deficient no matter how much or how little they work, their ages or sizes. Our working horses work hard, sweat almost every outing, which uses up Selenium fast. There is no Selenium locally in the ground, so all the horses get is what we supplement them with. We had two horses get in trouble with lack of Selenium years ago, which is why we changed to top dressing the extras. Horses in work get tested to insure they are getting enough Selenium, despite being worked so hard and being sweated almost daily. Horses really don’t store Selenium in quantity like fat, just have it in their body as it works it’s way thru.
So having Vitamins mixed in or top dressed to feed them to horses is something for OP to consider. My experience is that I don’t feed enough grain daily, to get enough vitamins etc. into my horses. They don’t need that much grain, even in harder work.
If the mill mixes feed for animals other than horses I would also worry about cross contamination. I personally know of a situation where someone fed a mix from a small private mill; they did not properly clean the equipment after mixing swine feed that contained a steroid and lo and behold her horse tested positive for steroids at competition. Even though the governing body accepted the explanation and the mill admitted the error it was still a huge hassle for this person.
I would not consider it for horses that compete where they might be subject to drug testing.
[QUOTE=goodhors;8448794]
Thanks for the math correction. Not paying close enough attention.
I wanted to add after crosscreeksh said that they added the vitamins and minerals to their feed, that there can be problems feeding this way. Insuring that EACH animal of all the various sizes and ages mentioned, gets the correct amount of vitamins and minerals will depend on them all getting the same amount of grain daily.
I am pointing this out, because I used to have my vitamins and minerals mixed in according to the formula, but then we were not feeding that amount of grain daily, so my horses were deficient in Seleinium and Vit E with their work load.
These days we top dress all supplements, Vitamins, the Selenium and Vit E, so we KNOW each animal got their correct amount along with their different sized servings of grain. Top dressing is much better for this reason, no one is going to be deficient no matter how much or how little they work, their ages or sizes. Our working horses work hard, sweat almost every outing, which uses up Selenium fast. There is no Selenium locally in the ground, so all the horses get is what we supplement them with. We had two horses get in trouble with lack of Selenium years ago, which is why we changed to top dressing the extras. Horses in work get tested to insure they are getting enough Selenium, despite being worked so hard and being sweated almost daily. Horses really don’t store Selenium in quantity like fat, just have it in their body as it works it’s way thru.
So having Vitamins mixed in or top dressed to feed them to horses is something for OP to consider. My experience is that I don’t feed enough grain daily, to get enough vitamins etc. into my horses. They don’t need that much grain, even in harder work.[/QUOTE]
I respect your decision to mix your own feed, but it seems like a lot of work, and you have to supplement anyway since you don’t feed at the recommended levels for the horses to get their rda of vit/min. Why not just go to a commercial feed that is balanced for the amount your horses need, and also has quality controls?
[QUOTE=Palm Beach;8449664]
I respect your decision to mix your own feed, but it seems like a lot of work, and you have to supplement anyway since you don’t feed at the recommended levels for the horses to get their rda of vit/min. Why not just go to a commercial feed that is balanced for the amount your horses need, and also has quality controls?[/QUOTE]
To me it seems like a lot more work and money, to get these various feeds for each of the horses at a higher price than what my mix costs, ration it out. And if you don’t feed what they say for quantity, horse comes up short or is overdosed by feeding too much of their mix. I have never fed the quantities recommended by Feed Companies, even with horses working very hard in a conditioning program. Just way too much grain. But the Companies don’t make money if they don’t sell volumes of grain to horse owners. Mine look fine on small amounts of grain, with hay or pasture to fill them up the rest of the way. We always get complimented on their shiny coats, good hooves when they go out.
Horse’s body was never designed to use volumes of grain as their main food, but Humans have horses in artificial settings like full time stabling or short turnouts with no access to pasture. I am lucky enough to keep mine a bit more “naturally” and they don’t need large quantities of grain to look good. Even in harder work, no one gets more than a couple pounds of grain a day. They don’t need it. No skinny ones either.
Add in the percentage of whatever that is listed on the label as ‘Misc. or Unknown’ which kind of seems to defeat the purpose of closely attending to their feed items in a mix. I am not into feeding floor sweepings or whatever they have on hand to toss in and end up with the Unknown percentages going into my horses.
Adding the supplement or Vitamins to each bucket once a day for seven horses takes about 5 minutes, not really what I would call labor intensive when feeding. I do see a significant savings in my grain costs over the commercial feeds, horses eat it fine, look good, can work hard with this ration.
I just call the Elevator, they mix what I request, no work except unloading the bags of my recipe into the feed room cans for storage. I would have to do unloading into the cans with the commercial feeds too, so again no time or labor saving there.
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