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Glyphosate in Horse Feed

Horse Care
#1

https://www.americanhorsepubs.org/newsgroup/14912/19367/

I have some health issues that have shown exacerbation when I used to eat conventionally grown foods. These went away when I switched to an organic diet on January 17 of this year. I’ve kept a food journal to be sure there are no other causes for the inflammatory conditions that used to appear. There are a couple but that is a different topic. As I research diets for horses whose needs are very low in sugars and starch, I come across soy quite often. This is a plant I’ve avoided for a very long time in my diet, my dogs’ diets and tried to keep to a minimum in my horses’ diets. Wheat is now also dried either pre or post harvest using glyphosate in the U.S. even if it is nonGMO wheat.

I wonder if anyone has found their horse to have health issues while on soy -or wheat and if they have switched to organic or nonGMO Project Verified (which would mean glyphosate wasn’t used at any point in the harvest or curing) with good results?
and
What are some affordable alternatives to soy and wheat for a starch sensitive horse that needs to gain weight? I’m not sure about beet pulp but my Ol Man won’t eat beet pulp without molasses so the point is moot for us… may not be moot for others.

I searched the forums and didn’t come across this particular topic but will be happy if someone points out previous discussion on the avoidance of glyphosate in starch sensitive (or IR/PPID) horses.

#2

Some horses are reactive to soy, probably to the phyto estrogens. Those horses should stay off soy.

If your horse is IR/PPID and obese, you can do just fine with hay. If your horse is losing weight, then fats and oils can be very useful.

IMHO a horse should not be eating large amounts of whole wheat, organic or not (brewers grains are different). The best whole grain for a horse is oats, the traditional feed. Corn, wheat, and barley are higher in starch. Of course all horses do not need oats or any grain.

I don’t think that all cereal crops are dessicated with glyphosphate pre harvest, only in wet conditions. It is an extra input and an extra expense, so I am sure the farmers will skip that unless it is wet.

There have been several recent threads on COTH that have discussed the current anxiety about glyphosphate in horse feed, and concluded that the anxiety is out of proportion to the reality.

Anyhow, if you want an overview of how to construct a diet for a horse I recommend Julie Getty’s “Feed Your Horse LIke a Horse,” which has chapters on IR and EMS and PPID.

If your horse is metabolically compromised, you need to keep the total dietary carb levels below about 10 or 12%, which means basing your feeding plan on a tested low NSC hay. You also want to get a vitamin/mineral supplement into him, which you can do in a mash of hay cubes without compromising the NSC levels.

If the horse is underweight on a straight hay diet, then you can start feeding low NSC concentrates. I have heard of metabolically compromised horses being sensitive to soy, so stay away from that. It has nothing to do with whether the soy is organically grown. You also want to keep the horse off any major sources of starch (because starch is a component of NSC). The starch will be a problem whether or not the wheat, oats, corn, etc are organic or not.

You also want to keep the horse off free choice pasture.

If you are dealing with a metabolically compromised horse, the important thing to do is to get the NSC levels in his diet under control, and to get a vitmain/mineral supplement into him. Testing your hay is the most important step you can take. If you haven’t tested your hay, everything else is a wild guess.

Once you have him stabilized on low NSC hay, and getting a supplement into him (hay cube mash is fine), if he is skinny, then you can think about concentrated calories. Vegetable oil, maybe flax oil if you don’t want to feed a soy product, is good. Locally we have an excellent “cool calorie” product that is basically alfalfa meal and soy oil in very palatable soft pellets. Soy oil apparently does not contain the phytoestrogens.

Anyhow, the #1 thing for an IR etc horse is to test the hay and keep the total NSC in the diet low. Your horse will have problems on high starch grains whether or not they are GMO because it is the starch that is giving him laminitis. If your horse is sensitive to soy phytoestrogens, then he will react to whole soy meal, whether or not it is GMO.

In other words, going organic will not help the horse tolerate these foods.

Just like a diabetic person cannot walk into a whole foods store and gorge on cookies and chocolates made with “organiz cane sugar” and not get into serious trouble. On the other hand, if they follow a sensible low sugar/carb diet, they will do lots better even if it isn’t organic.

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#3

Thank you for such a thoughtful reply . I’m going to check out that book. Have been reading the ECIR digests and learning. In my case my horse no longer gets hay due to missing teeth so we are heavily dependent on soaked alfalfa and timothy pellets or cubes . We are just beginning to test but was wondering about low starch feeds - I do not know if he is PPID or IR yet. which list both wheat and soy as primary ingredients and if other horse people had actually tested this idea and found a difference between organic and conventional
in skin allergies, fussiness, foot soreness etc. . In my diet there has been a notable difference.

#4

What “Scribbler” said.

One of my horses is soy and grain intolerant. He is not the IR horse but that horse also does not get anything with soy as the protein source either.

you could try feeding rice bran but it has to be specifically for horses and the bag needs to stay “stabilized and calcium fortified”.

Stabilized as as rice bran can quickly go rancid.

“calcium fortified” because rice bran is high in phosphorous, low in calcium. Horses have to be feed the correct ratio of calcium to phosphorous.

Also don’t feed more than the recommended maximum on the bag:).

You might think about buying hay cubes and soaking them. Triple Crown sells the Timothy balancer cubes for metabolic horses. Standlee also sells hay cubes. That way he could still have hay.

i have never paid attention to GMO or non GMO for the horses. My thing is keeping the NSC as low as possible so they can have more grazing time – which more for them is from about 9:39 AM every day until whenever it starts to get dusk. Dusk right now is about 8:00 PM but it’s horribly hot/humid and the horse flies/deer flies are terrible. That means they spend a big part of their day (at will) in the barn in front of the fans.

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#5

Thank you. I just bought the “Horse Hydrator” because my well water is very high in calcium and [another long story] the water softener isn’t working for the past year. High calcium levels causes Secondary Copper Deficiency in goats and the molydenum in alfalfa can also cause that, in goats. I don’t know if these cause issues in horses.

Just saw you are in Middle Tennessee. I moved from there 3 years ago and miss :slight_smile:

#6

I’ve also just been watching a saga unfold at my barn. Local hay dealer carves out a niche selling “organic no glyphosphate low sugar hay” in 300 lb bales installed in a special net for all you can eat. To get hay low sugar and guaranteed no glyphosphate the hay is alfala grass blend. Horses are eating about 3O lbs a day. Hay is about double the cost of regular hay on a per ton basis.

As I expected, the horses get very fat and one of them got laminitic symptoms last month that I thought had been brewing for months, but neither owner nor inexperienced trimmer saw this coming.

The moral of the story is that if you let an easy keeper over eat and get obese you are likely looking at EMS, and they can get obese on enough low sugar hay if they eat enough of it. And glyphosphate is neither here nor there as far as laminitis, compared to high sugar, too much total feed, or obesity.

BTW because starch and carbs break down to simple sugars in digestion, its the total nonstructural carbohydrates that you want to know, NSC.

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#7

Copper and zinc also have to be at a correct ratio for horses diets. Generally it’s high iron either in the soil, hay, or water that causes the depletion of copper and zinc. Both are needed not only for hoof and coat health but also to stabilize insulin.

that’s a big reason why I buy the HorseTech High Point vitamin mineral supplement for grass fed horses. My horses have been on that almost 5 years and I won’t switch unless something a lot better comes along. They are doing great on it .

I love it here in Middle Tennessee except for the high humidity we’re experiencing right now LOL LOL. This is where I wanted to retire. We bought 14 acres and then bought 10 more adjoining acres a few years later. It’s a lot of work but they will have to carry me off here LOL LOL

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#8

This is not true. In the US, it would be very unusual for wheat to be sprayed with glyphosate at any time, either pre- or post-harvest. I can’t even imagine what possible purpose could be served by spraying wheat with glyphosate post-harvest. I have read that it may sometimes be used pre-harvest in Canada, but such use would be very rare in the US. Like Scribbler said, only in circumstances where they absolutely can’t get the crop in without it.

Glyphosate may be used to kill weeds on fields that are going to be planted with wheat, but that happens before the wheat is planted.

As far as feeding your horse goes, I used to have a draft mare that was on the EPSM diet. It’s basically grain-free. Here is a link:

http://ssequineclinic.com/pages/health_topics_epsmdiet.html

I’m not endorsing that particular web site, it was just the first thing that came up when I Googled “EPSM horse diet.” I didn’t use purchased feeds. I mixed alfalfa pellets, oil, and a vitamin/mineral supplement. It’s been long enough that I don’t remember which type of oil I used.

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#9

I started a thread a few weeks ago called something like “free choice hay, laminitis and bad advice.”

Last fall, several folks at our barn signed on with a local hay dealer who was selling “low sugar organic guaranteed non glyphosphate” hay, an alfalfa grass mix, in 300 lb round bales that were installed in special nets in the stalls for free choice 24/7 hay. Double the price of regular hay on a per ton basis. The horses seemed to be going through 300 lbs in about 10 days, or 30 lbs a day.

A couple of weeks ago, one of the owners finally had to recognize that her little mare was not only obese, but was showing signs of laminitis and had developed EMS from basically gorging on good hay for 6 months. Horse had been very fat and going short in front for months, but neither owner nor the fairly inexperienced hoof trimmer made the connection.

The moral of the story is, that even “low sugar hay” can make a horse fat if they eat too much of it, and that an obese horse is susceptible to EMS even if they are eating low sugar hay. And that the “glyphosphate free” label is just a red herring. It’s got nothing to do with EMS or laminitis.

Anyhow, OP, you might find that thread of interest as well although the situation is different than your own.

My horse is on weighed Timothy (15 lbs a day) that is guaranteed glyphosphate free just through logic because no one is going to kill their pasture by spraying it with Roundup.

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#10

Non-inflammatory, non-soy sources of fat and fiber: Rice bran (my personal favorite), linseed oil, flax oil, micronised linseed, and coolstance copra (coconut meal… introduce this slowly as it has a strong flavor and some picky eaters won’t like it. I’ve not had palatability issues with any of the others listed)

Corn oil and veg oil have wacky omega-3:6 ratios and if your horse tends to get “inflammatory” I would avoid.

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#11

Timothy and alfalfa fields get sprayed for weeds.

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#12

Thank you. I look for reliable sources but this one flew under the radar probably because of my own illness, I was ready to insert prejudice. I stand corrected. Thank you also for the diet information :slight_smile:

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#13

Thank you. I read your thread and found the information helpful.

#14

I’ll look into those vitamins. We are on smart paks, basically for the ColiCare, and still tweaking his supplements.

I miss TN a lot. I’m not so fond of north FL My children were born in South FL and I grew up in South Fl. I have a nice property here, almost 12 acres, near three different rivers and three sweet horse trails nearby but if it weren’t for my mom needing me right now, I’d be TN. The humidity is the same here but where you are, when the sun goes down, that is it for the heat. Here the heat keeps and keeps and keeps…

#15

Greenie, I came across your Glyphosate question. Glyphosate was originally marketed as a Boiler Cleaner in the 60’s. It Chelates minerals. Meaning it grabs them and won’t let go. If Glyphosate is in your feed. It could cause your horse not to be getting all of the minerals it needs. It was later learned that Glyphosate blocks the Shikimate Pathway. Which is used by Plants, Bacteria, algae and Fungus to process amino acids. This is how it kills plants!!. Mammals do not use the Shikimate Pathway. So it was deemed safe for food and feed. BUT, Bacteria and Yeast do. Which are vital to proper digestion. In 2003 Monsanto applied for a patent on Glyphosate as a Antibiotic. It was approved in 2010. Let me repeat that Glyphosate is a patented antibiotic. Horses are Hindgut fermentors. Antibiotics reek havoc on their digestive system. The endocrine system is closely tied to the Digestive system. Insulin Resistance virtually did not exist in horses until the early 2000’s Yes, Glyphosate is used quite often in harvesting. Because it Kills the grains, dries the grains and helps to kill mycotoxins on the grains. 1 part per billion has been shown to kill bacteria. You are allowed to have 400 parts per million in feed. What contains Glyphosate? Corn, Soy, Beet Pulp Oats, Wheat, Barley, Molasses and Alfalfa. You are allowed to use Glyphosate and still be NON GMO. In short. Glyphosate is not goods for your horse. Neither is 2-4-d or Dicamba. All of which are used on GMO Grains.

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#16

Examining a Possible Link between Glyphosate … - Vita Trac Wellnesswww.vitatracwellness.com ”º Images ”º PDF ”º Glyshphates_In_RaceHorses

#17

[quote=“Dr. ![](reen,post:15,topic:459468”]

Greenie, I came across your Glyphosate question. Glyphosate was originally marketed as a Boiler Cleaner in the 60’s. It Chelates minerals. Meaning it grabs them and won’t let go. If Glyphosate is in your feed. It could cause your horse not to be getting all of the minerals it needs. It was later learned that Glyphosate blocks the Shikimate Pathway. Which is used by Plants, Bacteria, algae and Fungus to process amino acids. This is how it kills plants!!. Mammals do not use the Shikimate Pathway. So it was deemed safe for food and feed. BUT, Bacteria and Yeast do. Which are vital to proper digestion. In 2003 Monsanto applied for a patent on Glyphosate as a Antibiotic. It was approved in 2010. Let me repeat that Glyphosate is a patented antibiotic. Horses are Hindgut fermentors. Antibiotics reek havoc on their digestive system. The endocrine system is closely tied to the Digestive system. Insulin Resistance virtually did not exist in horses until the early 2000’s Yes, Glyphosate is used quite often in harvesting. Because it Kills the grains, dries the grains and helps to kill mycotoxins on the grains. 1 part per billion has been shown to kill bacteria. You are allowed to have 400 parts per million in feed. What contains Glyphosate? Corn, Soy, Beet Pulp Oats, Wheat, Barley, Molasses and Alfalfa. You are allowed to use Glyphosate and still be NON GMO. In short. Glyphosate is not goods for your horse. Neither is 2-4-d or Dicamba. All of which are used on GMO Grains.

[/quote]

Really?

That is not quite the way I remember that story goes.

Start here:

https://www.invent.org/inductees/john-e-franz

Here is more: [h=1]1970[/h] A young chemist named John Franz, who had recently been transferred to the Ag division, began work with another scientist, Dr. Phil Hamm, the head of Monsanto’s herbicide screening program. Hamm was excited about two compounds that had been recently submitted by chemists from another part of Monsanto, compounds that initially were studied as water softeners. Hamm wondered if there might be some use for the compounds as herbicides and asked Franz to study them.

[IMG]https://www.roundup.ca/_uploads/images/history_page/1970%20John%20Franz%20image%20history%20page.jpg)[IMG]https://www.roundup.ca/_uploads/images/history_page/Glyphosate.jpg)

Franz proceeded to study how these compounds metabolized within plants. He theorized that a beneficial compound might be produced during the plant’s metabolic process, and if he was lucky, he might be able to synthesize one of these compounds. The third compound he synthesized would prove to be one that would change the face of farming. The molecule John Franz discovered was called glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s original Roundup® herbicide formulation.
[h=1]1972-1973[/h] In the early 1970s when glyphosate was first discovered, Monsanto marketers were perplexed. They were accustomed to selling herbicides that were selective, which killed certain weeds but left crops unharmed. Glyphosate was non-selective, killing virtually all plants with which it came in contact. But because it was environmentally friendly, marketers continued to try to find ways it could be used commercially.
[h=1]1974[/h] Original Roundup® brand herbicide commercialized in Malaysia and the UK.

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#18

This is a bolus of misinformation. Glyphosphate is not an antibiotic in the sense of being used to kill bacteria. It is not used to kill mycotoxins.

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#19

Here is a good clear overview of glyphosphate and horse feeds.

https://www.horsejournals.com/horse-care/feed-nutrition/feeding-myths-and-misconceptions?fbclid=IwAR2Y37TaRA66yKQlhefz6dXfYrKFqqRydqni5Z0svZFLK5H1kgRJAta848Q

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#20

Thank you. So much misinformation gets spread about online. Obviously people need to do more reading and less leaping to conclusions.

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