Most people board out these days and only own one or two horses making mixing your own feed a PITA and very expensive since you can’t by the ingredients in bulk ir if you do, they go bad before the horse can eat them. Storage is tricky too.
Boarding barns simply have to simplify things. If they are knowledgeable, they’ll be good at it and charge a bit more if not, they’ll cost you more trying to compensate for poor feeding choices.
I’d say it’s harder to mix multiple mashes in a boarding situation than for one horse.
I go through a 40 or 50 lb bag each of whole oats, beet pulp, and alfalfa cubes in 4 to 8 weeks depending on my current ratios. A 50 lb bag of whole flax lasts 4 to 6 months. I keep everything in white plastic IKEA recycling bins and nothing has ever gone off or got mice or weevils in 7 years of doing this. I buy a single bag as needed since the feed stores are conveniently located between home and work, but delivery is also an option.
We are in a wet temperate climate and hay in the loft will get surface mold if not tarped. But grain in bins is fine. I don’t know if this would work in a hotter wet climate like the southeast.
I was in the same barn during this transition. And while I agree that a transition to less processed foods and more individualized diets was good for most of the horses in the barn, I have to point out that it wasn’t universally successful.
My horse lived happily for years on a DIY diet before I moved to that BM’s care. Beet pulp, hay pellets, a vit/min supplement that complimented the nutrition from her hay, and ground flax all mixed by me and adjusted in consultation with my vet. But ironically when the barn Nestor speaks of switched all horses including mine from a commercially formulated diet to a customized “whole food” mix mine didn’t get better nutrition per se (e.g. she had issues with hoof wall quality for the first time in her life during that period), and eventually she was switched back to a commercial feed due to beet pulp-induced choke.
Which is all to say that in my experience, even in that same barn with very good care and thoughtful nutrition, the non-commercial diet wasn’t necessarily nutritionally superior, nor did the customization it allowed provide the perfect fit for every horse.
Mine is now on a commercially produced ration balancer and a vitamin E supplement and is FINALLY getting enough protein to build a better topline. It’s easy. She’s healthy. I can add caloric content with hay pellets and adjust it to match changes in energy expenditure. She has twice as much tail now and her feet are strong again. I know from experience that many horses can be kept well with an individually mixed diet, but I just don’t think there’s any magic in DIY feed mixing that makes it superior.
I think that if you are feeding multiple horses, or just on a tight budget, the one thing folks tend to scrimp on or cut out is the vitamin mineral supplement. I’m using the most cost effective (and high quality) formula locally available, and it costs about $150 for 100 days supply. That is $1.50 a day or $45 a month. It is far more expensive than the combined cost of the oats, beet pulp, and alfalfa cubes I feed each month. However I would never leave this out when feeding a “home recipe” mash to horses on a diet of hay (no good pasture). I have seen folks do so, and the horses in general do not thrive.
So while I feel my recipe is succesful for my own horse, it is due as much to the manufactured vitmain/mineral supplement as it is to the components of the mash.
I gave up bagged feeds a year ago. It was in part due to examining the ingredients list on the bag and the distrust in feed manufactures due to recent feed contamination scares. My horse gets alfalfa pellets, beet pulp, whole flax, HorseTech High Point mixed grass vitamin supplement, HorseTech Nutramino, HorseTech Whey Protein Isolate and salt. The whey protein was recently added to help with top line/muscle development. My horse is showing 4th level and schooling PSG and has been historically slow to build muscle.
It is also all the other stuff listed on those bags of feed after the soy hulls and wheat middlings . I just prefer not to feed it. High price for a whole lot of filler.
Could you specify the ingredients you consider filler? And the brands?
Sometimes when there is a long list of ingredients you are seeing the technical names of the various vitamin and mineral sources or precursors.
I agree ,same reason I don’t feed any kind of bagged feed. Never saw it made any difference health wise any way. Good hay & good pasture horse’s stay healthy look good. Mine are worked 7 days a week look good, and never fed any kind of bagged feed.
What you feed will also depend on your hay. I would look into that when considering a feeding routine. Hay quality varies depending on region/soil.
Looking at most of the bagged ration balancers/general feeds the ingredients list begins with wheat middlings which are basically a by-product or inexpensive filler. I have heard them referred to as “floor sweepings” that have no nutritional value. Soybeans are high in protein, but some equine nutritionists argue it places metabolic stresses on the system and should be avoided. I think these feeds are all good quality, but prefer to avoid them.
Premium Performance 8 by Progressive Nutrition: Wheat Middlings, Maize Distillers Dried Grains with Solubles, Soybean Hulls…
Triple Crown 30: Dehulled Soybean Meal, Wheat Middlings, Ground Limestone…
Purina Ultium: Wheat Middlings, Ground Soybean Hulls, Dehydrated Alfalfa Meal, Cane Molasses…
Tribute Essential K: Dehulled Soybean Meal, Ground Extruded Whole Soybeans, Dehydrated Alfalfa Meal, Wheat Middlings, Flaxseed, Dried Whey, Cane Molasses
This almost sounds too good to be true! Tell us more about your all-forage fed horses and what kind of work they’re in 7 days/week. It sounds impressive that you have multiple horses in heavy work without needing even basic supplements to round out their nutrition. But I suppose that there’s a difference between the optimal nutrition for a field full of air ferns whose work is minimal vs. keeping performance horses in great condition even in demanding work. Without knowing more it’s hard to evaluate the diet you’re promoting.
What sort of bagged feeds did you try that didn’t make any difference? Are you sure the diets you tried were providing the right nutrition?
What you hear, and what are facts, don’t always meet in the middle.
Wheat middlings are a nutritious part of the wheat grain. The middlings are the best parts that are removed from the wheat in the process of making standard white flour. Protein, phosphorous, most of the vitamins and minerals in the grain, etc.
By-product is not synonymous with junk. It may be inexpensive since it’s not the valued part of its processing, but “filler” means “no nutritional value” (for that species, or otherwise) and that is far from the truth for wheat middlings.
Soybeans are high in protein, but some equine nutritionists argue it places metabolic stresses on the system and should be avoided.
What someone “thinks” does not always equate to average or even common reality.
Certainly there’s no problem choosing to avoid those things. Just do it for what they are, not what they aren’t 
The OP asked for straightforward, and I will stand by what I said for mixing your own grain vs purchasing bagged ration balancer. If your horse needs very little additional calories than what they get from a hay based diet, it doesn’t get much easier than providing free choice hay and a ration balancer based on the weight of the horse.
As another poster stated, if you decide to mix your own “whole grain” mix, you are basically turning your horse into a self teaching project in equine nutrition. If you’re comfortable with that, that’s fine. I’m not, and my mare looks great (as do thousands of other horses) on her diet of primarily processed feed.
If you prefer to mix your own feed, and that works for you, great, but I don’t see how mixing 5+ ingredients to obtain some semblance of a balanced diet is easier than a feed that’s been designed by nutritionists and held to fairly rigorous labeling and testing standards. Yes, contamination is a risk, but that risk doesn’t disappear with your oats from a local mill. My whole flax from my local mill has a fair amount of BOSS in it.
What JB says. Wheat middlings and brewers grains contribute low NSC protein. As do soy and alfalfa.
Whey is a protein source and limestone is calcium.
Some horses seem to be sensitive to soy but many do fine on it.
There’s nothing listed in these feeds that is not doing a job except for the molasses. Nothing that is a “filler” in the sense of empty bulk or calories.
Molasses has a job too 
While not a significant contributor, it does have a nice amount of copper, but its real job is often as a binding agent and/or dust control for pelleted feeds, sometimes a final coating on textured feeds for taste, while having an insignificant impact on NSC. Personally, I’d rather have a little molasses for binding/dust control than oil, but that’s my personal preference, there’s nothing wrong with using oil for that either.
Ok I stand corrected.
If I had a tag handy I would list it. Since I don’t buy it I will grab one when I go to town tomorrow and list the things that concern me. I think the store that carries the feed has Nutrena brands.
I do want to say that I don’t think anyone is wrong or doing their horse a disservice in feeding these feeds. My current horses ( and none that I have ever owned) just don’t need the volume that you need to feed to get the benefits, so it makes no sense to feed it.
@JB Molasses also makes feed more palatable for many horses
Definitely, and I would be leery of a feed that feels it has to do that to make horses eat it LOL
IME, molasses used as a binding agent is in a small enough amount to have an insignificant effect on NSC. Any amount to increase palatability often results in a higher NSC, getting into “sweet feed” territory.
Well, some horses don’t want to eat volume. They fill up fast. So you wouldn’t want to feed them a big beet pulp and hay cube mash to carry supplements, for instance, because they wouldn’t finish it off. You might want things to be more calorie dense.
And some horses don’t need calories. So you wouldn’t feed them a lot of concentrates, and if they wanted to fill up on a mash, then you could feed mostly hay cubes.
So just like you’d adjust your balance of components in a home-made mash, you’d want to choose the feed that best matched your horses needs. So for instance having forage components in an extruded feed isn’t “filler” any more than having hay cubes in a mash is “filler.” It’s doing something, whether it alfalfa adding protein or helping dilute the total NSC contributed by grain components.
I still prefer to make my own mashes. But I don’t think that the extruded feeds are using “fillers” either. In many cases they are just a processed version of what I could put in a mash.
I see that as pretty expensive for just a vit/min supp. I feed Triple Crown Lite to my two horses, which is $.44/pound, one horse gets one pound a day and one horse gets two pounds a day. The race horses will get Triple Crown Senior is $.45/pound, and I’m feeding 6 pounds a day, so $2.70/day for that horse. I don’t have any “in between” horses right now, but I know I’m covering all my bases and the feed prep is less than 30 seconds.Oh yeah, flax, but that’s pennies a day.
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