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Nutrena Safe Choice mite infestation buyer beware, manufacturer not responding

I’v found weevils in TC Sr. I think this happened at the store, though. The storage area is open air at this particular store–not a TSC.

I did get a bad bag of some TSC feed. WellSolve, iirc. Took it back, had them open a different bag for exchange and it was bad, too. They were very nice–I bought another type at a 10% discount and they threw in a scoop.

no problems with my safe choice senior

Summer 2017- southeastern Indiana. I just jad a strikeout day like the OP did back in 2016- a big drive into the big town and both chain feed stores had their entire stock of horsefeed infested.

Understanding how pesky this problem is an how much depends on weather- I don’t really have the heart to do a total blacklist name naming shaming over this as it’s probably every feed store- but I don’t want to bring this problem home! And I want to warn other people who may not be aware. Keep your eyes open and pay attention!

When I called it to the attention of the TSC manager she called them “paper mites” and said they were just on the outside of the bags (which aren’t paper) She also offered me a discount on the infested feed but told me that the store would not be withdrawing the mite infested stock. Reading other mite threads here, the paper mites story seems to be the line that TSC employees are given to work with as it was repeated almost verbatim.

Nutrena’s feed blog seems to take this much more serioisly than TSC does. Read here in this 2012 post-
http://www.horsefeedblog.com/2012/05/grain-mites-in-horse-feed/

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Our vets like for us to keep commercial feed in the sacks if we can store where nothing will get to them, like secure, mice and insect proof feed rooms.
This way we can always tell what we are feeding by the sack and serial # if necessary if there is a problem.
We used to have feed bins and metal trash cans for feed when we were buying in bulk, so we were using those when buying in sacks.

Putting the feed in bins and mixing it with others and maybe remnants on the bottom of months ago some times can cause problems.

Wonder if others out there also keep feed in original sacks?

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I admittedly don’t keep the sacks, but I am extremely anal about dumping or scooping out any remaining feed from the bin. I set it aside if I’m not feeding it out right away, dump the new feed then either feed out the older feed or just dump it on top so it gets used first. A holdover from working in food-based retail of keeping older stock fronted and rotating new stock to the back.

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Same as WNT.

Thirded. Do people really dump new feed on top of old? :confused:

I have seen plenty of barns with big feed bins do just that, topping them.
Don’t know how often they feed to the bottom and clean them out, probably often also.
When our vet told us to feed out of the sacks, for a while we were putting the whole sack inside the metal trash bins we were using, so we had the bags safe from anything that may want to get to them.

The past many years we keep the feed in a room nothing can get to them, so we have been feeding directly from the bags and works fine.
The bags do have some fines at the bottom, easy to discard when you get to them, they don’t get dumped in the containers like when we transferred the feed to them.
When feeding from sacks directly, you don’t have to clean bins any more.
If feed is fine in the sacks until fed, it should be fine while feeding off them.

I would say it depends how fast someone is going thru sacks how fresh that feed will stay.

Just more to consider, makes sense for us to do it as our vet suggested.

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