"the no grain diet"

[doublesstable]

I am from the camp of treating each horse individually; however saying that keeping it as simple as possible.

n the 40 some years I have had horses, funny - I have never needed to feed any grains. If I need energy (which is just about never) I would add or increase alfalfa hay.

I feel good fats are okay like flax seed. I use a stabilized flax seed I really like. A small amount of stabilized rice bran and a quality vitamin with grass hay (Timothy or Orchard) is good. Adding in alfalfa as needed. If you have horses that have been diagnosed with a particular issue then you can supplement them working with your veterinarian. I had some horses via blood work Vit D deficient. I am too (strange living in California) and I supplement all of us with prescribed Vit D.

There are good nutritionists you can work with as well as your vet - just make sure they are not doing it to promote a product line.

[JB]

There are several issues feeding cereal grains. Corn just has no value. It’s so high in sugar, there’s not much else of real value. As a treat, sure. But even then, you need to be really sure it’s screened for mycotoxins.

Oats are the best grain to feed. It’s digested fairly well, with more of the starch getting digested more safely.

Barley is much less commonly fed, at least in the US. There’s no NEED for it, but it can have value for some horses.

there IS evidence that grains can contribute to ulcers. Anything that contributes to the formation of volatile fatty acids (VFAs) , and grains fit that category, can cause ulcers. Some VFAs penetrate the non-glandular portion of stomach mucosa, biology stuff happens :lol: and ulcers may form
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12693529

But this is another example of why it’s critical to define “grain”.

[AKB]

I feed 1 lb of McCauley’s M10 balancer cubes, 5-8lbs alfalfa hay, and good pasture to my Irish Draught, my Connemara/TB, and my friend’s Hanoverian. They all look good and don’t need grain as all 3 tend to get fat… The Irish Draught is picky, and McCauley’s M10 is the only ration balancer that he likes.

[S1969]

@doublesstable

n the 40 some years I have had horses, funny - I have never needed to feed any grains. If I need energy (which is just about never) I would add or increase alfalfa hay.

Have you ever owned a thoroughbred? I have one retired TB who eats double what my warmblood and APHA mares eat. When she had a lush pasture to herself one summer, she did get fat. But in NY it’s not forage you can rely on year round. And if it’s not lush (which on my property means no other horses grazing on it, because it’s just not that big); it means she needs some form of concentrate just to maintain, even in retirement.

If she were in heavy work, she would need special care to ensure she could get enough calories. There would not be a way to do that without some form of commercial feed.

Now, my other two? They will be fat on limited, low quality hay. They definitely can’t be treated the same as my other mare.

[lenapesadie]

@candyappy

The biggest issue I see is feeding concentrates in huge volumes to replace adequate hay in the daily diet. For some , liker very old horses I can see the need, but not for the average horse.

This is the biggest issue I see too.

[doublesstable]

@S1969

Have you ever owned a thoroughbred? I have one retired TB who eats double what my warmblood and APHA mares eat. When she had a lush pasture to herself one summer, she did get fat. But in NY it’s not forage you can rely on year round. And if it’s not lush (which on my property means no other horses grazing on it, because it’s just not that big); it means she needs some form of concentrate just to maintain, even in retirement.

If she were in heavy work, she would need special care to ensure she could get enough calories. There would not be a way to do that without some form of commercial feed.

Now, my other two? They will be fat on limited, low quality hay. They definitely can’t be treated the same as my other mare.

Living in the West we don’t rely on pastures for feed sources.

I had a few OTTBs. One OTTBs I got as a three year old and he lived until he was 40. Some of them I got from a friend that worked at the track and find homes for them.

If I needed weight hay pellets added to the regular daily bailed hay worked great and added fats like the flax or stabilized rice bran.

Still never needed energy (ha ha) maybe our environment is different from where you are. Horses were pretty fresh.

[mvp]

I have fed Geoff Tucker’s Grain-Free protocol and it helped for a reactive (but otherwise healthy) mare of mine. It made her relaxed and that helped her get focuses and then her focus has helped her get happy in her work and in her barn life.

It sounds like y’all already have some yelling going on. I’m not a nutritionist. I did listen to Tucker, a Cornell-trained DVM, explain his program and rationale. I can explain it in PM for anyone who would like to know. But, reading the comments, I’m not sure you all want whatever education from me (a lay-person) that I could pass on to you from my understanding of what he explained. I’m not an internet warrior.

[JB]

The basis for the “no grain challenge” has a solid foundation, it’s just an elimination diet.

But he does need to be taken with a large grain of salt, because he does have things on his blog that are very questionable, such as saying that any horse with any egg count in the Spring needs to be dewormed weekly with ivermectin for 3 weeks :no:

Even his grain-free trial suggestion has some holes. He lumps beet pulp in with cereal grains and rice bran and wheat bran, but then says if the horse is losing too much weight, Renew Gold is a great option, but that has rice bran. Elimination diets are a great way to help get to the root of problems, for sure.

Being a DVM doesn’t mean they know all the right things about all the right things. It does give them credibility, but don’t blindly trust their knowledge.

[quietann]

Minor notes, I am not a feeding expert:

Ration balancers have protein added (25 to 35%) whereas Vit/Min supplements generally do not… They have vitamins and minerals in some sort of carrier pellet (alfalfa or those “distillers grains” seem common.) So one feeds more of a RB, and my assumption is that the hay being fed may be deficient in protein. I am a huge fan of them for easy-keepers, but might switch to Vit/Min only if the horse was still too fat.

No-grain diet: one friend, after her horse went through 2 colic surgeries in less than a year, put him on a no-concentrate, free choice hay diet. That’s about all he gets, except I think some sort of Vit/Min that doesn’t contain ingredients he’s sensitive to. He’s a hard-keeping TB, prone to ulcers, and he tends to pick at his hay, so it’s a challenge to keep his weight up, but at the moment he’s doing fine. He doesn’t have a great topline, but good enough for her purposes.

Herbal supplements: I love the comment about horses on pasture seeking out the things they need to feel good. The pasture where my mare spent the first 9-10 years of her life had weeds, including one that would be sought out by horses with a bellyache, and a couple that the pregnant/nursing mares liked. There’s a native groundcover that my mare used to prefer over grass when we went to a show. It usually grew in areas where the ground was just too beat down and hard to sustain grass. I don’t know why she wanted it, but my guess would be it had some sort of digestive and general calming effect.

[JB]

Horses eat what tastes good. No doubt many weeds and other edibles that aren’t harmful, also taste good. There’s a reason many toxic edibles don’t get eaten - they don’t taste good. But even then, some horses do find some of them delicious - bracken fern for example.

They don’t know that this plant made their belly ache go away. They don’t know they have parasites, much less know that anything they ate made them go away (or they’d all love their dewormers LOL).

[quietann]

@JB

Horses eat what tastes good. No doubt many weeds and other edibles that aren’t harmful, also taste good. There’s a reason many toxic edibles don’t get eaten - they don’t taste good. But even then, some horses do find some of them delicious - bracken fern for example.

They don’t know that this plant made their belly ache go away. They don’t know they have parasites, much less know that anything they ate made them go away (or they’d all love their dewormers LOL).

What would you say if it was a plant that they only ate when they had a bellyache?

[JB]

What if he chewed wood and it made his stomach feel better? It’s learned behavior. Total coincidence at first, but if the cause and effect are repeated enough times in a row (which could be 1 time, depending on how valuable the reward was) then it’s learned behavior, he was trained.

And of course, if that plant really was the cause of his stomach feeling better, he may easily connect the dots, and like a lot of learned behavior, may keep the dots connected even when the belly ache isn’t something to be fixed by any plant

But he never sought out or ate the plant the first time out of any instinct that it might help his stomach ache.

[S1969]

@quietann

What would you say if it was a plant that they only ate when they had a bellyache?

How would you know if a horse was eating something only because it had a bellyache? How would you know it had a bellyache to begin with?

[mvp]

@JB

The basis for the “no grain challenge” has a solid foundation, it’s just an elimination diet.

But he does need to be taken with a large grain of salt, because he does have things on his blog that are very questionable, such as saying that any horse with any egg count in the Spring needs to be dewormed weekly with ivermectin for 3 weeks :no:

Even his grain-free trial suggestion has some holes. He lumps beet pulp in with cereal grains and rice bran and wheat bran, but then says if the horse is losing too much weight, Renew Gold is a great option, but that has rice bran. Elimination diets are a great way to help get to the root of problems, for sure.

Being a DVM doesn’t mean they know all the right things about all the right things. It does give them credibility, but don’t blindly trust their knowledge.

True. Tucker is an iconoclast. He’s a True Believer in his program. I don’t have any doctorate in horse nutrition (though I have some legit, PhD-level knowledge of horse evolution), which is the logical basis for much of what Tucker recommends. I have no desire to become his mouthpiece. Y’all can find him and read for yourselves.

One question I would answer, however, is about “high quality proteins.” Tucker would say that he’s like horses to have the kinds of proteins (and, really, all feeds) that have all 20 amino acids. So for the purposes of this discussion, I think that “high quality protein” means a source or sources of them that, together, provide the full compliment of amino acids.

[JB]

I’d love to know his thoughts behind why they need to consume AAs that they already make themselves.

[Moshposh]

@JB

The basis for the “no grain challenge” has a solid foundation, it’s just an elimination diet.

But he does need to be taken with a large grain of salt, because he does have things on his blog that are very questionable, such as saying that any horse with any egg count in the Spring needs to be dewormed weekly with ivermectin for 3 weeks :no:

Even his grain-free trial suggestion has some holes. He lumps beet pulp in with cereal grains and rice bran and wheat bran, but then says if the horse is losing too much weight, Renew Gold is a great option, but that has rice bran. Elimination diets are a great way to help get to the root of problems, for sure.

Being a DVM doesn’t mean they know all the right things about all the right things. It does give them credibility, but don’t blindly trust their knowledge.

I read his articles too and asked him about renew gold. He said he doesn’t recommend it because of the rice bran…but he mentioned using it in another article,Same with coolstance. ???

He’s a huge believer in SBM. I asked him if this diet has enough carbs for hight intensity work. He did not answer that.

”‹”‹”‹”‹”‹ðŸ¤·
I have one horse that gets nervous energy on grain…when. I took her off grain, that changed. But I need her to get enough calories for hard work

[JB]

@Moshposh

I read his articles too and asked him about renew gold. He said he doesn’t recommend it because of the rice bran…but he mentioned using it in another article,Same with coolstance. ???

Yep, exactly, pretty contradictory in this area

He’s a huge believer in SBM. I asked him if this diet has enough carbs for hight intensity work. He did not answer that.

he probably doesn’t know, but the real answer is - it depends. Really high quality hay, and enough of it, can do wonders. But reality is most people can’t get that, and reality is, a lot of hard working horses do need extra carbs
”‹

I have one horse that gets nervous energy on grain…when. I took her off grain, that changed. But I need her to get enough calories for hard work

Did we ever get an answer to what she was getting, and what she’s getting now?

[ParadoxFarm]

@mvp

I have fed Geoff Tucker’s Grain-Free protocol and it helped for a reactive (but otherwise healthy) mare of mine. It made her relaxed and that helped her get focuses and then her focus has helped her get happy in her work and in her barn life.

I did this with one of my TBs as well. I will say that he did really well with his behavior. He calmed down quite a bit. He was easier to handle. I spread the feedings out to four feedings. It was a pita, but it worked. However, after about nine months I noticed he had lost quite a bit of weight. He was already getting unlimited quality hay plus four feedings of alfalfa cubes and the supplements he needed. I had to switch him back to a commercial grain. I tried to find the best I could with low sugar/starch, etc., but I still find him to be a little high strung on this diet. I wish I could find a happy medium. Though, he has had most of winter off, so a lot of silliness is probably due to the lack of work.

[JB]

@ParadoxFarm

I had to switch him back to a commercial grain. I tried to find the best I could with low sugar/starch, etc., but I still find him to be a little high strung on this diet. I wish I could find a happy medium. Though, he has had most of winter off, so a lot of silliness is probably due to the lack of work.

What did you switch to, and what brands do you have available?

[DMK]

But he does need to be taken with a large grain of salt, because he does have things on his blog that are very questionable, such as saying that any horse with any egg count in the Spring needs to be dewormed weekly with ivermectin for 3 weeks

Please… just no, No NO. We really can’t afford that kind of idiocy in the southeast, given the exponential rate of resistance…