What do you guys think? Anyone tried any of it? Looks very similar to Cavalor and reminds me of when Spiller’s was available in the U.S. (via Spiller’s/Seminole)
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The Senior feed looks interesting w a low NSC. Our shipping from Chewy has been terrible through FedEx…it is reliably unreliable so I’d be afraid to start that now.
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Chewy does tend to have horse forage and feed items suddenly be out of stock. It’s distressing when you have your regularly scheduled autoship order every 4 weeks and without much warning you are told that it won’t be shipped due to a shortage.
Now I just order way more than usual and hoard feed when it is back in stock. What’s even worse is just as the herd gets used to a feed, and Chewy discontinues carrying the brand.
And Fedex delivery has gotten way worse recently. My last autoship order of 12 shipping boxes arrived spread out one box at a time over a three week period after Fedex saying all 12 were out for delivery on the same day.
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It’s been on Chewy for a bit. It caught my eye because I fed that brand for a bit when I lived in Germany. I fed “Pur.Itan” and “Pur.Sport” with good results. It wasn’t as expensive though.
As with most feeds, if it fits your needs, then it’s a good feed. I don’t remember any quality issues off the top of my head.
Soy isn’t as popular over there when it comes to horse feed ingredients, so they may have some good options for those that are feeding soy free. There are cheaper options though! I’m interested in how well it’s selling on this side of the pond.
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Hard to imagine it being cost effective to import horse feed from Europe to North America where we grow millions of acres of grain, but maybe the very strong US dollar makes it affordable.
Where I am in Canada in a port city, all our feeds are milled locally out of grain already being shipped here by train from the prairies. We don’t even import from Eastern Canada or the USA, let alone Europe.
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Yowza. It’s US$40 to $50 a bag, so that’s CAN $60 to $70 a bag. I’m sure it’s a nice enough feed but you can put something together for much less.
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I don’t see the advantage to feeding a feed that looks like granola except to the human’s eye . And I don’t want to pay a premium for the cachet of feeding a German feed. I am sure it is a fine feed - if you are in Germany you formulate feed with ingredients that are available in Germany. I am not sure they have any magic ingredients that are not used here. Linseed is just flax and are “black oats” nutritionally better than North American oats? Anyway I won’t pay a premium for hype. It’s not like I won’t try new things - the Unbeetable Forage seems to help my smooth toothed pony digest better - but I better get some real reasons to buy something besides it is cool.
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AND, only 44lb bags, not 50lb.
None of these feeds are economical compared to US feeds, because many of the ingredients are imported which raises the price to start
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I noticed they had lupin which is a legume that has been bred to have non-toxic seeds (unlike our common roadside lupin flower) and peas, which are also becoming used in Canadian feeds. This is because Canadian farmers made a big push to plant peas for the Beyond Meat veggie burger product that’s based on pea protein (I’m assuming a different variety than green peas for the table, likely more like split peas). I understand that feed crop lupin is more common in Europe.
I think either of these are fine protein ingredients that replace soy, but they aren’t magic and are being used because they are easy to source in the country of production.
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I assumed they were being imported pre-mixed in bags so shipping the whole feed including the alfalfa and flax etc components that are common in North America.
Or is a mill in the USA licensed to make them for the North American market? If so that’s a major price gouge.
Or are the Germans importing American flax seed to Germany and shipping the finished product back to the USA?
Any which way, shipping bagged feed cross border is just not economical. Even inside the USA the national feed companies have regional mills and there are still regional companies (as I’ve learned from COTH!).
Horse feed is so heavy and bulky, shipping costs are huge. The cost of a ton of hay off the field in Alberta is much much less than the hay dealer charges to deliver it to our barns on the BC coast.
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oh that could be, I was thinking about the other brand that recently went kaput but then came back because of a US investor, I think they were importing the ingredients and producing here. But yes, shipping heavy things, regardless of bagged or bulk ingredients, is $$
Yes, their lupin is not ours! It’s in a few US-sold feeds already. Peas are also in several US-made feeds as well, like Tribute’s Wholesome Blends line, to add back protein lost by removing soy
It’s Muesli, which is very popular and common in Germany. It does often look and smell good to humans!
With all of the feeds that are available across the US via the internet and/or feed stores, I’m not sure who this will really appeal to because there are already so many good options here. They’re not bad feeds, and I guess if you(g) have the money then go ahead, but I’d be curious to know how well it’s selling.
Granted I’m sure some barn or individual(s) somewhere would enjoy feeding their imported horses imported feed and think it’s posh.
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these feeds appeal to those who have the money to spend, who feel like soy and grains and molasses are evil, and think it’s cool to say you feed something from another country. I really hate saying that but it’s true, because there ARE other ways to avoid those things because you either think they’re bad, or your horse really can’t handle them, and which don’t cost this much
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I looked through several ingredient lists, and the lower starch offerings list sunflower “peels” which I cannot find defined as a feed ingredient. Is it sunflower hulls, which while high in fiber is pretty indigestible?
Cavalor was using the black oats a few years ago as higher in antioxidants than traditional oats. They don’t process as “pretty” as a regular oat with a pale hull. I don’t know how successful they were getting an American based source started. The European and European-inspired brands lean heavily on puffing or micronizing grains to maximize digestibility, and it strikes me as somewhat odd that these feeds are put forward as “cooler” energy and oat free when they tend to be corn and barley heavy as those grains’ starches puff readily, where oat starch is more digestible with less processing and doesn’t tolerate the puffing process.
I do not feel soy is evil. I just happen to own a horse that we determined (vet input) did not do well with soy in their feed. My other horse has a soy based feed, because most feeds seem to be soy based.
Shrug.
(I am not feeding this feed, just commenting on the whole soy thing.)
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On pricing, that is in the range of normal for anything that heavy that is being shipped via chewy, Amazon, etc. I for sure pay a premium to get Tribute via Chewy. And online prices for Crypto Aero are insane for a 40lb bag). But I talked with a local feed store that was trucking some Tribute from AZ on special order (which is the same place my Chewy warehouse stocks its orders), and they quoted me only like $1-2/bag different. I think I tend to pay less on the authorship price as much of a pain as it can be to use FedEx. I’d have to drive a ways to the feed store and would probably spend more on diesel than I’d save buying “local”.
The only feed store that carries Gro N Win charges more than Chewy and I have to drive an hour one way to get to the feed store. I do notice that some of the feeds on Chewy are more than TSC so I buy my forage products at TSC. TSC only carries ration balancers on a random basis and since I only need one bag per month I can’t special order from them. My Chewy service is great and the one time they were out of Gro N Win they gave me the option of a similar product at a 50% discount. Which worked for me. If I were buying a lot of other products their prices might not be so good for me.
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which is why I also said:
But IME, there are WAY more people who have bought into the idea that soy and grains are inherently evil, that ANY ingredient with more Omega 6 than 3 is inherently evil, that all commercial bagged feeds are inflammatory, than there are horses who actually can’t tolerate soy or oats or rice bran or alfalfa or flax or oats.
it’s not though. $33-40 for only 44lb isn’t the norm. Buckeye, Tribute, Nutrena, and others, have several feeds in the $26-31 range for 50lb. ProElite has some that are a little more for 50lb but they’re also typically a few dollars more than the other brands anyway
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It’s over priced for what you are getting. I’m surprised people are buying it at that price with so many comparable feeds available.
Like most of these “boutique” type products, it’s woefully under fortified compared to typical North American horse feeds.
I chose one product at random from that link. Based on the specs given, you would need to feed ~37 pounds per day to meet the NRC’s copper requirement for an 1100 pound horse at maintenance. The feeding instructions say to feed this horse 250g (a little over half a pound) of the product per day. 
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