Who’s feeding grain diets over commercial complete feeds?
How long have you been feeding grains? Why did you make the switch?
What level of work do your horses do? What grains are you feeding?
Do you feed a ration balancer for vitamin/mineral supplement?
Most good modern formulations have little actual grain content, and are also fortified with vitamins and minerals. You feed them at the recommended level to get all the nutrients typically about 4 lbs a day.
The exception would be buying whole oats or flatted barley, or an old school sweet feed.
I feed a mash with beet pulp, alfalfa cubes, a small amount of oats, flax, and a vitamin mineral supplement. We don’t have access here to a wide variety of ration balancers which would be my other option.
A ration balancer is typically fed at about a pound a day.
So while I do feed oats, they are a small component (at present one cup a day). I don’t know of anyone who feeds real grains in quantity any more. Maybe some really high performance horses need the calories.
If you want some direction on current best practices in horse nutrition I recommend Julie Gettys Feed Your Horse Like a Horse.
A lot has changed since I fed a gallon of sweet feed every night in 1976.
You are all over the map with your questions. What do you mean by “grain diet,” all grain? Some grain? I’d call a “commercial complete feed” one that can be fed exclusively and meet all the horse’s nutritional and caloric requirements. I personally don’t know anyone who feeds all grain, or someone that feeds just a complete feed.
Most people I know feed a roughage based diet (pasture, hay, or a combo of the two) and then add a commercial feed product to add calories and nutrients, depending on the needs of the horse.
Agreed. When I think of ‘grain’, I literally think of grains of corn, barley or oats.
And yes, yes, I get it that it’s kernels of corn, etc.
Haven’t known anyone who feeds like that in a dog’s age. The NSC is just too high without any significant nutrition attached to it.
Many complete feeds contain cereal grains. Many do not.
“Complete” in the industry means its fiber content is high enough that the feed can be the sole source of calories for a horse and still provide the required fiber content necessary for at least decent gut health.
Most commercial feeds are not “complete” feeds. Complete feeds tend to be Sr, and sometimes Jr feeds, but sometimes they are in other categories.
Do you feed a ration balancer for vitamin/mineral supplement?
By this question I am assuming you mean a “grain” diet is some version of a COB diet - corn, oats, barley. Is that right?
Grain diet… oats, barley, corn etc
Commercial diet… pelleted or extruded feeds
There are some HYPP horses who get tested low potassium hay, and oats for calories.
It’s pretty much a given that no hay is good enough to not only meet all the nutritional needs of a horse all around, but provide all the nutrients in a reasonably balanced ratio. Most hays are going to be low in something. Almost all will be unbalanced. To that end, I would always at least use a v/m supplement, which one depends on the specifics, and possibly a ration balancer if a v/m just can’t do the job.
A lot of v/m and ration balancers indicate to supplement with oats if extra calories are needed.
Pretty much no one is feeding a grain diet in this sense in any large amount. If you do feed grain, oats are the best choice.
But as was mentioned above pelleted or extruded feeds can have grains ad their first ingredients and can be just as high in NSC as oats. So you need to read the labels.
You’d be surprised how many in the QH/Western discipline side of things feed a lot of oats. Some barns even free-choice feed oats to young horses. I’ve run across several who feed a straight COB diet, with varying ratios and varying amounts.
Well, if you want fat horses!
Or if the horse is working really hard. I seem to recall that when i was a teen, I fed my little horse up to a gallon ice cream bucket of COB sweet feed every night. We were out every day, up to 5 or 7 hours weekends and summer holidays. We galloped everywhere and she was high as a kite much of the time 
not overweight and no metabolic problems. We burned it off.
Maybe a working ranch horse would have similar energy requirements.
I can’t see doing that with my current horse who rarely gets ridden for more than 2 hours a day. And I don’t want high as a kite either!
I haven’t been anywhere that fed a lot of grain diets but the area I am in presently, it seems to be popular.
Oats and barley with the hunter/jumpers. Usually mixed with beet pulp. Everyone seems to be more for the ‘natural’ way of feeding with less processed stuff but I’m not competently convinced it’s better.
There is absolutely nothing natural about feeding horses grain, locking them in stalls part of the day and riding them.
Their digestive tracts are designed for the ingestion of long stemmed fiber, to be taken in while moving slowly over large areas, at will but mostly in straight lines. Man introduced “grain” (as you use it here) to compensate for the calories burned when we put them into intensive work for us. And by that I meant actual work for several (4+) hours a day – either working farms, pulling buggies or being ridden for long distances (think Pony Express stuff, here in the US. Though that’s pretty far along on the domesticated horse’s history). Nevermind riding in circles most of the time.
Does your barn use Cal/ Phos. balanced rice bran?
Well, a smaller amount of oats mixed in beet pulp and alfalfa cubes probably approximates the basic ingredients of a commercial feed.
It also makes a good carrier for a vitamin mineral supplement.
Depending on local feed brands and prices it can be a good cost effective option.
Weird, no one I know feeds that kind of diet. Tribute is very popular with the show/ranch/reining/cutting crowd I run with. But I really don’t go west of the Mississippi river, except for Texas. Must be something kind of local. I would not make that kind of sweeping generalization, though, about owners/trainers of the most popular breed in the country, without having some kind of data to reference. Anecdotes are not evidence.
In your original post, you used the phrase “commercial complete,” and your title is Grain v. Complete Feeds, leading me to think you were actually talking about complete feeds. Like this one -
The point was that there are people who feed whole grains, and in some circles, it’s almost everyone. I don’t condone it, especially at the amounts often fed. I was just pointing out that it is definitely done.
I agree, some oats, beep, and alf (cubes or pellets) can serve as a base. Whether or not that becomes cost effective depends on how much you have to feed for calories, and to what ends you want to go to get a relatively balanced diet. It’s amazing how badly balanced many homemade diets are, when people think they only have to feed “whole” foods.
I personally know a few who feed that kind of diet, and I know of many more who do, including East of the Mississippi. I was not talking about Western as in geography, I was talking disciplines. You got an HYPP horse? Don’t be surprised if the concentrate portion of his diet is based around feeding oats. And there are a lot of HYPP horses.
And where did you read I was making a sweeping generalization? Please read again - “You’d be surprised how many in the QH/Western discipline side of things feed a lot of oats. Some barns even free-choice feed oats to young horses. I’ve run across several who feed a straight COB diet, with varying ratios and varying amounts.”
Did I say all? I did not, and didn’t even imply most.
Anecdotes area, in fact, evidence. You then look at the quality of the evidence. Is it a fact that I know of many people, mostly in the QH world, who feed that way. But stating I know and know of many who do, is not the same as implying all do - that would be using anecdotes (evidence) to prove a generality.
It may be that up where you are that the general method of feeding QHs is relatively different. You aren’t feeding a lot of alfalfa. Where there is all or mostly alfalfa fed, oats help offset the high calcium in alfalfa.
You might find this an interesting read
https://www.chronofhorse.com/forum/forum/discussion-forums/horse-care/252913-educate-me-on-feeding-oats
I used to feed one of my hard keepers stabilized rice bran. I’m presently feeding Purina products.
I just changed from Tribute Kalm n EZ to whole oats based on recommendation from a nutritionist. She recommended doing it for just a couple of weeks and then switching to a different feed because of some digestion (hindgut) issues he had been having.
I have been feeding him oats for about 2-3 weeks now (plus hay and pasture), he seems to be doing really well on it and might just keep him here. We do low level Eventing and currently he is turned out on 15 acres and ridden 4x a week for about 30-40mins.
Overall he seems to be a sensitive chap and I had a food intolerance test done via a hair test. He is ‘intolerant’ to wheat, rice bran, sweet potatoes, sugar and calcium carbonate to name a few. So he is intolerant to a lot of the ‘fillers’ in manufactured grain. The company won’t outright say allergy, so I do take some of this info with a grain a salt. But I figured it won’t hurt to remove the foods at the top of his intolerance test and that show up multiple times.
I had my hay analyzed and used FeedXL to balance out his diet on oats, he currently gets 2x per day:
1.5 lbs whole oats (previously 1.5 lbs Kalm n EZ)
.5 lbs alfalfa pellets
Vitamin E
Multi Vitamin
Lysine
Di-Cal
Electrolytes
Chia seeds
Purina Outlast
Uckele GUT
Interesting. I was always told oats weren’t that great for ulcers, although I haven’t actually done any research on this.
Is her reasoning that this is some sort of digestive reset? Sort of like when people fast?
I find it amazing that there are people out there who make equine nutrition their life’s work. They sell their expertise to companies who make commercial grain mixes, companies such as Blue Seal, Purina,Triple Crown etc.
They know the variance in nutritional values in different varieties of corn, oats barley etc.
And yet there are those who blithely go on their way, second guessing them.
Me, I quietly settle for their estimate of the most intelligent feed regimen for each particular horse with which I am coping.
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