Walk into most feed stores here and you’ll find bags designed decades ago: grain-based, molasses-sweetened, described with words like “good palatability” and “all essential nutrients”, and not a single number on the page. We think your horse deserves better. This page explains exactly why, and what to demand instead.
Look up the product page of a typical traditional feed here. You’ll read that it “covers the nutritional needs of adult horses”, that it has “good palatability”, that flaked cereals guarantee digestibility. What you will not find: the starch percentage. The sugar percentage. A full ingredients list. A lab report. Any number at all.
That is not an accident. Grain-heavy recipes are cheap to mill and sweet to eat, and their numbers don’t look good next to modern equine science. Starch-rich feeds are the main dietary driver of gastric ulcers, hindgut acidosis and “hot”, unfocused horses. If the numbers were flattering, they would be printed in bold.
| “Good palatability” | usually means: molasses & sweetness |
| “Flaked cereals for digestibility” | means: a grain-and-starch energy base |
| “All essential nutrients” | means: trust us, no numbers given |
| No starch % published | often 25–35% in traditional mixes |
| No sugar % published | you feed it blind, every day |
The single most important number for gut health. Modern fibre-first feeds sit under ~10%. Traditional grain mixes: often 25–35%, and unpublished.
Essential for laminitis-prone, EMS and sensitive horses. If a brand can’t tell you, it cannot be fed safely to a sensitive horse. Full stop.
Every serious brand publishes full analytical constituents per product, and for forage, a lab report per batch. “Technical sheet on request” is not transparency.
Fibre and oil burn slow and steady, that’s horse physiology. Grain starch burns hot and fast, that’s cattle feeding logic applied to the wrong species.
If the answer is a shrug, the recipe was designed around mill economics, not around your horse. The best modern feeds answer both questions proudly, on the bag.
Every product we sell shows its numbers. Every hay batch has a lab report. Ask us anything, including the questions above. That’s the whole point.
We didn’t choose our feed partners for their margins. We chose them because they publish full analytical values for every product, protein, starch, sugar, fat, because they invest in equine research, and because they build modern, fibre-first, low-starch lines for exactly the problems we see daily: gastric horses, sugar-sensitive horses, sport horses that need steady energy instead of rocket fuel.
And when hay itself falls short, we fix the forage before the bucket: lab-tested meadow hay, alfalfa swapped in for protein, never another kilo of sweet grain to paper over a forage problem.
| Declared starch & sugar | on every product we recommend |
| Grain-free & GMO-free options | actively preferred by our calculator |
| Gastric-support lines | for ulcer-prone & sensitive horses |
| Forage-first philosophy | hay & alfalfa before concentrate |
| Lab report per hay batch | always, ask and receive |
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