03/11/2026
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FOOD FOR THOUGHT: ARE YOU ACCIDENTALLY TURNING YOUR HORSE INTO AN INDUSTRIAL GARBAGE DISPOSAL UNIT?
It is an Unpopular Opinion… but it’s one worth thinking about.
Many bagged horse feeds, despite the marketing, are not really designed with horse health as the first priority. They are often made using inexpensive fillers and industrial leftovers that allow companies to maximise profit and extend shelf life.
Turn the bag over and read the ingredients. You will often see things like:
Beet pulp
Soy hulls
Molasses
Grain fragments
Vegetable protein meals
Legume hulls
Grain and grain by-products
Vegetable oils
Mineral premixes
Mould inhibitors
Apple flavour
To the average horse owner this sounds technical and scientific.
But when you strip away the marketing language, many of these ingredients are simply highly processed waste by-products from other industries that have been repackaged and sold as horse feed.
For example, beet pulp is what remains after sugar has been extracted from sugar beet. Wheat middlings are the fine leftovers from flour milling once the flour has been removed for human food. Soy hulls and legume hulls are the outer shells left behind after processing beans and legumes. Vegetable protein meals are often the pressed residue left after oils have been extracted from seeds.
Many of the crops used to produce these materials are grown in large-scale agricultural systems that rely heavily on genetically modified varieties, fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides. By the time these by-products reach the feed industry they have often been through multiple stages of industrial processing.
They are, in many cases, materials that need to be disposed of somewhere once the primary product has been removed.
So they are dried, processed, blended together, and repackaged with attractive marketing and technical sounding ingredient lists.
Which raises an important question for horse owners.
Just because something can be packaged and sold as horse feed… does that mean it is actually the right food for your horse?
A simple guideline many experienced horse owners follow is this:
If it is not something a horse would naturally encounter and eat in a natural grazing environment, it is worth questioning whether it belongs in the feed bucket.
These ingredients are ground together, mixed with synthetic vitamins and minerals, and the whole mash is then cooked and pressed into pellets where often the real core of what is in them is not clearly stated.
This is a good example - apple flavouring.
Most people imagine that means a little bit of apple.
It doesn’t.
In many cases it refers to a manufactured aroma made from chemicals such as:
Hexyl acetate – used to create a green apple scent and also used as an industrial solvent
• Butyl acetate – commonly used in paints and coatings
• Ethyl acetate – used in inks and adhesives
• Isoamyl acetate – a strong artificial fruit fragrance
• Ethyl 2-methylbutyrate – used to create apple-like aromas
• Propylene glycol – used to carry and blend flavour chemic
If a company is willing to call that “apple flavour,” it raises a reasonable question.
How much trust should we place in the rest of the label?
Another thing worth paying attention to is the amount of added oils in many feeds.
Vegetable oils
Canola oil
Rice bran oil
Soy oil
Horses do not have a gallbladder and their digestive systems evolved to process fibre, not large quantities of extracted oils.
Yet these oils now appear in many feeds because they increase calorie levels and make feeds more palatable.
Over time highly processed feeds, oils and additives can contribute to chronic inflammation and metabolic stress.
The problem is rarely a single event.
It is often more like death by a thousand inflammatory cuts.
Day after day the horse’s digestive system is asked to process ingredients it was never designed to deal with in large quantities.
Over time the strain builds.
Inflammation increases
Metabolic stress increases
Digestive balance begins to struggle
Eventually owners begin to see the symptoms:
Laminitis
Metabolic issues
Digestive problems
Skin reactions
Hoof problems
Behavioural changes
We are also seeing more horses become over-reactive and difficult to settle, and while many factors influence behaviour, diet is often part of the picture.
Because I work in this field helping owners solve problems with their horses, I probably see this more than most.
Many horses arrive on ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty different feeds and supplements in an attempt to solve their health problems.
Then we simplify everything.
Very often most of those products are removed.
And the horse improves.
So what can we do instead?
Start with a species-appropriate diet.
Horses evolved to eat forage made up of:
Grass
Plants
Fibre
Small amounts throughout the day
Not bags of highly processed feeds.
FEED FORAGE FIRST: AND USE A GOOD GRASS MANAGEMENT PLAN
Grass suitable for horses
Low sugar meadow hay
Simple forage
Whole foods such as flaxseed meal
Not highly amplified ryegrass pasture designed for beef and dairy production.
Another common misconception is that feeding real, whole foods must be complicated.
People imagine standing in the feed room grinding seeds or preparing special mixtures for each horse.
That might have been the case many years ago.
It isn’t anymore.
Today you can buy flaxseed meal ready to feed from most agricultural merchants. It has a good shelf life, stores easily, and takes no longer to add to a feed than pouring a scoop of pellets.
No grinding.
No soaking.
No complicated preparation.
Just scoop, stir and feed.
Many owners simply add a small amount of flaxseed meal to a handful of low sugar chaff such as meadow or timothy and feed it that way.
Simple. Quick. Effective.
Flaxseed meal is also one of the most useful whole foods you can add to a horse’s diet because it provides a dense package of natural nutrition.
It is naturally high in digestible fibre, which supports the hindgut and microbiome.
It provides a good quality plant protein that supports muscle maintenance and tissue repair.
It is one of the richest natural sources of omega-3 fatty acids, which help support healthy inflammatory balance, skin, coat and metabolic health.
It also provides beneficial nutrients such as vitamin E and important trace minerals.
Because flaxseed meal is nutritionally dense, you do not need to feed large amounts.
Small amounts can provide significant nutritional benefits.
That means you get a lot of nutritional value for very little feed volume.
And here is something many owners don’t realise.
It often costs less to feed a horse real, healthy food than it does to buy heavily processed feeds.
You are already spending the money.
The difference is simply where that money goes.
Often the biggest improvement in a horse’s health and behaviour does not come from adding more products.
Sometimes it comes from removing the things that never belonged in the diet in the first place.
Because horses were never designed to be industrial garbage disposal units.
