My 5 Favourite Weight Gain Ingredients for Horses
Podcast #65
What are the best ingredients for helping a horse gain weight safely?
In this episode, PhD equine nutritionist Dr Nerida explains why lucerne (alfalfa), full-fat soybean, lupins, sugar beet pulp and copra meal are five of her favourite horse weight-gain ingredients.
Discover how each ingredient supplies energy, fermentable fibre or quality protein, and how the right combination can help horses build body condition and muscle without simply relying on more grain.
You’ll also learn why hindgut health matters, when high-protein feeds can become problematic, how to use these ingredients safely and why every weight-gain diet still needs to be properly balanced.
Soycheck test kit for checking whether soybean products contain active trypsin inhibitor: https://cbsbioplatforms.com/Store
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G'day, g'day, and welcome to the Happy Horse Nutrition Podcast. I'm Dr Nerida, PhD equine nutritionist, founder of the My Happy Horse Nutrition app, and someone who cannot actually have favourites because I can never choose them. So I'm not sure why I'm doing this today, but we are going to talk about my five favourite ingredients for weight gain.
With the strong disclaimer that I could easily have way more ingredients on this list. But to help myself narrow them down, I have gone with what I actually have in my feed shed right now. And you'll probably find that I'll do another episode with my next favourite weight gain ingredients.
Anyway, well, I'm making myself laugh here, but without further explanations of my own inability to choose, let's jump right on in. So…
Hopefully you've managed to catch episode 57, which was a whole episode on feeding for weight gain, and why just feeding more is not the solution to weight gain, because there's a whole lot of… a whole lot of things that we need to consider when… when.
We're looking at a horse and trying to figure out…
to feed them when they need to put on weight. So that episode went through, essentially, a five-step process, and I'll just recap it super fast here for you. So the first step was, um, figuring out what was causing the weight loss. Then we'd talk a heap about.
Um, turning the hindgut into a fiber-fermenting powerhouse, because you have to have the hindgut really healthy and pumping energy out from all the fiber that it's fermenting, and the microbes are fermenting in the hindgut, in order for a horse to have.
any chance of putting weight on in a sustainable way, and also in a way that they will be able to maintain.
over a long period of time. So, you know, we can put weight on horses easily by feeding them, you know, say, high-grain diets, but then once you stop feeding them those high-energy ingredients, you'll find that they'll lose weight again really quickly because their hindgut is not set up to allow them to extract as much energy as possible out of the fibre. I talk about that.
in a lot of detail in episode 57. Um, and then the last three steps were feed a balanced diet, feed high-quality protein, and add high-energy ingredients to the diet. And I make the comment in that episode that often those three steps will happen together.
Because you'll usually bring in a feed, or you can bring in a feed that does all three of those jobs. So it'll balance the diet, it'll bring in high quality protein, and it will bring in your high energy ingredients. So, you know, when I say feed, I mean a fortified feed.
or a pre-mix feed, we call them lots of different things all over the world, but a bag package feed that is meant to be fed to your horse at a certain amount per day, and there's lots of different feeds that are actually designed for putting on.
weight, to help horses put on weight. And you'll find that a lot of those feeds have got some of these ingredients that I'm going to talk about today. But the five ingredients I'll talk about today are ones that you can use in combination with one another, or you might already be feeding another feed and you want to add something in on top to help a particular horse to gain more weight.
Now, it is, it is so, as they say, horses for courses here.
the ingredients that you choose will very much depend on who the horse is, what they're doing, you know, are they in work, are they a lactating broodmaire? So, there's lots of…
complexities sometimes. There's lots of nuance in which ingredients we would choose, but.
pretty much the five ingredients I'm going to talk today, I'm going to make a big call here and say, aside from a horse that mightn't be able to have.
one of these ingredients for some random reason, you could use these five ingredients in pretty much any horse's diet that needs to put on weight. So, top of the list is lucerne hay, which we also call alfalfa hay in lots of different parts of the world.
And I… I was sitting here, um, you know, scribbling… scribbling my notes, and… and then I actually was just recapping episode 57 for myself whilst making dinner, um, for my kids and I for tonight to get a little bit ahead of the game while I was just… had my headphones on.
And having this conversation with myself going, well, do I put lucerne in? Do I keep lucerne out? Because the foundation of every single weight gain diet is high quality forage. So you have to have high quality forage in a diet when you're wanting to put weight on horses.
But sometimes there's not high quality forage available. So, for example, you may only be able to buy reasonably low quality grassy hay, or you may have your horses at pasture and you're having, you know, a dry period or just seasonally your grass has changed to be quite low quality at certain times of the year.
So, it's not always possible to just magically have high-quality grassy forage as the base of a horse's diet, which would mean…
my favourite thing to do in those situations is to bring in lucerne hay, so it does form a very important part of the forage base of a diet. There's very few diets that I put together that don't have some amount of lucerne hay, but the amount.
varies. So, the reason I was sort of going backwards and forwards with myself, going, well, do I put it in as one of my favourite weight gain ingredients, or is it just inherently a part of the forage foundation of a horse's diet? And I guess it's both. Um…
So, for me, it's the first place I go when my hay or my pasture is not doing enough work for me in maintaining weight on horses. And I have spoken about it in previous podcasts, but when.
Alay and Breeze are the two horses that I have here who need that little bit extra feed. So Breeze is a very, very old mare. She must be getting close to 40 because our vet, Doug, estimated she was in her mid-30s and that was when we first got her and that was about five years ago. So we've upgraded from saying she's in her mid-30s to she must be close to 40 now because she's still here.
Uh, so she… she's one that needs a little bit of extra feed, and then a lay, our off-the-track thoroughbred, who my daughter rides and competes.
And I have to catch myself sometimes because, you know, we'll be in the middle of winter, as we are at the moment, or we'll be in drought conditions, as we were a few months ago, and I'll be watching them and thinking, okay, they're at the point where I'm needing to put something extra in.
their diet to up their energy intake and put some more weight on them. And instinctively, I want to go for a feed, and then I'll catch myself and go, first step, lucerne hay. So, I always bring in lucerne when I can catch myself and make myself do it.
As the… as the first step towards…
increasing weight, or even just maintaining weight in horses that I feel, or I can see, are already losing some weight. And it does such a beautiful job, because it brings in lots of energy, it's quite high in energy, so legume forages don't get the amount of lignification that a grassy forage will get, so.
When grasses are very young, you notice that their leaves are really soft and they tend to flop over. And then when that grass wants to shoot up its seed head, it starts to bring in lignin, which is essentially wood. And the lignin gives the plant the structure, the ability to hold itself upright so that it can have its seed heads sitting up high.
better chances for pollination and all those things that go along with plant reproduction. But the thing is, when lignin attaches itself to a fibre, that fibre is no longer digestible.
It probably would be if it sat around in the hindgut for a week, but the amount of time the hindgut microbes get to break down the fibres in the hindgut, anything that's lignified is essentially indigestible. And legume forages don't lignify themselves to the same extent that grass forages do, so they tend to be higher in energy, and therefore they tend to be better.
weight gain ingredients than what a… an older grassy forage will be. And the other thing that it brings in is this beautiful protein. So, leucine is… is quite high in protein, like, really, really super prime.
Leucine can be, you know, 25% protein or more, and there's very rare times where you'll have a horse that needs to put on weight and only needs to put on condition. Lots and lots of horses that need to put on weight need to put on body condition, so they need to put down a little bit of body fat.
And you also want them to build muscle. So there's a rare circumstance where a horse is very well muscly and you just need them to put on condition. So you'll find as we go through my list of five favorite ingredients that a lot of them have this combination of energy as well as good quality protein and leucine is one of them.
So, it's at the top of my list. I did put it on the list because it's not… it's not necessarily a major part of every diet, so all of my horses here.
and Spotty the Pony, who has come back to live with us again, they all get a little bit of lucerne each day, so most of them are getting 250 grams as a chaff. And I have that in the diet for various reasons, and in fact, someone requested.
A whole episode on chaff, so I'll talk a lot more about chaff in a future episode, one that will be coming up very soon. But the other horses that are in really good, the horses that are in really good condition, so my track horses, they don't get a lot of lucerne because it would put too much condition on them. They all get lucerne before they're ridden because we know that it reduces the risk of ulceration while they're being ridden.
But it's top of my list for weight gain because it is the first ingredient I go for when horses need to put on weight. And that also applies to performance horses too. So when we're struggling with, say, racehorses that are in work, they have to be a little bit careful. And this is where diet balancing comes in. So using a tool like My Happy Horse to make sure that we're not exceeding protein requirement and then causing.
you know, electrolyte deficiency issues because the protein, lots and lots of protein, will make horses urinate a lot, and then they dump a lot of electrolyte, and then they can tie up, particularly in hot weather. So you do have to be careful in high-performance horses that you're not overfeeding protein.
But lucerne with racehorses, if they're struggling to maintain weight, it's often something I'll go to for them as well. So instead of just having 2kg of lucerne a day, we'll increase that to 4kg per day for a period of time to help them just put a little bit of weight on.
So, if I had to choose a favourite ingredient out of all of the ingredients we can feed to horses, it probably would be lucerne, but you have to remember that nutrition is a puzzle. Maybe this is why I'm a nutritionist, because you can't have a favourite ingredient, really, because you need lots of ingredients to.
to make a balanced diet. But there is no single ingredient that will fully meet the nutrient requirements of any animal. So when we think about leucine, like it's got so many beautiful qualities, but it needs to go hand in hand with other ingredients to meet, say, for example, phosphorus requirements. So leucine is quite low in phosphorus, so we need to bring in.
other ingredients that will meet a horse's phosphorus requirement. So, with puzzle building at the, at the front of our mind, our next ingredient, my next favourite ingredient, and this, this is, um, earns its place in position number two, is full-fat soybean.
So, soybean, there's an episode, and I didn't write down its number, it's around 25, but don't quote me on that, about ingredient diversity. So, if you search within the Happy Horse Nutrition Podcast for ingredient diversity, it'll pop up for you.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:46:22
So, I talked in that episode about the pros and the cons of soybean, because soybean's such an interesting ingredient. So, in its raw form, soybean has got a multitude of what we call anti-nutritional factors, so things that will negatively affect the health of a horse, and also negatively affect us as humans.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:46:43
And to feed it, it has to be heat treated, and it has to be heat treated at the correct temperature and for the correct amount of time to denature all of those anti-nutritional factors. So one of the anti-nutritional factors it has is called trypsin inhibitor.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:47:00
And trypsin is a protein-digesting enzyme, so it's like a little pair of scissors whose specific job it is to go around and cut up protein into its single amino acid.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:47:11
Um, units so that the amino acids can be absorbed and then used by the horse to build protein and repair, um, you know, organs and do all the things that protein does in the body.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:47:24
If you feed raw soybean, there's this trypsin inhibitor, which is kind of like a piece of string that wraps itself around the end of the pair of scissors, and stops the trypsin enzyme from cutting up protein. And I have seen horses that have been fed raw soybean.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:47:38
in the form of soybean hulls that had not had any heat treatment, and these horses looked like tents. They'd lost so much.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:47:47
protein, because they were having… they couldn't… they were unable to digest any protein from their diet, because they had so much of this trypsin inhibitor in their body, or in their gastrointestinal tract, and then they were having to use their own muscles to meet the more essential requirements for protein.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:48:03
in their bodies, so they're mining their own protein reserves and…
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:48:07
losing all their top line, lost all their muscle over their rump, and things like that. So, soybean, to be fed safely, it has to be cooked properly. So, when I say full-fat soybean, it's generally extruded, and it's like this rich golden, it's beautiful looking stuff, rich golden, mealy, very oily.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:48:28
Feed ingredient and it's such a beautiful weight gain ingredient because it's super high in energy, so for those of you who speak in megajoules, it's around 15 megajoules per kilogram. For anyone who megacals per pound, which is such a foreign language to me, I have to convert everything and then go, that doesn't make sense, but it's 1.63 megacals per pound of energy, which to me doesn't sound very impressive, but.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:48:53
if that is your unit that you're used to, it'll hopefully, um, feel quite high to you. Um, and it's 37% crude protein, 18% oil, so it's an ingredient that has this.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:49:07
wonderful ability to condition a horse, so to give them more energy than what they strictly need, so that they can put on some body fat, gain some weight, and it also has got the best quality plant protein available to help a horse build muscle, and horses build muscle on this stuff like nothing else. It is amazing.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:49:27
how effective it is for building muscle. So, it's important to remember that protein in feed ingredients is not all the same, and episode 52 talks about this in detail on the Happy Horse Nutrition Podcast, so I'd love you to go back and check that one out.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:49:43
that there's essential amino acids and non-essential amino acids. So proteins are made up of roughly 20 amino acid building blocks.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:49:54
But the combination and types of amino acids that are in different proteins varies from plant source to plant source. And soybean is known as the highest quality plant protein available. And because it's got so much of the essential amino acids a horse really needs, it supports muscle building really well.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:50:14
So, when we bring full-fat soybean in, we're bringing all this energy in, and we're also bringing in this really, really high-quality protein.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:50:21
at the moment, I haven't been able to buy my full-fat soybean for… gosh, it must be about 6 weeks now. And my feed store has got soybean meal, and I've gone and looked at it a couple of times, and it's crazy, like, I know that it…
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:50:38
uh, is, you know, got a very high chance of being safe to feed, but I don't… I don't know this particular soybean meal.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:50:56
And so I haven't been game enough to buy it. And I've literally just jumped online and ordered a soy test kit, which is a color reaction. And you just take a little bit of the soybean, whatever the soybean product is. So it can be soybean whole, soybean meal, full fat soybean.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:51:05
And drop this liquid on it that's in the soy test kit, and if it goes bright pink, then it means that there's still active trypsin inhibitor in that product, and it's not safe to be fed to a horse, so…
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:51:20
I've actually, because I've been able to buy my full-fat soybean, I've actually just ordered one of those kits so that I can buy soybean meal, but make sure that I test it first to make sure that it's safe, because otherwise, if I put soybean meal in that is not safe to feed, it's like…
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:51:36
One step forward and two steps back. You know, you're putting protein in, you're putting some energy in, but because if it's still got active trypsin inhibitor, it will actually block protein digestion. And then, you know, we're two steps back. We would have been better off.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:51:52
not having it in the diet in the first place. So, it's a handy little tool. I will drop the link to the kit in the show notes, so if anyone's thinking, oh, I'd really like to have one of those, if you're using any soybean-based feed, it is a good idea to just test and keep.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:52:09
an eye on the quality of the soybean that… that's being used, but yes, my… my usual full-fat soybean, absolutely love the stuff. I'm feeling a little bit lost without it, and… and am…
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:52:21
Really feeling it in the diets, especially for a lay.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:52:25
Now off the track and I don't know whether it's just me imagining it, but I'm looking at her going far out, like you haven't had, you haven't had soybean for so long. And I swear that she's starting to just drop muscle a little bit, which I don't want her to do because we had her so beautifully muscled. So enough about full fat soybean. We'll move on to the ingredient that is third on the list. And I have said this before, but sorry to everyone else in the rest of the world, but it is lupins and they are an Australian luxury. I know you have them in.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:52:54
New Zealand as well, because you bring them over. And even for us, I'm in the east side of Australia, and we bring, I think, nearly all of our lupines over from the west. So even to get to us, they have to travel quite long distances.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:53:10
I love lupins. Everywhere I can use them, I use them in diets, and there's a… there's a few reasons. So, they… they have good quality protein, so it's not as good as soybean, but if we're… if we're using soybean already in the diet, then it's…
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:53:26
filling that little puzzle piece in, the really, really high quality protein. And then lupins come in in a supporting role for me, so… from a protein perspective. So they… they bring in nice protein, but I'm not expecting them to do the job that the soybean.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:53:41
protein can do. But the nice thing with lupins are that they're nearly 6% oil.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:53:47
Also quite high in energy. They're not as high in energy as the full fat soybean, but they're up there with a cereal grain in energy, but they have virtually no starch and very low water soluble carbohydrates. So they're non-structural carbohydrate content.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:54:04
is low, which means that I can put them in pretty much every horse's diet, because they, you know, they're safe for lemonitic horses, they're safe for horses that have got the PSSM form of tying up. They're great when you're wanting to, if you've got an off-the-track or something, that you're actively trying to keep starch.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:54:24
in their diet really low so that you can give their hindgut a chance to rehabilitate from, you know, perhaps being on a very high grain diet for a period of time. So there's lots of reasons why the low starch, low non-structural carbohydrate content is very useful.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:54:40
And they just, I just love them. Horses love them too. And the other nice thing about them is that they don't have the same anti-nutritional factors that soybean have, and in fact, they don't have anti-nutritional factors that are going to affect.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:54:55
a horse. So you can actually, you don't actually have to heat treat lupins to feed them.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:55:00
So I feed an extruded lupine just because it's convenient, and if I had to remember to soak lupines every day, my horses would go without them on a number of occasions, because I'd probably forget to do it, just with life being busy. Um, so I find the extruded version, um.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:55:16
very handy, but you don't have to have heat-treated lupins. Unlike soybeans, soybean has to be heat-treated. Lupins don't have to be heat-treated. And…
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:55:27
you can therefore buy whole lupins and soak them, or you can buy crushed lupins. The only reason we soak them or crush them is because they are so hard that you'd nearly break your horse's teeth if they… if you fed it to them whole.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:55:41
Um, so they need to be crushed just so that they can, they can chew them up, but they're not unsafe to feed uncooked, which, which also, you know, it just makes them such a, such a safe ingredient because you can't, you know, I just talked about buying a soy cheek.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:55:58
test kit for soybean, because I'm not game enough to buy a soybean meal that's unknown to me.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:56:06
and feed it to my horses, because I'm worried about the inter-nutritional factors. Lupins, you don't have to worry about that. They… they are safe to feed in any format. And… and here's me doing my favourites thing. Um, this is my list of five, and I'm gonna add, sneakily, one in here is lupin hulls, so same ingredient, just.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:56:26
just the hole from the outside. So, highly fermentable.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:56:30
High energy fiber and because it comes from lupins that don't have any anti-nutritional factors, they tend to be very safe. The only little risk with lupin holes is if you have a horse that is an absolute piglet and will vacuum its feed down without chewing very well, they do get very sticky and choke does become a risk. So if you've got a horse like that, either soak them or put them in with plenty of chaff so that you're making them.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:56:57
chew and salivate so that they can swallow them safely. Um, but, you know, soybean holes are such a common ingredient, and also very high in energy, and brilliant from that perspective, but there's always that risk that there's going to be the anti-nutritional factor.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:57:13
With them, and if you're trying to put weight on a horse and you're feeding soybean holes and you're not getting anywhere, it'd be worth checking the soybean holes to make sure that they have actually been heat treated properly and make sure that they're not giving you one step forward and two steps back.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:57:27
So lupine and lupine holes, a lot of it is because they're so safe to feed. If anyone doesn't know lupines in different parts of the world, there is lots of different types of lupine. So there's a bitter lupine that is actually quite toxic. It's got really high alkaloid.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:57:44
content. That's not the ones that I'm talking about. There's a sweet lupin, very low in alkaloid, and very, very safe to feed. So, I love lupins, and honestly, I think I'd really struggle if I had to go to a country and.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:58:01
And only do diets in that country if I wasn't able to use lupins. So I'm not sure why they're grown in.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:58:08
Or why they're not grown in other parts of the world. But it's an interesting curiosity to me that I've never looked into. Okay, so feed ingredient number four on the list is sugar beet pulp.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:58:22
So, I love sugar beet pulp. Uh, we don't, in Australia, have a sugar beet pulp industry, so it's a very expensive ingredient for us here, uh, as opposed to, say, in Japan, who do have a sugar beet pulp, or sugar, sorry, a beet.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:58:38
industries, so, um, growing beet for the purposes of extracting sugar, so our… all of our Australian sugar comes from, um.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:58:46
Sugar cane, the name just popped out of my head. It comes from sugar cane, the very, very tall, very pretty grass that we grow in the warm northern areas of Australia. But in colder climates, you tend to use beet for sugar production.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:59:03
And so, in Japan, we use masses of beet in diets, and in fact, pretty much every single horse that I work with in Japan, so be it a brood mare, weanlings, yearlings, young racehorses, right through to racehorses in.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:59:20
Full work. Um, they are all on beat pop.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:59:24
And it's such a… it's such an easy ingredient to work with in a diet, because it's a… it's a fibre, so the horses are extracting the energy from the beet via fermentation in the hindgut, which is a very natural process for them.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:59:40
And it means that we can get energy into their diet, but still have them digesting that energy in the way that evolution has set up their gastrointestinal tract to work. And I think any time.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:59:53
We can honor their ancient gastrointestinal tract and have it working the way it was designed to work means that they will stay healthier, because we're not sort of forcing them away from the diet that their gut was designed to.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:00:08
to digest. So that's one big tick in the beet box. And the same goes for the lupin holes and other high energy fibers because they're fermentable fibers. They just, they're much more natural and they do keep the hindgut healthier. They bring in fiber diversity. So, you know, you're keeping the number of species of microbes in the hindgut.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:00:32
higher because you're bringing in diverse sources of fiber. Um, and the other thing about beet is it's a little bit of a…
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:00:41
blank slate. So, it's got lots of energy, so, you know, in terms of energy, think of it as being equivalent to oats, but it's not a cereal grain, so you're able to feed… because cereal grains are our classic high-energy ingredient, and I will talk about them briefly in a minute, but.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:01:00
they're our… they're our classic go-to for weight gain diets. You know, if you had to put weight on a horse, you would… you would classically go to something like oats or a cooked grain.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:01:10
And so beet has got the same amount of energy as oats, and it's got quite a lot of calcium because when they wash the sugar out of the beet, they cut it up into these little matchstick pieces and then they put it in water that has got calcium carbonate in it.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:01:27
And they wash the sugar out in that water. So the calcium carbonate stays with the beet pulp, and that makes it quite high in calcium.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:01:41
And then we've got, um, a little bit of protein, and the protein's cool, we'll talk about that in a minute, but it's virtually… beet's virtually devoid of other nutrients, so there's not a lot in it other than…
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:01:52
energy, calcium, and a little bit of protein. Uh, and then, so it… it means that when you…
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:01:59
when you want to bring in energy, you're really just bringing in energy. And… and…
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:02:07
calcium, which you do have to be cautious of if you're already feeding lots of high calcium ingredients, but it's different to, say, lupins or the full-fat soybean. If we were wanting to bring in more energy and we only had those two ingredients, we would hit our upper protein threshold really quickly.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:02:26
Because in bringing in energy with those two ingredients, we're bringing in lots of protein, which is what makes them so useful in weight gain diets, because we want that protein, but there's also a limit to how much protein we want to put in a diet. So I would… I wouldn't, for example, if…
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:02:44
if I had a horse that was, you know, needing 3 to 4 kilograms of hard feed a day to put on weight.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:02:51
I wouldn't just feed lupins and soybean as that amount of feed. You would do the job from a calorie perspective, for sure. You would get enough energy into them, but their protein intake would be so high. And in hot weather, that can be problematic. In stabled environments, that can be problematic. And I'm just, I give myself ideas for podcasts for the future when I'm doing podcasts. So I will have to do one.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:03:16
on the downsides of having too much protein in the diet. But this is part of the thing that makes beet so useful, is you can bring in energy without bringing in a whole lot of other stuff. And there's not many ingredients that let us do that, that are not cereal grains.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:03:32
So, um…
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:03:35
And the and the other cool thing with beat.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:03:38
is that it's around 9% protein, so it doesn't have a lot of protein. It's similar, again, so it's similar energy to oats, and it's also similar protein content to oats. But if you look at the protein…
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:03:52
So the amino acids that sugar beet pulp contains, it's actually pretty cool. So if you compare it side by side to a 9% protein oat, the beet is higher in essential amino acids, lysine and threonine, which are two of the three most limiting amino acids. And then it's also higher in isoleucine and valine, which are two of the branched chain amino acids.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:04:16
So you would never feed beet pulp.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:04:19
as a protein source, ever. You would never ever bring beet pulp in if you wanted to add protein to a horse's diet. But, if you've got a horse that's needing to gain weight, and as part of that gaining weight, you're wanting it to put on muscle, in using beet pulp.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:04:34
you're bringing in small amounts of protein, but it's actually quite high quality protein, or at least higher in quality than what you would bring in if you were using a cereal grain. And so, it's just… it's an interesting, curious little, um…
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:04:46
feature of beet pulp that I really love about it. I also love with beet pulp, there's something about… I will feed it dry, so, um, a couple of my horses get beet in their feed, and depending on what else is in their feed, and depending on how much beet they get, I will happily throw some of it in.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:05:05
dry. Um, but there's something so satisfying about soaking beet. I don't know what it is, and I don't think it's just a me thing. I think a lot of us share this. It's just, you know.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:05:15
the fact that it expands so much, um, it feels really lovely to me when it's soaked. And I also think, too, for horses, if they're not getting… I mean, if they're on weight gain diets, they probably are getting a bit more feed, um, anyway, but it just bulks their feed up and it makes their feed taste nice. Maybe it is just a…
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:05:36
me thing, but, um, yeah, I love, I love that, uh, about beet.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:05:41
And then number five on my list, and this genuinely is in my feed room pretty much all of the time. And it's interesting watching my dogs love it. We had the gorgeous Tilly here, an English backpacker living with us for a little while, and she was like, oh my goodness, what is that stuff? It smells so good.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:06:01
But is copper meal. So copper meal is the white flesh of a coconut after it has been dried and then pressed to get the oil out of it. So it's a byproduct of the coconut oil industry.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:06:18
And, and it's, it's been, it's been around now since the 80s, and I remember, um, back when I was a very young nutritionist, people used to get quite upset about copper meal, and I remember someone, um, funnily commenting that.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:06:33
You know, you never see a horse climbing a coconut tree. Well, no, of course you don't. You don't very often see them wandering around, beet pulp, paddocks or lupine, crops either. But but we feed our modern day horses all of these ingredients because this is what we have at our disposal to feed them.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:06:53
And, um, coppers…
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:06:56
it's interesting, again, a lot of these… all of these ingredients are interesting, but it's interesting, again, from a nutrient makeup perspective. So, it's high in energy, partly because it's quite high still in residual oil, so the… the oil extraction is not, um, solvent extraction, so they don't…
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:07:14
They don't use chemical to extract the oil. They press the oil out of the copper, which means that there's a lot of residual oil. So the copper meal that I use is around 12% oil, which is quite high. And then that gives it, along with its fermentable fiber, that gives it quite a high energy content.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:07:34
And it's also 21% protein, so it's quite high in protein, and I remember there was often heated debates about, you know, the protein quality of copper meal, too, over the years, and people getting upset because they'd say it was poor quality protein.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:07:49
And other people, you know, saying, no, it's good, but… and both sides of the conversation were right.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:07:55
Now, if you compare copper meal to soybean, yes, it is low-quality protein, because the soybean has just got so much of the essential amino acids that a horse needs that it is the premium-quality protein, and copper meal just doesn't have those levels of.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:08:13
the essential amino acids. But it's a little bit like beet. We would never, ever put copper meal into diets when we were wanting high-quality protein. So if all we're wanting to do for a diet is add high-quality protein in, soybean is your.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:08:29
is your top choice there without question um but the cool thing is with the copper meal I always use it as a uh well I use it for a couple of reasons I use it as a weight gain ingredient um so um old poet who is 23 years old has been called up for duty my my niece Remy wants to go.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:08:54
to pony camp this year. And I'm like, righto, old thing, she just absolutely adores him. He's not actually my horse, I don't think anymore, because Rem's claimed him, but, um, you know, he's, he's in work at the moment, because he needs to get fit to go and do, do five, six days at a, at a pony camp.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:09:08
And it's winter. He's 23 years old, so he's not a young man anymore. And he just is needing that bit of extra energy because he's in work now. And this was one of the first things I brought in for him to up his energy content. He's metabolic, so he's, you know, he's cresty necked, even though I can just see a faint shadow of his ribs at the moment.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:09:29
Um, so I do need to be a little bit careful with the ingredients that I do feed him.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:09:35
Um, but copper meal's so handy because it brings in this energy, but it also, for him, brings in protein, um, and it's better quality protein than what I would be able to bring in if I was using a cereal grain.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:09:51
Now, for him, of course, being metabolic, I couldn't use a cereal grain, but if it was a horse that could have grain, when you look at the copper meal amino acid content versus, say, the barley, a barley amino acid content.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:10:06
You're getting much better amino acid content by using copper meal as an energy source.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:10:12
than what you would get if you were using Bali as your energy source. So, when you compare it to…
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:10:19
other equivalent energy sources, it's got really good quality protein. It's like this little extra bonus that you get when you feed copper meal, and of course, it is a new fibre source in the diet as well, so it also contributes to.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:10:35
Uh, fibre diversity in the diet, which then contributes to microbiome diversity, and, you know, we… we are starting to see, um, more and more research around microbiome diversity, and say, for example, reduced colic risk when horses have got a larger, um, microbiome diversity.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:10:52
Better behaviour because they're more likely to have the microbes that will communicate positively via the gut-brain axis. There's so many benefits of higher microbiome diversity. So copper meal as well as beet pulp as well as lupin holes will all contribute to that fibre diversity in the diet.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:11:13
um, have that lovely flow-on effect of increased microbiome diversity. Uh, and it really does… my horses love copper meal. It really does smell nice. Um, it has that similar…
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:11:27
similar, um… what's the word, uh… ugh, I'm not going to be able to think of it, but the feel, so, you know, you can soak it, and it will, you know, it puffs up and gets nice and soft, feels lovely, uh, to feed as well, um, so I…
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:11:43
At the moment, throw my beet and my copper meal in a bucket together and let them, let them soak, put the beet on the bottom and the copper meal on top because it tends to soak up water a lot faster. And then they just soak together for however long I've got. And then they go in on top of my feeds and they, yeah, they really do, they really do feel and smell lovely as a combination together. So I do, I do love feeding them together.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:12:09
Then the other… the other thing with copper meal, and… and also, uh, soybean fits into this category as well, and… and people will sometimes get very upset about it, is they're high in phosphorus.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:12:21
So, phosphorus…
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:12:23
If if you have too much phosphorus in a diet and not enough calcium, then you will get a phosphorus induced calcium deficiency. And that is definitely not a good thing. The horse will end up with what was traditionally called Miller's disease or brand disease or big head disease.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:12:38
And it is just a phosphorus-induced calcium deficiency.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:12:43
But you have to remember that nutrition is a puzzle. So, when we bring in ingredients, they all bring their own set of nutrients with them, and yes, copper meal and soybean are high in phosphorus, but then we're combining them with ingredients like lucerne.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:13:01
and beet pulp that are high in calcium. So, when you put them all together.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:13:05
They actually work really nicely together. And in fact, if we didn't have some ingredients that were high in phosphorus, we would really struggle to meet a horse's phosphorus requirement. So I look at the high phosphorus content of soybean and copper meal as a good thing.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:13:20
Phosphorus is actually hideously expensive, so when I'm doing commercial feed formulations, so recipes for commercial products that you would then buy as bag products from your feed store.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:13:33
Phosphorus is one of the most expensive ingredients to bring into one of those bagged products. So, if I can get phosphorus from a natural source, it means that I can, you know, keep the rations a lot cheaper than they otherwise would be.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:13:48
So if I was doing a, say, a lucerne and beet pulp based ration, I would have to bring in a heap of mineral phosphorus to balance the calcium phosphorus ratio up as opposed to if I was using, you know, soybean and copper meal and other high phosphorus ingredients in amongst them, then that would bring my phosphorus in for me as well as.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:14:10
um, other nutrients that those ingredients bring with them. So the high phosphorus content of copper meal is a… is a positive thing, um, because it allows me to balance up the… the high calcium nature of, um, the leucine and the beet and…
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:14:29
And lupins, from a calcium-phosphorus perspective, they're almost even, so they're not very high in either, and they're not terribly unbalanced either. They'll probably lean towards more phosphorus than calcium, but it's neither here nor there with lupins, so they're an easy one. Again, makes them really easy to fit into rations, which is part of the reason why I love them so much.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:14:47
So that's my top five. So lucerne, full fat soybean, lupins and sneakily snuck in there, lupin hulls, beet and coprim meal. And I do, I just, I probably will do another weight gain ingredient episode, but I do just want to mention cereal grains here. So they are definitely a brilliant weight gain ingredient for horses who can have them safely.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:15:14
They do have to be heat treated properly. So with the exception of oats, every cereal grain needs to be heat treated properly so that the horses can actually digest them safely. I do talk about that in detail in episode 45, which is all about feeding grain safely. So if you're wondering about cereal grains, I would.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:15:36
my, my next go-to's, um, spoiler alert here for the next episode, but my next go-to's after these, after these five ingredients would be cereal grains and oils. Um, so…
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:15:48
Yes, they definitely are, and especially if it was a performance horse doing quite hard work. So, you know, polo horses, polo cross horses, race horses, anything that is working quite hard, eventers, endurance horses, they can definitely benefit from cereal grain in their diet and oils, of course, being the highest energy ingredient.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:16:10
have a place up there as well for weight gain ingredients. So I'm sure you all notice what I just did is add another couple of ingredients onto the end of my top 5. But do if you, if you do have a wall struggling with weight gain, do you go back and listen to episode 57, because that that brings the whole structure of a weight gain.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:16:35
um, into place for you. So, there's, there's lots, honestly, the most important.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:16:41
part of a weight gain diet is getting your horse's hindgut functioning properly, and I do talk about that in detail in that episode. But yes, if you're looking for weight gain ingredients, leucine, full-fat soybean, lupins, sugar beet pulp, and copper meal are absolutely brilliant. They're nearly always in my feed shed. They are what is being fed to.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:17:02
most of my horses at this point in time towards the end of our winter, and yeah, I love them. And with that, I probably better go and mix up their feeds, and I will…
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:17:18
See you in the next episode.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:17:24
I might just do that again, David. I don't know what happened then. I just lost my brain.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:17:37
And with that, it is time for me to go and mix up my own horse's feed. So thank you very much for being here. If you have got the time, I would absolutely love you to follow the Happy Horse Nutrition podcast.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:17:52
Uh, give us a rating, and if you know someone who is struggling with a horse with weight gain, please share this episode with them.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:18:00
Thank you again, and I will catch you in the next episode.
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