Horse Nutrition Q&A: Clover, Protein, Gut Health & Fibre Diversity

Podcast #69

How high can the starch content of clover really get? Can lupins be too high in protein? And does adding lots of different fibre sources actually help your horse’s hindgut microbiome?

In this Q&A episode, Dr Nerida and Orla unpack a mix of practical horse nutrition questions, including clover and insulin dysregulation, faba beans and resistant starch, high-protein diets, gastric ulcers, and why even a skinny horse can still be metabolically at risk.

They also explore one of the biggest emerging areas in equine nutrition: forage diversity and the gut microbiome and how much ingredient variety may be enough to make a meaningful difference to the microbiome.

Plenty of practical feeding advice, a few rabbit holes, and one genuinely scary clover statistic!

📲 To check your horse’s diet and KNOW you are feeding right, download the MyHappy.Horse app ⁠https://apps.apple.com/au/app/myhappy-horse/id6633422324⁠

💛 We’d love if you would leave us a rating, follow the show and share this episode with a friend, it truly helps us get this information in front of more horse owners.

🩺 And if you’d like to get in touch with Orla, Orla.lyons@randlab.com.au

• Full Episode Transcript

  69. Horse Nutrition Q&A: Clover, Protein, Gut Health & Fibre Diversity

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:07:46

  Hello, and welcome to the Happy Horse Nutrition Podcast, and as a…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:07:52

  Oh, what are we going to call you today? Or is this… you're not really a special event anymore, you're more like a regular…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:07:59

  You're just part of the furniture now on the Happy Horse Nutrition Podcast. I'm an EMS girly, Nerida. We already did this. Anyway, welcome back to the Happy Horse Nutrition Podcast, Ola.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:08:13

  Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. It's so good to have you back. So Q&A session today.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:08:18

  Let's jump in, I reckon.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:08:22

  Jump in. Well, going straight back into the last one we did, talk to me quickly about our little friend Clover that has… Oh, yes.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:08:30

  Sent me down a horrible, slippery EMS girly lifestyle. So backstory, if you haven't caught the episode about laminitis and feeding strategies for the particularly high risk springtime.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:08:46

  Orla asked me what the starch or non-structural carbohydrate content of clover was, and I went, oh, I don't really know, I've never… I had looked it up, but I didn't have an answer off the top of my head, and I still don't have a brilliant answer, other than it is highly variable.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:09:04

  And can be very, very, very high.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:09:08

  Now, hi. Are you ready? I don't know that you want to know this. I don't. I really don't want to know. So, this is a Food and Ag Organisation paper. Actually, it's Agronomy 2018, but I found it on the FAO website, but the journal article, I think, would be Agronomy.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:09:27

  And so this research was done looking at white clover specifically because there's so many different types of clover and they're very, very different. This looked at white clover specifically, but there's so much variability even within white clover.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:09:44

  And this paper actually says…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:09:49

  that, um, the best performing 5% of the white clover population, so they just did something like 180 different strains of white clover in this research, and when they say best performing, they're talking about fattening cattle, right? So they want the starch.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:10:05

  So, the best performing is the worst thing for us.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:10:11

  in the EMS club that we started in that episode, or the Insulin Dysregulation Club. We'll have to come up with a good name for it. So it's like membership is free. You get to come in when you feel the pain of- Gonna claw your eyeballs out every day. When you feel the pain of feeding an insulin dysregulated horse. So it says the best performing 5% of the white clover population contained of their dry weight.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:10:36

  More than.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:10:39

  25% starch.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:10:42

  25. That's like a grain. You're making my eyes water like I don't know if I'm crying of laughter or just crying. That's that's nuts.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:10:53

  Um, and, and so, so if you happen to have gotten that particular type of white clover, we tend to talk to about, we talk about white clover, oh, it's white clover versus red clover versus, you know, strawberry clover versus whatever.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:11:06

  but even within white clover, there's this huge variation, um… and… and so, evidently, some of them can be very, very high in starch. And it's interesting, it's a… I wish, um…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:11:20

  I wish I could show you this, but there's a graph in this paper that has got the milligrams of starch per gram of dry weight, and they've measured it at the end of day, and then also at the end of night. So remember, in that.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:11:36

  laminitis episode. We talked about how plants photosynthesize during the day, and they make all these carbohydrates.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:11:42

  But then they metabolize them overnight. Yep. So these, some of these, um, clovers.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:11:48

  On this graph, they're getting up to 150 grams, so 15% starch by the end of day, but then by the end of night, they must be back down to…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:12:00

  Like…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:12:03

  Five? Oh, hang on, that's people. Yeah.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:12:07

  No, actually.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:12:09

  50 would be

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:12:11

  5%. So they're getting down to, like, less than 1% overnight.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:12:17

  Oh, wow. Hmm.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:12:19

  So I can let, let 'em out and graze on clover at first thing. Only if it hasn't been frozen overnight though, remember?

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:12:26

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if it's, if it's warm, but I mean, I'd still be, I'd still be really careful. I'm not going to do it, because it scares me, but I'm like, hmm, I wonder now. So the starch reduces dramatically, but then they also have, um, what have they got? They've got sucrose, which doesn't, it doesn't.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:12:45

  It doesn't drop down so much overnight.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:12:50

  And glucose… actually, this is going to blow your theory apart.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:12:54

  Oh, no, milligrams of… milligrams of glucose per gram. No, the glucose is only tiny, so, like, 3 milligrams of glucose per gram, so less than 1%. It's… it's really small. Yeah.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:13:08

  There you go. See? Unlucky clover. Yeah. So, so yes, to answer your question, it's not a definitive… this is… well, you can't say this is how much such is in clover, because it's all got to be…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:13:18

  Very different, but sometimes passive levels, unlike lucerne.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:13:25

  Which is… it doesn't… it doesn't accumulate starch like that. Well, actually, hold on. You did, um… you did a lot of cattle stuff before you went into equine.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:13:35

  If this research paper is on cattle fattening.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:13:40

  I thought we don't let cattle graze on clover because it can give them bloat. Only sometimes. Side topic. Oh, oh. Yeah. So, so, so bloat, I often, I often say we rode the wrong species. Like, cattle would have been so much easier to feed, but…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:13:56

  Bloat's a little bit like managing insulin dysregulated horses because sometimes the legumes are safe and sometimes they are not. So I remember as a kid we were moving cattle on horses and we were moving them through a pasture up to the yards and what we were doing with them, but they had to walk through this pasture that had lots of clover in it.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:14:22

  And they were all like, we were wandering along. We always moved everything really slowly on the farm. It was always on horseback, so it was just, you know, we'd just kind of wander along with them. And they would nibble on graze as they went along. But I remember this one particular day, and it wasn't a very big paddock that we had to move them through. They were bloaty by the time they got out of this paddock from munching on the clover as they went through. We were like, whoa! Like, it was just a really, really high-risk day.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:14:51

  cloudy, windy days, uh, higher, and I could be saying stuff that's completely wrong now, because I haven't done ruminant nutrition for a very, very long time, and I really didn't do it. I did dairy nutrition for my honours, but…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:15:03

  that was about the extent of my ruminant nutrition, but cloudy, windy days, like, we used to… we used to be really cautious on cloudy, windy days, and I think to… and nitrate would likely play a role in that. So there's certain compounds in clover that will create a stable foam in the rumen, and then they can't burp out the gas.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:15:24

  that's being produced and they bloat. Such a flaw on both animals. Horses, they can't vomit, they can't burp, they can't eat. This is one of those, it's an issue that we've created because we've taken these animals that have evolved for such a long time on a very specific diet and then we change the way they're.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:15:46

  they eat, and so we then have to deal with the fallout of that. And not only… with lemurites, it's not only the way they eat, it's the… it's the way they… well, they don't move very much if they're…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:15:58

  domestic and in small paddocks or stables even. And so they're not exercising much either. And they also are usually not, you know, going through very harsh winters with not a lot of food and then coming out and fattening up again in summer. So they don't have this, you know, gain weight, lose weight, gain weight. They're just gain weight, gain weight, gain weight.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:16:20

  There's lots, there's lots that domestication has contributed to in these spaces. So there, it's not a flaw in their design, it's just the fact that that design doesn't fit neatly into our modern day management.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:16:34

  Well, uh-uh. No, we ruin everything we touch, humans. So, um, I think you might be regretting asking me that, that question about Clover, but now we know. Up to 25%, that's, that's, um, what did I, what was my word today? Mind-bogglement.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:16:50

  Mind-boggling. It's a noun. What happens if it's mind-boggling? Because it's not a noun.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:16:57

  Oh, she's such a geek, guys. Such a geek. I needed a mind bogglement noun. But that's boggled my brain. I didn't realize that about Clover. Anyway, let's move on to something less depressing.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:17:11

  Anyway, moving on, staying on our little leggy me happy friends.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:17:16

  Talk to me about someone asked me about faba beans and resistant starch.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:17:25

  and, uh, potentially about them going hand-in-hand, and I don't know much about resistant starch, and all I knew is that we used to use faba beans with Pride's feeds, correct? In our…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:17:36

  high grain feeds, so… Yep. Yeah, can you talk to me about that? I love fava beans, and I have to say that, because my mum is Egyptian, and Egyptians eat so many fava beans, and… They're white, aren't they?

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:17:52

  The ones I know are brown. Lupins are white.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:17:57

  More white? Opens are white, right. But fava beans are… Yeah, chickpea. Yeah, they've normally got the brown seed coat on them. Maybe white when you take that off in the middle.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:18:08

  But anyway, they eat full and you eat it for breakfast and you put all these yummy Middle Eastern spices on it and olive oil and oh, it's really good. And falafel as well.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:18:24

  Often, not always, but yeah, the Egyptian version is often made out of fava bean. And I distinctly remember Peter Pride calling me one day and going, Nerida, we need to make some adjustments to some of the feeds because the Egyptians have bought all of our fava beans. I'm like, damn you, Egyptians, travel bankers. So, I mean, I love them. I love to use them in formulations.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:18:53

  And typically would use them alongside lupins. So they're similar to lupins in some ways, similar protein content, but they're very different to lupins in that lupins are like maybe 2% starch, if that, very low in starch. Faber beans are much higher.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:19:12

  30 to 45% starch. They're quite… they're more like a… like, peas are quite starchy as well. Um, so they… they do have enough starch to… to warrant that we should be cooking them.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:19:26

  to feed them because the starch is not going to be, and I've not, I've not tested faba bean starch, just to put that out there. I've never actually run it through our little in vitro assay where we test starch digestibility.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:19:41

  But my assumption would be that I haven't tested a plant starch that is naturally really digestible for a horse, so my assumption would be that it would be quite indigestible, which is why people refer to it as resistant starch.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:19:56

  Because resistant starch in humans is starch that is not digested in the small intestine.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:20:03

  That's low GI stuff, right? It is. It is, but I think there's a massive flaw in that thinking, because it's… Sorry, I should say, in humans, it's low GI. Yeah, but even in humans, it's a big flaw in the thinking, because I don't think…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:20:21

  human nutrition, and I must, um, I'm having dinner tomorrow night with two human dietitians, so I'll have to have this conversation with them, but, um, I don't think human nutrition has thought, um, to the extent that we have thought about.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:20:38

  Um, to this point, in animal nutrition, about the impact that resistant starch actually has on the who's who of the microbes in our large intestine.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:20:47

  So if we're dumping, and this is like high fibre white bread does my head in, because I'm like, it's not fibre, it's starch. It's sugar. Well, it's starch. Because you can create resistant starch. If you heat it and cool it, then it's…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:21:02

  becomes resistant to small intestinal digestion, and you actually create resistant starch. So, um, I think for some of these breads that are, you know, the high-fiber breads, fiber in human nutrition, as far as I understand it, is in… this is classification in Australia, is fiber.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:21:20

  that is a carbohydrate that is not digested in the small intestine. So technically, resistant starch.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:21:27

  is a fibre.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:21:29

  in human diets. Exactly. Yeah, but then it would ferment, like, starch in the large intestine. So, I, I, and I don't, and I haven't, I haven't, um.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:21:40

  read, like, I know I've, I've seen studies looking at, um, you know, populations of people who will eat certain, um.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:21:49

  plants that have got natural resistant starch, and it apparently is, you know, has got benefits in their gastrointestinal tract, but I think that's a very different thing to deliberately dumping a whole heap of resistant wheat starch into a large intestine and calling it.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:22:04

  fibre, but certainly in a… I should stop talking about human nutrition, because I don't actually know what I'm talking about, but um… certainly in horses, and I recorded a podcast this morning about.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:22:19

  performance horses and hindgut microbe diversity. And there's multiple papers now that show that the more diverse the microbiome in a horse's hindgut, and the more fiber fermentation capacity the microbes have, the better the performance.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:22:39

  And, um, also multiple papers showing that if you put starch into the hindgut, you reduce microbiome diversity, and one of the papers actually specifically showed that when the starch fermentation metabolic pathways were present.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:22:53

  performance was worse. So I've, I've not ever found a reason.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:23:00

  to dump starch into a horse's hindgut. Other than, the only very, very edge cases for me, and I've only ever done it once in my entire career, was a horse that was, had, kept getting etralis.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:23:17

  in his hindgut, and I'm like, right, well, we need to keep your hindgut a little bit acidic so that it… you don't… you don't keep forming enteraliths. I mean, it had… it had surgery multiple times, like, this was a… a last ditch. Yeah, it was just something, like, there's horses that are prone to enteralith.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:23:33

  Um, and so I… I actually… this is the only horse I've ever, ever put on cracked corn.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:23:41

  It might hurt to do it. It was a long, long time ago now, and I don't know whether I'd still do that. I was a much, much younger nutritionist back then. I was like, well, I know something that will acidify the hindgut, and we didn't give him so much that we caused acidosis, of course, but it was just something to keep the pH of his hindgut.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:24:03

  lower to… to stop these enteralists from forming, which will normally form when… Oh, that's how they form. Well, they… they normally form when the… when the hindgut is more alkaline.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:24:28

  So, yeah. And we knew that his hindgut was alkaline from memory. It was a long time ago, but I remember going, oh, we need to acidify his gut. So, other than that, I've never found a reason or a time when.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:24:31

  Putting starch into a horse's hindgut is a good idea.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:24:39

  Right, there you go, Fun Fact Friday. So yeah, to answer your question about… to answer your question about fava beans, a beautiful feed ingredient, but I'd want them heat treated.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:24:51

  Yep.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:24:54

  I think my internet connection's not very good.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:25:01

  Come back, Ola.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:25:11

  Hmm.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:25:22

  Hang on, David. I just lost my everything. Oh, hang on. I'm not even connected to the internet.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:27:13

  Shit.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:27:36

  Sorry, David, sitting here listening to me swear as I try to get all the way to the thing. She's coming.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:27:44

  Hey, there she is. Sorry. I don't know what happened then. Everything just dropped out on this end.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:27:49

  You were slowly just getting worse and worse and worse and I was like, I'm picking up what she's saying. Nah, nah, nah, I've got it. The good thing is the audio, you were fine and my audio is fine because it doesn't need me to be on Zoom for that. So I think we did it.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:28:07

  I think we got that.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:28:09

  I think we finished that up.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:28:12

  Yep. Oh, cool. Just, yeah, no cooking. We're cooking paper bins. Cooking paper bins.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:28:21

  All right, next question.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:28:28

  Great, maybe laser training. Oh, Lupins.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:28:31

  Can they be too high in protein?

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:28:35

  For a normal horse. Normal horse. It's funny. Something else said to me this week, someone was saying something was being said about lupins being bad for horses because they were something, something. And all I can think is…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:28:50

  There, they… it's like my favourite ingredient, one of my favourite ingredients. Um, uh, yeah, they… I mean, yes, they can, but it depends… depends what the rest of the diet looks like. So, you gotta remember, and this is where people come unstuck with nutrition.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:29:05

  They forget that nutrition is a puzzle.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:29:10

  So, there is no single ingredient that is a perfect ingredient for a horse, because we could look at, um, I don't know, we could look at oats.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:29:22

  And go, well, they're too low in protein.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:29:27

  But for who? Like, if we're looking at a brood meat, like, yeah, they're too low in protein, but if we're looking at a… at a, um, brood meat just on oats, that's a problem. But if you're looking at oats as part of a diet with lupins and soybean and leucine and all that stuff, then you're not feeding the oats for…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:29:46

  protein, you're feeding them for energy. So if you look at lupins and go, are they too high in protein?

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:29:54

  It depends who they're being fed to. I mean, if you're talking about a brood mare, again, on low-quality pasture, they're not high enough in protein. It's really, really hard to meet a lactating brood mare's protein requirement. If you were talking about an endurance horse training in a hot climate, and also getting a lot of.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:30:16

  alfalfa hay, then, yeah, they probably are too high in protein to feed in any more than just a, you know, small token amounts as… as part of, you know, ingredient variety or something in the diet. So it… it just… it depends. I mean, all of my horses are getting lupins.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:30:34

  at the moment. Some of them are getting token amounts, because I feel mean not putting some of the lupins in their bin, but, like, literally, you know, Spotty would be getting a quarter of a cup, like, it's not going to be doing anything, and Popcorn wouldn't be getting much more than that, because she doesn't need the… the energy in them, because I'm…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:30:51

  trying to control their weight. Um, but then Poet, who is 23 and in work and reasonably lean at the moment, he's getting, like, half a dipper.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:31:04

  Yep.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:31:05

  And if it was really bad drought conditions, and our pastures were really poor quality, then Breeze, our very old mare, might be getting more than a dipper. You know, like, it's just… it just depends.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:31:19

  the horse is being fed to you, the climate is being fed in, the… what the rest of the diet looks like. This is why I bought people to use My Happy Horse, because then you can see… Finally! She plugs it! She does her own plug! I thought I was gonna have to feed that to you!

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:31:36

  Oh yeah, I forget too. I'm over again. Fun, fun, fun, fun. I love to mention my happy horse wedded.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:31:46

  I mean, this is what it's designed to do, right? It's designed to show you that jigsaw puzzle, so that if you're worried that, you know, if you've heard from someone, oh, lupins are too high in protein, but then you put it into your horse's diet with your pasture and your hay and your workload and all of that stuff.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:32:04

  they might fit beautifully in there. And it might be that, you know, 250 grams a day fits beautifully, as opposed to 860, whatever. Like, you have to find the right amount of.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:32:20

  a particular ingredient for your horse. But it's a little bit like people saying, well, mill run's too high in phosphorus.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:32:28

  or rice bran's too high in phosphorus. I'm like, yeah, but if you're feeding a diet that's got lucent hay and…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:32:36

  a calcium-based gut supplement, you need the phosphorus, because you have to balance the diet up. Like, yes, if you just feed that ingredient, it's too high in phosphorus, but no one ever feeds one ingredient.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:32:49

  like that. Well, I shouldn't say… She says no one. You're not in the field anymore, Nerida. I should never say no one, but it, you know, it's got to be a jigsaw puzzle. You use this ingredient for these nutrients, and you use that ingredient for those nutrients, and you bring them all together, and I guess that's part of the reason why.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:33:10

  um, complete feeds or fortified feeds are good, because hopefully a nutritionist who understands that puzzle concept has brought all of the ingredients together for you, and then you don't really have to think about it. But if you… if you do.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:33:25

  want to use, like, mix your own feeds, then this is… what you're working through is, where am I going to get that nutrient? Where am I going to get these nutrients? So, I mean, yes, lupins are high in protein, they're, like, 30…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:33:37

  They vary depending on the lupin, 28 to 30 something percent protein. Oh, wow. Right.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:33:46

  Fine. Yeah, well, they're…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:33:49

  And we feed them for protein, right? Like we, I mean, we feed lupins for energy, but you wouldn't, you wouldn't put, well, I wouldn't put lupins into a diet where I was just wanting energy. So say if I had a racehorse and I was just wanting to top up, like I just wanted a bit more energy, I wouldn't use lupins to do that because I don't, I don't want the protein as well. I'd bring in a cereal grain or an oil or a high energy, like a lower protein, higher energy fibre, like sugar beet pulp or something like that.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:34:18

  Or a faba bean. No, but see, faba beans have got the same amount of protein as lupins. They're high in protein as well. Oh, I thought faba beans were lower in protein. They'll be around the same. They'll be around the same amount of protein. Okay. They vary just depending on the quality of the.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:34:35

  of the bean. But yeah, they're upwards of that 30 something percent protein as well.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:34:43

  And this is why we use them in rations, like, you don't bring those ingredients in unless you want to bring in their protein.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:34:50

  Yeah, yeah. So then, just saying, you said, um, lupins for, I'm just thinking, coming into spring and summer.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:34:59

  Um, because I'm seeing a lot of lupins being fed in diets now, so just going back on feeding a very high protein diet in a very hot, humid climate.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:35:09

  The downfall effect. Yeah. I actually need, I actually need to do a whole podcast on this, but the, the.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:35:15

  problem with doing that is when you… when you feed excess protein to horses, it doesn't hurt them as such, because they… they can process it, their bodies process it, and they… essentially what they do is they cut the nitrogen off the protein, and then they use the rest of the protein like it's a carbohydrate. They just burn it for…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:35:32

  energy. Um, but then they've got this nitrogen that they have to get rid of, so it goes, um, out through the kidneys and gets… gets washed out of the body in the urine, but it takes quite a lot of water to do that, so they… they need to… they need to process that nitrogen with quite a lot of water, which means.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:35:52

  they drink more, but then they urinate more, um, and that can cause a couple of problems. So if it's a stabled horse.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:36:00

  And it's urinating a lot of nitrogen. It's, you know, a lot of nitrogen is coming out in the urine. You can get that really strong ammonia buildup in the stables, which is good for them. Air quality becomes a problem. And then the other problem, and I see this a lot, is that.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:36:17

  Um, when they're urinating a lot to get rid of the nitrogen, they're also dumping a whole heap of electrolyte.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:36:23

  And they become electrolyte deficient, and a little bit dehydrated, and then they'll tie up.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:36:31

  Yeah. So there was one trip to Japan, it was a few years ago now, and it was… I was there in summer, and it had been a really hot summer for them. Like, hot, and then it's humid because it's so surrounded by…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:36:47

  water, and there was horses in some of the… some of the racing stables that had tied up so badly, they'd actually damaged their muscles so much that they lost their top lines and… and muscles over their rump and stuff, and they were feeding… Oh, I didn't know that. …feeding quite high-protein diets, like lots of soybean meal, lots.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:37:06

  of soybean meal. And so they were having to get rid of all this excess protein. And then the only thing I could really put down the severe tying up episodes to was this loss of electrolytes and then tying up. And I see it nearly every year in Australia too, you'll get a stable that feeds lots of clover hay or lots of lucid hay.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:37:28

  And the same thing happens. Lots of protein, they have to dump all the nitrogen, then they get electrolyte deficiency, and then they tie up.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:37:35

  Yep.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:37:36

  You're up.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:37:37

  There you go. It's a random one.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:37:41

  I've heard a lot of people saying, when they see horses with stomach ulcers.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:37:48

  To not feed…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:37:50

  like, oaten… no, what is it? Yeah. Don't feed a rough hay, because it's irritating on the oceans.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:37:58

  Don't know.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:38:00

  I actually don't know on that one. Um, I mean, it makes sense. I just thought it was a very interesting comment. I've heard it many, many, many, many times. Yeah, it makes sense. It'd be really interesting to know whether, um, you know, for horses that are being treated for ulceration, whether the type of hay.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:38:16

  Makes a difference.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:38:18

  Um, there is a study that showed weanlings on loose and chaff, I think they were weanlings, um, had, um, like, glandular ulcerations, so down, and I think, is it the pyloric ridge? And you, like, my expert on this now.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:38:37

  Um, where the, where the food leaves the stomach. So… The exit of the stomach. From memory, there was ulceration around there, and there was, there was some…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:38:46

  assumption, um, that… that may have been because the chaff was quite sharp, and then they… and if they weren't chewing it, and weanlings, classics for not chewing, I don't like feeding oats to weanlings because they don't chew you very well.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:39:00

  Um, they're like little kids.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:39:02

  if you see weanlings that are on oats, you'll find lots of whole oat in their manure, because they just kind of don't spend much time chewing. So maybe if they're inhaling this chaff, and it was sharp, and I see occasionally people say, oh, you shouldn't feed loose in chaff because it causes ulceration, or there's.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:39:21

  studies that were followed up after that one that said, oh, no, actually, we haven't found that… that same ulceration in horses fed, um… I don't know whether they're fed…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:39:31

  the, um, chaff, or whether it was just lucerne. There was one German study I read that they fed lucerne to see if they could also cause ulceration, like they saw in the chaff thing. But anyway, um, long roundabout way to say, I mean, it makes sense if something is, if something is.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:39:46

  abrasive, um, that maybe it would affect the stomach, but, I mean, horses eat pretty rough, abrasive-type grasses when they're out foraging around on natural parts. Trees.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:40:01

  Um, and they, and they should also chew, like, they do chew very well. They've got lots and lots of molars, and they do, when they chew well, they do tend to chew really well. So, um, I mean, it'd be…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:40:16

  You'd have to look at their teeth. If you did a study on that, you'd have to look at their teeth and, like, the particle size that they were chewing food down to and stuff to see whether it was related to whether a horse was on a rough hay but wasn't chewing it very well either, or something.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:40:33

  Yeah, interesting, yeah, because I've always, like, anytime when I could get grassy hay, I was buying the worst, like, stalkiest, rubbish, rough stuff, because I was like, yeah, they have to chew it for longer, so they're gonna be salivating more, and…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:40:49

  Yeah, and then now I'm like, oh god, there's another thing I've been doing wrong. Yeah, I mean, I… yeah, I don't worry about rough hay, because I think, you know, they eat it reasonably slowly, and they should… they should chew it very well, but in saying that.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:41:04

  I've not followed horses that have been… I've not followed horses that have been on really rough hay and then, um, been able to look in their… in their stomachs.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:41:15

  consistent. You'll have to, you'll have to, um, see if you… because you ask people when they do gastroscopes with you what the horse has fed.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:41:23

  You'll have to start seeing if you can see any trends between. I'll start going back through there. I got my pH reader today. I'm so excited. That is cool.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:41:33

  Yeah. And we have, we've got two days, two days in Canada and then two days in Canada. We've got 40 horses in Canada on Tuesday, Wednesday. So I'm gonna be just pH testing everything. Awesome. Cool. That'll be really, that'll be interesting. It'll be really good to see what pH they get down to.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:41:51

  Make sure you, um, especially with Sparky being on his very restricted diet. Um, like now he's got the muzzle and the hay bag, um, versus Bravo and then Chippy's and all the little fat ponies. So.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:42:06

  Again, don't tell Matt that I'm spending all this money on these three horses just for interest. Yeah, well, that'll be, yeah, it'll be really, really interesting to see how low that pH goes in horses that have been fasted.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:42:19

  Ooh, that makes sense. Yeah.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:42:22

  I have another one. There was a little skinny pony that was bought and so very, very skinny, fed it up and they were feeding it a high grain diet.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:42:36

  Because it was so skinny, they were, like, thought they were doing the right thing, and then typical foundered, and it now has completely, like, insulin dysregulation, insulin's through the roof.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:42:47

  So it's now on all the treatments to bring the insulin back down. Um, yeah, and it was just, it was one of those things that you look at it and you're like, oh, you're skinny.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:42:55

  You can't have EMS, you can't have…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:42:58

  metabolic issues, and then when it starts putting on weight, now it's still skinny, like around the ribs, but it's got pockets of fat on the shoulders and the bum and the neck and the head. Is it an older pony? I was like…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:43:12

  Uh, I wouldn't say it was too old, but it's not… it's not young, but it's not old-old. I could just… you wouldn't have looked at it and gone, that's gonna be your…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:43:21

  Typical EMS force. When it was really skinny.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:43:24

  When it was skinny or then, and now it's only as it's putting on weight. As it walked around the corner, I went, oh, that's funky. You will get, and Poet's a little bit like this, like he's still sort of slightly cresty necked, but you can just see his ribs at the moment.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:43:42

  Um, and you know, I don't want him to get it, particularly because he's, he's gearing up for pony camp with my niece, um, so I don't want him to get any lighter in condition, but if he, so he's like, he's still kind of.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:43:57

  cresty-necked, but he's ribby. So you get this uneven fat. And that's one of the characteristics of a lot of metabolic horses, is they have patchy fat distribution. And the other thing that might have worked against that little horse, I mean, I get it, you get them and you want to feed them up and put weight on them.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:44:21

  But the, um, University of Melbourne researchers showed, years ago now, but they showed that horses that are, um, fattened up, for want of a better term, on starch-based, grain-based diets, um.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:44:37

  were more insulin dysregulated or more insulin insensitive than horses that were fattened up on fibre and fat based diets. So it probably or potentially also contributed, like having that pony putting on weight on a grain based diet, had they done the same thing just on good quality forages and some higher energy fibres and maybe a little bit of oil.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:45:02

  Um, maybe wouldn't have gone…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:45:05

  to… the insulin dysregulated to such an extent. Might have as well, like…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:45:11

  Yeah. Yeah, but it's not surprising. I mean, when they're skinny, they usually do have better insulin sensitivity.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:45:20

  than when they're overweight.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:45:24

  Yeah. Now everyone needs to go back and listen to Luke Goldsmith's episode and go and poke the eye pockets on your horses. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. Poet's actually got, like, big divots, um, with his at the moment, and his neck's, you know, quite soft. I tend to pay a fair bit of attention to how hard their neck is as well.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:45:43

  Um, but yeah, it's interesting, like, I hadn't, until Luke said that, I sort of hadn't really paid much attention to the divots over the eyes, but I'll watch, um, yeah, definitely, definitely popcorn, and I'm looking at Po going, you know, you're brimming with light and condition, you're in work, like, I reckon if I did an insulin sensitivity test on him at the moment, he'd probably be okay.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:46:05

  Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:46:08

  How are we going for time? Yeah, let's do another.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:46:11

  We dropped out. We dropped out for a while, so… Yeah, I'm all discombobulated.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:46:20

  Um, I have an email question.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:46:25

  All right, I'm just pulling it up. Um, right, so this is from Jody and the little shitster mini horse, Deli. Deli? I love how she describes him. Deli. Everyone with one of those goes, yep.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:46:42

  That one. That can be another t-shirt. Yeah. But.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:46:48

  So in terms of creating and supporting healthy microbiome diversity, how much of a forage and fibre source is a meaningful amount? So she goes on to say she's thinking percentage of total daily forage requirement would be the most appropriate measurement to allow for different sized horses. Yeah.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:47:06

  In your opinion, when creating a nutritionally balanced diet based upon 1.5% to 2% body weight in forage and without exploding digestible energy levels?

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:47:16

  Is it better to include 6 to 7 different forages and fiber sources? I want to know where she lives, because…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:47:23

  Six or seven different species is amazing.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:47:27

  Um, even if some of those individual ingredients only make up 5-10% of the total forage requirement.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:47:33

  Um, are these smaller quantities enough to feed the gut microbiome diversity, or just wasting money?

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:47:40

  Um, or should you… should the diet contain a more substantial proportion of each forage for it to support a meaningful diversity in the gut microbiome, even if that means reducing… reducing the variety of forage sources? Say, stick with a few different forages, with each compromising 20 to 50% of the.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:47:58

  Daily. It's such a good question. It was so beautifully written to you. Thank you, Jodie. So, I mean, the answer is we don't really know.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:48:11

  um, like, I can't say, well, you'd have to feed, you know, 0.05% of body weight of a certain ingredient to get a… to get a meaningful change, because the work hasn't been done to actually measure this yet.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:48:25

  So, I just work off the basis that we know horses, when left to their own devices, will eat many species of plants throughout a year. So, the estimation is something like, I think the published paper that my brain always goes back to was something like 50-something species over the course of.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:48:46

  a year. And so, in terms of the forage, when she says it's better to feed six or seven different forages, or, you know, two or three with more meaningful amounts of those two or three, I mean, if you can find six or seven forages.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:49:01

  I think that's… that's the way I'd be going. Or if you can buy, you know, a mixed species hay. Um, like, I love my pasture here where I am, because there is so many different edible species, and some of them, though, would only make up very small percentages of their diet.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:49:19

  Um, and, you know, and I watch… I watch my horses graze a lot, and get a bit of a sense for what they're actually eating, and some things I will just nibble at, and other things I'll eat quite a lot of. So, I just think the more… the way I…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:49:36

  try to feed, and the way I try to encourage other people to feed is just… just get as much fibre diversity as you can in the diet. And she makes a really good point with the… without exploding the calorie intake, because, you know, if you go, oh, sugar beet pulp's such a great.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:49:52

  source of fibre and fibre diversity, I'm gonna feed, you know, for a mini, be like, 3 tablespoons would be nearly too much. I find it so hard. I honestly, I would prefer to do the diet of a horse with some, um, really, really difficult challenges.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:50:08

  than I would the diet of a normal mini. Because I'm like, I just… grams of something in and everything's out of balance. Like, they're so tiny that tiny little changes in feed amounts make such a big difference, and I don't… my brain doesn't really think in those amounts, but, um…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:50:24

  She does make a really good point because you can't go putting lots of these alternate higher energy fibers in chasing fibre diversity and then create problems with obesity. So you kind of have to find the…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:50:39

  You know, if you can only, I'm joking saying three tablespoons, but if you can for a mini, if you can only put three tablespoons in, put that amount in because it's got to be different. It's got to be better than not having that diversity.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:50:56

  Diversity.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:50:58

  Well, then I'm kind of like, okay, say chickies, the little pony that we have.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:51:04

  To create diversity for her, she's out on whatever grass is there. Um, she's no longer in the clover paddock. But, like, let's say she's stabled and she's in work. It'd be, like, a handful of sugar beet pulp.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:51:18

  A handful of TEF multi cubes. Yeah.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:51:22

  A handful of lupins, maybe half a handful. Um, a handful of a lucerne leaf.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:51:32

  Um, legume whole fiber pellet.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:51:35

  Vitamins and minerals.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:51:37

  Grassy hay.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:51:41

  Yep, and you've got, I mean, you've got copper meal, you've got hemp, hemp hulls and huts. Oh, this is.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:51:48

  But that's what I'm thinking, I'm like, if I'm gonna make an amazing diet for her, or all my horses, they're my… throwing in hemp, they're my seven ingredients. Is that a little bit.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:51:57

  And so with a horse, then… and again, I run it through a happy horse. But, like, that half a dipper kind of… Yeah, amounts. …build up. Yep. Yeah. So at least if you have your diet balanced, but then you're just chucking in a couple of little bits…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:52:13

  And you keep it within that balance-y area. Is that better than that? I think so. And it's interesting, although you shouldn't really use goats as proxies for horses, but it's really… I love watching… I get the opportunity to watch goats graze a little bit, because Ryan and I have.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:52:29

  kids, and their names are Clover, funny enough, and Manny, um, and before them, um, their mum, Lucky, but it's really, really interesting watching them browse and graze as we, as we walk through, um.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:52:45

  where they live, because there's lots of different plant species. And now it's so fascinating. I'm actually reading a book called Nourishment at the moment, which is, it actually talks a lot about feed selection in animals and talks a lot about goats, because this guy did his PhD in looking at goats grazing certain plant species in the US.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:53:07

  But I haven't, I haven't finished reading it yet, but it's, it's fascinating. But you watch, um, these goats grazing, and they'll sniff something.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:53:15

  and sometimes they'll just have a little nibble, and then that's enough. Or sometimes they'll sniff it and go, nah, not today. And then other times, they'll find a plant that they may have walked past the last few days, and they'll smash it. Um, so they're… really, like, the food selection is really complicated in animals, and I…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:53:35

  It's, you know, we've taken all of this ability away from our horses to select food, because they only get what we give them. So, I think, and I may be proven wrong, and, you know, we might do research and go, well, a handful of this and a bit of that is making no difference whatsoever, and you would have been better off just feeding your.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:53:56

  two or three types of hay. And I'm also under no illusions that, you know, when we tracked a lay's hindgut.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:54:02

  And we saw the changes over time in her microbiome, so a number of species increasing, and the evenness improving, and things like that. A lot of that work was being done by my very varied pasture, but still, you know, like, there's grasses that they prefer to eat, and if you watch them grazing, they'll eat mostly that grass, but then they'll nibble at the lamb's tongue, and the milk thistle, and the, you know, bits and pieces of… there's lots of different grasses as well, and they'll nibble at the dried.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:54:34

  stuff, and there's that square, I don't know whether you have that, it's got like a square stem and a purple leaf, they'll eat bits of that at certain times. Oh yeah. So, you know, they are just taking little bits and pieces, so I think that if we can sort of recreate that by putting little bits and pieces of.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:54:49

  of as much as calorie intake will allow into our horses' diets, then it's got to be better than nothing.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:55:00

  The not creating that and really.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:55:03

  No, and I think, like, if you… and again…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:55:05

  Playing around so you actually have it in the app so you know, but you're not going to be blowing out the budget either if you just are feeding a small amount of all these ingredients. You're not making an overly expensive feed. Yes, the first time you buy all those bags, but then they last for, well, I did that today. I did that today because I've had the same bag of sugar beet pulp and copper meal, and usually what I do, and we'll have to finish up soon because I have to go out and feed my horses, but normally I'll do, I've got some of my favorite dippers are the half dippers.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:55:36

  Have you got them? I mean, this sounds stupid 'cause they're full dippers, but they're a leader.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:55:41

  Alida Duba.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:55:42

  I just have a thousand pride. Ah, see, they're two litres. You need to, you need to have some small dippers, because it's so much more satisfying feeding a full dipper than half a dipper, but you feed a full small dipper.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:55:54

  It's a weird human… It's like me eating my dinner on a small plate rather than a big plate. It's a weird human psychology thing. Anyway, so I have a one-liter dipper of beet pulp and copper mule, and that gets soaked.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:56:10

  Um, and then that gets divided up between Poet Allay and Breeze. Um, so they don't get very much each, like, they're… Poet's probably getting the best part of, um…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:56:23

  I don't know, it's a little bit hard to work out now in my head, because Breezy gets a little bit less than Alay and Poet do, but, you know, they're not… they're not getting a whole lot of these ingredients, um, and… and for them, you know, they… they need the calories as well as the.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:56:39

  the fibers, so it works really well. Um, but I don't put them in the other horse's feed, mostly because my pastures are so varied that I get so much, and I'm lucky like that. I don't have to do a lot of work creating diversity in my diets, but if they were just on Rhodes grass hay, I'd be giving it to everyone.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:56:59

  Because I don't want them just having that one type of fibre.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:57:07

  Yeah. Yeah, cool. Oh, well, thank you, Jenny, that was a good one. And hopefully… She also wants to know when the Android is coming out, too. The Android app. I really, really… we've actually started having conversations about it, so that it's closer than what it has been, but we need to… I really hope that we're released in the US within the next month.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:57:27

  And then, um, and then I really want to build the auto diet where it will actually create diets for you, because it doesn't, doesn't do that yet, but it will.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:57:39

  And then, yeah, we'll…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:57:41

  let all the… I…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:57:44

  people break it, and sort it out, and find all the bugs for us. Actually, that is something I did want to say. If anyone is using the app, or has used the app, and it's… we had a lady very…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:58:00

  um, kindly email us the other day, and we do appreciate it so much, but she's like, oh, it's so hard to use because everything goes off the screen and nothing fits on the screen, and we… Matt thinks he's figured that out, like, that it was… that if you increase the text size on your phone, it was actually.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:58:15

  messing up the app, like it was making everything go off the screen, and we… because I don't increase the text size on my phone, and Matt doesn't, and I haven't seen anyone use it like that, we're not… we're often not aware of those problems.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:58:30

  Yeah. And I went to take a photo with it yesterday and I turned it sideways and it went completely wonky. I'm like, oh, what is this? I just took a video of it and sent it to Matt going, oh, we need to fix that. So it is, there is still, it's still very much a work in progress, but if you have used it or you are using it and there's things that frustrate you or that don't look right, please just take a screenshot.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:58:55

  And there's a phone number in the app if you go to the little help icon, which is bottom right.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:59:00

  in the list of the little string of icons across the bottom, there's a phone number in there. Text us the text messages, uh, the screenshots, because otherwise we don't know, because there's so many different phones and so many different operating systems, and then people have, you know, custom settings on their phones as well, so there's, like, a million combinations.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:59:20

  of, you know, platform that this thing can sit on. So, yeah, if you've struggled with it for some annoying reason, please let us know so that we can fix it, and then it will get better and better over time.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:59:33

  It's a bit different than your, um… what was it called? What are those little… the floppy disks?

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:59:39

  Yeah, man. I remember being at uni, and we did a… it was a valedict… valedicts dinner at college, like, the residential college where we lived, and it was just a… it was just a PowerPoint presentation with a few photos in it, and it was so big that we had to save it across two floppy disks.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 17:59:59

  I don't even know how that's possible. How do you split a PowerPoint presentation in two? But you could. But yeah, there wasn't… I don't even think I could work an old school computer nowadays. I think I would get so frustrated with just turning it on.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 18:00:13

  And how long it would take, I would not even get that far. Come a long way, thankfully. Anyway, that's probably all we've got time for.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 18:00:22

  Yep, no, absolutely. I'm gonna go and feed my fat boy. Oh, and I have to do a shout out to my family who are over in America now listening to the podcast. They don't know horses, they don't like horses, but they are listening. So you have to listen. Hello, all this family. Oh, and you had a bit of a starter moment the other day. You were recognized. I know. From your voice.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 18:00:44

  Ola walks into a saddlery, and gorgeous Kate, who is local to me here in Tamworth, and Kate, who does listen to the podcast a lot, goes, you're Ola! Ola says, how could you possibly know that? And she recognised you from your voice. Not freaked out at all!

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 18:01:01

  In saying that, only on Tuesday, I was doing a… there was a CPD training for vets, and there was a girl, and I kept being like, God, I know her, I know her. Anyway, fast forward, she's… we're talking…

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 18:01:13

  about some… whatever, we're just talking, and then she goes, are you born a lion, by any chance? And I was like, who the hell are you? We went to uni together. Oh, well. Oh, well.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 18:01:24

  Yeah, we were just… she was in the year above me, but we were so, like, we'd socialize, kind of, in the same groups, and yeah, and I was like, oh god, do you recognize me from my amazing voice, too? But no.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 18:01:35

  I love it. It's funny when you see people out of context like that. Yeah.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 18:01:42

  Yeah, I was like, we did not go to vet school, so how are you a vet? She was smart, she continued on. Very cool. It's fun, those trippin', you're just bumping into moments. Well, thank you. And I'm sorry to have ruined your life with the 25% starch and clover.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 18:02:01

  Umm, yeah.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 18:02:02

  Yeah, like, I've… Bravo is just… all my horses are scattered between properties, because no one… only Bravo is handling. Oh, well, we'll have to… we'll have to, um, have to have a, uh, Jean and Cry and our Jean together next time we see each other.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 18:02:17

  Yeah, I'm going to go and buy a drone sprayer and just keep spraying. I'm going to go 24 hours a day, just keep spraying. On that note. Yeah, happy Friday. Thanks for listening, everyone. If you get a chance, do follow us so that you don't ever miss an episode with Orla and I, because you wouldn't want to do that. It's too much fun.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 18:02:43

  No, thank you. And yeah, questions in the, in the comments. Oh, yeah, yeah. For your hot tips. We still want those hot tips. Please send us questions, and thank you very, very much for listening, and we will catch you in the next episode.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 18:02:54

  Yay, bye! Thanks, Sula.

  [Nerida McGilchrist] 18:02:57

  Bye. See you.