1628: Finding the Right Feed – Why Extruded Nutrition Matters

0:00You are listening to the Horse Radio Network, part of the Equine Network family. Greetings, everyone. Coach Jen here, and thanks for tuning in to Horse Tip Daily, episode 1628. This time, Dr. Randy Raub, Equine Research and Nutrition Specialist at Sentinel Nutrition, joins me as we take a deep dive into extruded horse speed. And once again, I am so happy to welcome back to the podcast. Dr. Raub, he is the Equine Nutrition Specialist for Sentinel Horse Nutrition, and a horse guy. You might see him out there riding on a horse with some cattle, thanks for coming to the show today, Dr. Raub. That's my pleasure to be here, thanks for having me. We're going to be a little bit about Sentinel feeds, and Sentinel feeds has a lot of different unique attributes that benefit the horse.

1:00It seems to me like everything you do with Sentinel feeds, the reason you do it is to benefit the horse. Well, I think that's what you should be in the nutrition business. That should be your primary reason for what you do, right? And if you do a good job at that, then the business aspect of it kind of takes care of itself, at least that's my perspective. You need to do things that are going to serve the horse, and the rest of that will take care of itself. Yeah, and one of the attributes that Sentinel Horse feeds has is the extruded nugget. What the heck is an extruded nugget? Nugget? And why does it make a difference to the horse? So extrusion, I think everybody is probably familiar with it. If you look at a lot of dog and dry dog and cat food, it's an extruded form. If you look at Cheerios, Rice Krispies, they're all extruded. So extrusion takes the ingredient profile that you would have say if you're going to make

2:01a pelleted feed. And then an extruder is different than a pellet mill. So extrusion allows you to, for lack of a better descriptor, actually almost kind of inject air into it so you can kind of fluff up or make that pellet less dense, if you will. So that extruded particle comes out less dense and a little larger volume capacity so that you have a more porous, less dense particle that now contains your nutrient profile. Where pelleted feeds usually are much denser, much harder, this is very opposite than what an extruded particle will be. So that's, if you can kind of look at a pellet and then just imagine it being expanded out and opening up and being more porous and more airy and more light and that kind of give you an idea of when an extruded particle or at least one of ours would look like.

3:02So correct me if I'm wrong, when you make a pelleted horse feed, some of the ingredients in that pellet are there specifically so that the pellet has the ability to maintain its shape and be produced effectively. Yeah, there are some ingredients that you might, depending on the ingredient profile, right? So like alfalfa, ground alfalfa, usually because of the little higher calcium content in alfalfa, that will tend to make a pretty good quality pellet. I don't know if you ever fed pelleted alfalfa. I have in it and the little pellets are like hardest rock. Yeah, they are some of the hardest pellets on the planet. I mean, you shoot one out of a gun and kill somebody with an alfalfa pellet, depending. But you know, depending on how it's pelleted, the temperature and the pressure and the rate that is run through there, but alfalfa as an ingredient will make a very hard pellet. You've got other ingredients that you can put into a mix that also facilitates what the industry refers to as a quality pellet, right?

4:04That doesn't break apart very much so that that way, you don't have very many fines or dust particles in the bag, right? Whereas from a horse's perspective, you don't really want that really hard, hard pellet, even though from a production standpoint, it's good because you have less fines and you have less customer complaints, et cetera. But from the horse's perspective, they want something that's quite almost dissolvable in their mouth, a very softer type of pellet that almost disintegrates in the moisture content of their saliva. And extrusion will do that, but what's interesting about extrusion is those particles are almost kind of glued together in that nugget so that you oftentimes will have less fines in an extruded bag of at least our how we extrude feed compared to a pelleted of the same type of formulation.

5:04So from my perspective, extrusion just solves a lot of issues from A to Z, less fines, maintains that shape and consistency to a greater degree, but yet it is, in my opinion, without a doubt a superior form of bagged particles for horses to consume. Yeah, horses aren't, I don't think horses mouths were designed to eat hard, crunchy things. They're designed to eat stemmy things and slightly stringy things like grass and hay, but not really hard, crunchy things. So if somebody has a young horse, winglings and yearlings and even two year olds, how can the process of creating extruded pellets and the advantages of those play into feeding these young horses? We have a product called Safe Start that is really incredibly popular amongst brood

6:06mayors. We folks have brood mayors and winglings, yearlings that they're growing both to show and as the sales prospects and we've had a tremendous following for that product. And one of the reasons that is is that when you're feeding a young growing horse, they're demanding a lot of nutrients, right, during that growth phase. And you want to provide them those nutrients. And if you can do it in a very highly digestible form of nutrients, which extrusion helps to facilitate digestibility of the ingredients, no matter what the ingredient you'll enhance the digestibility of it. So you're better ensuring nutrient delivery to that young growing horse. You're also allows you to feed less of that feed coming out of the bag, right? Because if it's more digestible, I can feed less of it and still hit my same nutrient goals. So if I feed less of the actual feed out of the bag, that leaves more room for the most

7:09important component of any horse's diet. And that's the forage component. So it delivers nutrients in the most efficient manner and allows a greater percentage of your feeding program to be made up by the hay and or pasture. So that's a win-win. And so I think for those reasons, and if you look at our formulation in general and how we make sure we have the nutrient balance and symmetry of ingredients to best impact healthy growth for horses, you combine all that and I think you have an ideal formulation to facilitate a healthy growth of young horses. So you can effectively feed young horses well. So what about horses that need to just plain all gain weight? This is a big one for competitive horses. They can sometimes struggle to have keep their weight on and they're prone to digestive upset. And because they need a lot of calories and a lot of feed, that can cause problems in their

8:11hind gut, how can these extruded nuggets help those horses? Kind of the same way that I just described for young growing horse, right? And you're right on target with horses that are really working for a living, right? Usually that means they're getting thrown in a trailer and hauled somewhere as well, right, to competition. And that by itself is maybe the most stressful thing we can do to horses is haul them in a trailer. And as you all know, the worst the driver, the more stressful it is, so that these horses that are competing heavily on the road, tremendous amount of stress, they burn a lot of nutrients just dealing with that, not to mention what they have to have to fuel their workload. So for the same reason that I just described for the young growing horse, horses will get more nutrients per pound of feed out of an extruded formula than they will a traditional pelleted or textured formula.

9:12So we can deliver a higher concentration of nutrients per pound and do it successfully. And then, again, leaving more room for the forage component of their diet, which always tends to make horses happier when they got a more continuous amount of forage available to them. So I think it's just such an ideal form of feed to deliver a concentrated nutrient profile to the horse. So you've chosen a horse feed, let's say you're chauvin a sentinel horse feed for your horse. And sometimes it's a little bit of a struggle for people to figure out which feed is right for which horse. Are there ways that we as horse owners can say, okay, I'm feeding too much of grain A to this horse or too little of this grain A are there guidelines for that? So you can go to a website either if you googled sentinel horse feeds or you could go to Kentfeeds.com on the sentinel page, there's actually a feed finder, right?

10:16And it asks some really basic simple questions and it gives you at least in the ballpark of the sentinel feeds that might be applicable to your situation, right? So it doesn't, doesn't hone it down to maybe your specific horse, but at least get you in the ballpark of feeds that you would consider. And then of course, the other attribute that I think is great if you have access to is one of our sentinel sales folks in your area, you know, find out who they are and where they are. And they are some of the best trained folks out there and they certainly can help you. And then you can always call in to our customer service line and talk to them about what product may suit them the best for what they're wanting to do. And the other thing about sentinel when you're looking at, well, what feed should I use? And then the question comes up about transitioning from what you were feeding if it was a palliative feed to an extruded feed and the transition is similar, right? You take a five to seven day period and gradually wean them from what you were feeding them

11:20over to what you're going to feed them, like any feeding change. You do it slowly over a period of time. But the thing you have to keep in mind about our extruded products is when, if you take the typical scoop and fill it up with the typical pellet, that's going to be about three pounds on average, right? Depending on the size of your scoop. If you were to do that same scoop with our extruded particles, it would be about two pounds. Okay. So a pound of extruded particles is going to take a larger volume than a pound of palliative feed and some, and you know as well as I do, people, horse people say, yeah, I feed two scoops in the morning. Two scoops in the afternoon. Well, I don't know what, I don't know if your scoop is a teaspoon or a scoop shovel. I don't know what your scoop is. So it's really important that whatever you were feeding that pelleted diet with, you're not going to get the same pounds in that size of a scoop, right? So you're, it's going to look like, oh gosh, I got to feed more.

12:23Well, you're not feeding more on a pound basis, but you will be feeding more on a volume basis. There's lots of air inside that extruded pellet. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. That makes perfect sense. That makes perfect sense. Yeah. That attribute by itself should be good enough to want to feed extruded feed because if I can provide a greater volume per pound of feed, that means I'm more closely reflecting hay and pasture. They're going to take longer to eat that pound of feed. Oh my gosh. I never even thought of that. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What are you going to do? Are they going to take longer to consume? They're going to have more jaw movements per pound of that feed and horses salivate by moving their jaw. They're not like you, I or dog that salivate by look or smell of food. Horses actually have to physically move their jaw to generate saliva. So if that horse has more jaw movements per pound of the concentrate feed you're pulling out of a bag, that's creating more saliva.

13:24That's a good thing because that's one of the coding agents that helps buffer the stomach against acidic conditions. And there's also some other neurological things that we think go on as a horse moves its jaw to better facilitate healthy digestion. So just in addition to increased digestibility, you've got that going for you when you feed at least our extruded products. And Sentinel has a wide variety of different Sentinel products and maybe next time you stop by Dr. Rob, we can chat a little bit about the different formulas you have available because you quite literally have something for every horse, every type of horse and every feeding situation. I was driving around the website the other day and I was amazed at how many different products you guys have and you can go to feed sentinel.com slash podcast and right there on that home page where you land, there's a little green bar right next to the horses and muzzle so cute, just hit that feed selector button and it will take you over there and

14:25help. Or if you're like me, you just hit the all button and look at all of them and read every single description and memorize every single nutritional profile because we're horse people and it's fun. Right. Right. You like, you kind of like to see the whole smorgasbork so you can then make your own choice according. Well, and it's, it's good to look at all the different options because like just like you talked about the horse eating a larger volume of food, even though it's not dense it's not heavy. He's not eating more pounds. Yeah. He's not eating more pounds. He's not eating more pounds. He's eating more volume. Therefore, he's getting closer to mimicking his God-given need to chew for a long time. It's not something I ever even thought of. So when you just drive around there and educate yourself about the many, many different product lines you guys have available, you're going to have light bulb moments. You're going to say, wow, I never even thought about that's an important, that's an important fact for me and my horses. So that's, that's great stuff.

15:26Well, thanks for stopping by Dr. Rob. And again, you can find out more by going to feed sentinel.com slash podcast and learn more about sentinel feeds. Very good. Well, thanks for having me. You have a great day. Well, there you have it. Horse Radio Network has thousands of engaging podcasts for horse people and you can have them sent right to your phone. Just subscribe, view your favorite podcast player. This is Coach Jen and I will be back again soon with another tip. Until then, go ride your horse. The horse radio network and the horse radio network hosts are not responsible for statements paid by guests on the horse tip daily. Please use your own judgment when listening to the tips on this show.