A word from our sponsors Charnwood Milling

Feed For All

By Kelvin Gibbs and John Murray

From previous editions of the magazine, which we hope have been helpful, you should now have an understanding of all the services that we pride ourselves in supplying to all our customers.

One of the things we have often talked about is the technical help that we supply through specially-designed products. We thought it might be helpful to look at some of the frequently asked questions – to use modern jargon – that seem to arise, and hopefully the effective solutions that we are able to offer.

Possibly the most-asked question relates to the management of horses and ponies with laminitis. The technical details of this distressing condition have been very well covered in lots of articles in this magazine and elsewhere, giving you the information related to the disease and its effects.

While, sadly, there is no cure for laminitis, susceptible animals need careful management. Unfortunately, this often means inadvertently restricting essential nutrient intake in an effort to avoid the problem. The ‘bare paddock’ approach may restrict the intake of potentially dangerous ingredients, such as early spring grass, but what about the other micro nutrients essential for wellbeing?

We have a feed called Lam Aid, which is specially designed to supply essential nutrients while avoiding the ingredients that are associated with laminitis.

Endurance riding, we find, is becoming more popular and causes particular nutritional problems for the horse, and probably the rider. In human terms, it is the equivalent of running a marathon. Because of this we have applied the glycaemic index concept to the design of our foods. What this means is that the energy supply from the speciallyselected ingredients in our feeds is released in a slower way and provides energy over a more sustained period of time.

Last year, Charnwood introduced a High Fibre Conditioning Mix to fuel the endurance horse and to condition problem horses. The energy sources in the mix are chosen carefully to provide long and short term energy:

Digestible Fibre

‘Super fibre’ materials are used, including long chop alfalfa, soya hulls, sugar beet shreds and molassed oat straws. These fibres are easily fermented to valuable fatty acids in the hind gut and provide slow release energy to maintain the horse in light work.

Fat

Fat contains two-and-a-half times the energy of cereal and is used efficiently by the endurance horse to spare reserves of liver glycogen. Again the energy release from the fat is slow.

Starch

Starch is a rapid-release energy provided by highly-digested, cooked cereals that are broken down to glucose and immediately used by the muscle cells or stored as glycogen in the liver. Periods of heavy exercise (sprints) will utilise glucose as the principle energy source.

For any information or advice, please contact:

Charnwood Milling Company Ltd at
Charnwood Mill, Saxtead Road, Framlingham, Suffolk IP13 9PT
Tel: 01728 622300 or Fax: 01728 724359.
Website: www.charnwood-milling.co.uk
Email: feeds@charnwood-milling.co.uk