Purina Answers Your Most Commonly Asked Questions
By Dr. Karen Davison
Equine Research, Purina Mills LLC
What are "grain by-products"? Why do you use them in horse feeds?
Grain by-products include things like wheat bran, rice brand, wheat midds, brewers dried grainsanything that is a by-product of the grain milling process. Many grain millers are now calling them co-products, because in some situations their nutritive value is more desirable than the grain they are derived from.
There are very good reasons for using many of these by-products in feeds. they can provide very specific and useful nutrients and advantages to horse feed. For instance, wheat midds are what remains of the wheat grain after all the starchy flour is taken out in the milling process. It includes the bran, germ, etc. All the things that people are trying to get back into their own diets since we eat so much refined flour.
Grain by-products are not "floor sweepings" but instead are legitimate feed ingredients with quality standards that must be met in order to be used in our products. We know specifically what nutrients and properties each by-product provides, how the horse utilizes them and the benefits to the horse in using each by-product in our feeds. We could not stay within our nutrient specifications if we did not have such standards on all our ingredients. If any load of one of these ingredients doesn't meet our quality standards when it arrives at a plant, it is refused just like any grain or other ingredient we use in our feeds.
There are some by-products, like bakery by-products, we don't use in horse feeds because of their variable nutritive value and potential problems with variable ingredients.
Our goal, as always, is to provide a formulation which will meet the nutrient needs of the horse that the product is intended for. We test every potential formulation until we determine the best combination of ingredients to meet those nutrient needs, and that is what gets manufactured at our plants. Grain by-products provide very good sources of soluble fiber, insoluble fiber (which is also important in some diets), some minerals and other nutrients.
We could not achieve the consistent results we do in the horse if we were using "floor sweepings" or poor quality ingredients to make our feeds.
