When “Metabolic” Is the Symptom, Not the Cause - Allison Lepanto

I typically kick the episodes off by just having the guests tell us who they are and what it is they do OK. So my name is Allison Laponto and I am the founder of Aderect Nutrition, a woman owned business and Aderect Nutrition is a mission based feed manufacturer in North Carolina. We specialize in equine and livestock feeds and we’ve been around this will be our 9th year. Our focus has always been to provide the highest quality nutrition to our horses, animals and over the years it has evolved from just a feed company into a company that also provides faster solutions. I started to see the correlation between the metabolic symptoms that we’re hitting horses and the lack of resources for pasture and management and species available to horse owners.

So we grew from just feed into faster solutions. And then as we went down that rabbit hole with the herbicides and the monocultures, we expanded into knowing the necessity of educating people on the GMO versus non-GMO for the animal health and longevity. And that is where our passion sits right now is optimal health education for the horse owners and longevity for the animals. Awesome. Yeah, I think nutrition as a whole is such an interesting topic because from a human point, I have cured or put into remissions my own sort of autoimmune diseases or issues through change of nutrition and that sort of thing.

Really the lifestyle didn’t change because I’ve always been very active with the horses, but I know how much food can impact us as people. And then I was chatting with, we have a local feed company here. I live in Aiken. And I was chatting with him about does he see market need for organic feed or that sort of thing. And he went off on a whole tangent about how he’s pretty sure allergies and a lot of these things we’re seeing in forces now stem from GMOs and these pesticide herbicide things that we’re putting in seed.

But as a business owner, he wasn’t sure about justifying the cost of what it would be compared to what it is. I think that’s one of those things that the more educated people are on nutrition. And I always think of the phrase you are what you eat. And then I think of even from the standpoint of if you’re eating poison without even knowing, like you’re just constantly poisoning yourself, even if you have the best intentions for your nutrition and that sort of things, where do you see the gaps in people’s knowledge or education of nutrition with horses or livestock in general? That is a good question.

So I’m going to narrow it down and answer it in the lens of you’re mentioning the feed owner that isn’t sure how to make it work regarding the cost for GMOs. And I kind of want to start there because we did a survey with our customers and then also non customers asking do they feel that there’s a need or do they want non-GMO force feed. And the majority of the response was surprising. Majority of owners said they had never thought about it. And when I first looked into the non-GMO options, I can tell you that the cost is definitely something to be considered.

And that intrigued me because when you go to the grocery store and you go down the junk food aisle, of course everything’s expensive. Now generally the junk food and the pre made meals are less expensive. And when you go into getting like raw food and raw ingredients and something that does not have genetically modified ingredients inside of it, the cost is significantly more. And it’s. So I was intrigued when I saw that.

And I’m like, OK, why is that? When you look into the GMOs, it’s definitely funded from the government because they’re looking to have everything available on a broad scale. From nutrition aspect, everything is pretty straightforward. Horses are not different from people in that we’re all mammals and then outside of that were biology. So biology is very straightforward.

We need water, we need air, and we have to have balance in our nutrition. So for horse nutrition, the majority of the time what we have is toxic exposure. In the pastures with herbicides, we have toxic exposure and the feed with the wheat Midlands, your pelleted feeds, weed is being sprayed. It’s one of the number one GMO crops. All of your grains are being sprayed and the so you have your toxic exposure.

But also, when we think about GM OS, what does that mean? The GMO gene change that it undergoes is not really what causes the damage. It’s the chemicals that get sprayed on them. Why does that matter? Because when the chemicals get sprayed, it kills off everything below the soil.

Why do we care about everything below the soil? Because if there’s no microbes and we don’t have nutrients in whatever is growing. So let’s say it’s oats or barley or corn is one of the big ones. OK, it’s corn. So the GMO corn, you’ve got all these herbicides, so you’ve killed off all your microbes, you’ve killed off all of your nutrient density that’s in there.

And then you apply the chemical fertilizers. So you have this very big kernels. Corn then nutritionally has less than half of what it should. And then we provide that to the horse and it not only is nutrient deficient, meaning that the horses are hungrier and are acting like they’re starving even though we’re providing them with pounds and pounds of food, but they’re also getting a constant dose of chemical exposure. And what ends up happening, I’m not sure if your listeners are aware of this, but the herbicides get stored in their fat cells and the metabolic syndromes that we’re seeing in the horses, like the cushions, insulin resistance, the metabolic syndrome, they get these, I call them the metabolic red flags.

So they get these fat pads that are on top of the muscle and they’re in places they shouldn’t be, and they’ll be on top of the croup or on the side of the gluteus muscle. And it’s the body’s way of coordinating off toxins and to keep them out of circulation. So what does that do to the horse? We have massive inflammation, right? So the horse’s body, it’s part of it.

So it’s part of the circulation. And you’ve got a horse that is saying I’m hungry because even though we said them, we’re feeding more than we would like to and we don’t understand why the horse is still giving us the indicators that they’re starving. So we go back to we’ve got toxic exposure, we’ve got nutrient deficiency and then we have to balance the nutrients that they’re not receiving with synthetic replacements. So what this looks like is your standard pelleted feed is a wheat meddling, so massive GMO. And then you have the synthetic vitamins and minerals they get put together and they don’t get absorbed.

They’re not as biomutrient. When the horse has a metabolic syndrome, then generally the professionals are going to tell you take it off of the pasture because the pasture has grass and the grass is sugar and it’s going to put your horse into founder. And so now you’ve got a horse that’s wrapped up in bubble wrap and as the owner, you’re like, what do I feed it? It’s starving. And meanwhile the horse is stressed because its body is saying I need nutrients and we’re told put it on a low NSC feed and no grass.

So the hay, which does reduce the sugars, but it also reduces the nutrients. So basically we end up giving horses the equivalent of junksuit, which is we’ve taken all the nutrients out of it and we’ve left them with fiber that they feel like they’re receiving what they should. But once they finish, their body immediately says I’m starving because what I have to survive and have longevity is not present. And they’re constantly looking. And then we get the cribbing and then we get the pacing and all of these non desirable behaviors.

So I would say from a horse owner standpoint, there’s a couple things we want to look at. We want to provide maximum nutrition. One of the ways that we can do that is if you want to keep them on pasture, there’s plenty of educational resources you can switch over to a non-GMO seed that immediately cuts down your daily exposure to the chemicals and the herbicides in their feed. And we want to stop the onslaught of toxicity. And then we want to provide them with the nutrients in a balanced way.

But we have gone about it in the educational aspect and the product aspect. Here’s a product and also here is the educational aspect and the system. And then we’ve split that education system down the middle and said here’s the education system on the feed and here’s the education system on the pasture. So that we’re not sending owners down a path of you are a hostage to this food product for the rest of your days. Because at the end of the day, if we can restore the microbes in the soil, whether it be in the hay, in the ground that the feed products are coming from or in the pasture, we are those microbes and those nutrients get into the horse.

The horse has maximum longevity and that dollar amount saved the amount that you don’t have in your emergency that visits and the questionable, Oh my gosh, there’s something wrong with my horse. I can’t put my finger on it. We save that and and we also get to look and know by looking at our animal that they just exude not just survival, like yes, they stayed alive, we spent them, they haven’t died, but that we’ve raised our expectations and our standards to them thriving. There’s so much there. So like when I’m looking at a food to feed my horse and I turn the bag around and I look at because I think a lot of people look at the guaranteed analysis and they say, OK, this has fat, fiber, protein.

Cool, but I don’t think a lot of people are looking at the ingredient list that’s on the back of that bag. So. If I’m an owner and I go out to the barn and I look at my feed bag, what are some things that I might see that are maybe not? Because I think you mentioned the middlings and I think people think, OK, yeah, my horse would eat wheat out in nature, whatever. Maybe they wouldn’t.

I have no idea. There’s so many things where I think people give a lot of trust to companies to ensure that their horses are getting the best stuff. A lot of it is it’s so hard to find stuff in general. There’s a lot of people that are feeding out of Tractor Supply grain because that’s just all that’s available to them. But if you can get the pasture, get the hay, you might not need to feed a lot of excess feed.

And so if I’m looking at that bag, what am I probably going to see that maybe is a GMO or maybe is something that’s low grade toxic or maybe even high grade toxic with to my horse that I just maybe wouldn’t even know? That’s a great question. So your corn, soy, unless it says non-GMO corn, soy, wheat beat pulp unless it says non-GMO. We have been able to source non-GMO. It had to come from out of the country because the beat pulp inside the United States is all GMO.

I’ve asked and pounded the pavement trying to find somebody that would provide it and they they pro it in bulk locally and it’s inexpensive but it’s a high price to pay in long term. So I would say those are the things. If that’s in your feed, then you’re definitely exceeding GMO. And what are some signs, So I know we talked about maybe the metabolic side of things were like your horse may have some fat pads or maybe just might seem a little dull. But are there any things that maybe people wouldn’t associate equine behavior with a nutrition issue or a high grade toxicity issue or something like that?

Yes, absolutely. That’s a great question. So what I would say the let’s real quick chat about the endocrine system. The endocrine system is a fancy way of talking about hormones and herbicides are known for affecting the hormones. The hormones are responsible for mood.

The hormones are responsible for inflammation. The hormones are responsible for fat distribution. It’s one of the most important. One of the things that you’ll notice is erratic behavior or extremely lethargic fatigue behavior where your horse starts acting just like you would if your joints all of a sudden felt like they were on fire. Horse doesn’t really want to move forward, their eyes glaze over and they almost become listless to their environment.

I have noticed as we feed horses non-GMO and make improvements with their pasture, that the horses get the lust and zeal for life again. So they become more alert. They will start to play again. Their tail will go up over their back and they’re excited. They exude lice.

The symptoms of the opposite are true as well, where you turn them out. It’s a cold day and they just stand. They just put their head down and their ears don’t really alert too much and that’s it. You look out and they might saunter around, but they’re not taking advantage of the pasture. I would say that is a big indicator.

It’s your vet says we need to put them on something like beautless and they’re less than 20 years old and don’t have a lot of injuries. I’d look at that. And I say, OK, are we dealing with a horse that is sore or are we dealing with a horse that has a lot of chronic inflammation and is generally just miserable? Interesting. I want to get into pasture management in a minute, but I had a horse who she had a couple of things.

So I originally am from New Hampshire and then I moved down to South Carolina a few years ago. And when I lived in New Hampshire my mayor got sweet age every year. And my at the time I also had a chestnut thoroughbred mare and she got to a point where the chestnut thoroughbred mare was like cracked out like I she was a really hard keeper. So she was eating the high fat, high fiber feed quite a bit of it multiple times a day. The other mayor was she was just like a warrior.

She also ate a fair bit of calories, but not nearly as much thoroughbred got to a point where I couldn’t even handle her for turn out and I had her for several years at this point. So it was bizarre. And I got to a point where I was like, you know what, I’m cold Turkey ING, which I know they say you shouldn’t do, but I was like desperate to get the spare off of this feed and get her behavior back to normal. So I cut them off of the grain and I put them on Timothy and alfalfa pellets and the chestnut mayor chilled way out. But what I noticed was my other mayor Swedish went completely away.

And that was my first inkling of oh this is weird. Like why would this affect this? Because I dealt with it for a year prior so and I tried everything, the creams, the everything, and it was Midsummer and normally the tail would grow back in the late fall, but it was Midsummer and the tail started growing back. And I was like, interesting. Yes.

So then Fast forward five years and the bear has uveitis and whatever. So she gets retired, lightly retired from work. She was an event horse, decided not to jump the blind horse anymore. The barn that I was at, we have really bad fire ants in South Carolina, and the farm that I was at decided that spring to spray the grounds for this Ant, Rappella. Yes.

And she asked the pest control company, she was like, is this safe for the horses? And they said yes. And a month later, my mayor has a eye ulcer flare up and we were treating it. I treated that thing for three months, every three hours for 24 hours. I was treating this for good thing for three months.

My vet had me test for Cushing’s this. She did not look metabolic. If you looked at her like she was a fit athletic course and she was only 14 and we tested and she was slightly elevated for Cushing’s, the ACTH or whatever. So we put her on percent and within three days the aisles are completely went away. Now two years ago I moved barns to a barn that pretty much does not.

They don’t really do any pasture management, but they definitely do not spray pesticides anywhere. They grow organic blueberries. So it’s. Really, I have not used percent for this horse in a year and a half and maybe a bit longer. And she has had no eye flare ups.

She has had no they they feed a commercial feed, but so she got a little bit of the sweet itch. But in the back of my mind, I’m like, I know that’s not like an ongoing issue, but when you try to tell people that your horse can’t eat seed, they go, they look at you pretty sideways because we’re pretty conditioned as a community to be like, new Air Force needs green two to four times a day and they need all of these things. But anyways, that was a long way to get to through just this one spray of this. I don’t really even know what it is. I guess it makes the ants sterile so they can’t continue breathing and then they just die off and it create it’s like this really weird.

But that was my first time dealing directly with a pesticide basically directly interfering with my forces health. So I want to talk a little bit about pasture management. I know people will like see their paddocks and then water it, but to me that’s the extent of pasture management. So maybe we can chat a little bit about what goes into it, what you’re looking for in like a healthy pasture. Excellent.

This is one of my favorite topics. So yes, pasture management, what we’re looking for in a healthy pasture, we’re going to start there and then we’re going to backtrack her way into how we get there from where most people find themselves in a healthy pasture. What we’re going to find is we’re going to have signs of lice in the soil. So if I take a soil sample, oranges down and inch by inch triangle, I want to see signs of ants, black ants, brown ants. I want to see worms, I want to see signs of beetles.

Any kind of beneficial bug, I want to see signs of lice. I want to see roots. I want it when I put a knife under the ground, I want to hear the snap, crackle, crunch of roots intertwined, knowing that there is lice. And also I want to be able to push my knife under the ground without both hands and my body weight on it. And what that’s telling me is that there’s air in the soil though there’s pockets for moisture to go into the soil for air to because microbes are just like people.

They have to have air, they have to have water, they have to have food. So there’s three things. You don’t have them, you don’t have life. Those I pull that sample out there, it should hold together. They have the soil, you have the roots and the roots, when you house the correct signs of lice, it has like a sticky substance to it.

And that actually holds together, holds the porous structure of the soil. So we have that below. It should be a nice color, doesn’t have to be black, doesn’t have to be dark brown, but it will have a nice color and it will smell very rich. Above, you’re going to see a multitude of species, not just grass. You’re going to have multiple different types of grass.

You’re going to have grass Icas. You’re going to have legumes, which are going to be your clovers and your peas. You’re going to have broad leaves, you’re going to have all different types of lice wrapped in the above soil, and there should be different tiers just like a city. You’re going to have your skyscrapers and you’re going to have your business buildings, and then you’re going to have your lower shopping malls. What that’s telling you is that you’ve got the coverage on the soil, so it’s keeping the nutrients in the soil.

It’s also protecting the topsoil from the rain, taking the topsoil away. So really important. The other thing that you’re going to notice in the soil part of that sample is differences in the types of roots. So grasses have roots, the kind of net out. Legumes tend to go horizontally, create like a spider web, but they don’t go very deep, they go wide.

The grasses grow almost in a triangle. And then you have your brassicas and your broad leaves that are going to have your tubes that go deep down into the ground and pull a lot of the nutrients up. And that’s going to be the like you have a spectacular soil sample new, you have signs of lice. Your microbes are happy, you’ve got green things, living roots and green things growing all year round. Now how do we get that with horses or excellent at compacting the soil, and they’re also excellent with their top and bottom teeth is ripping the roots out of the ground.

Mother Nature has provided us with a way to sidestep those effects, and that’s the rotational management. Now, most of the time when I speak with owners and I mentioned rotation, they’re like, Oh yeah, I took the horse off the pasture for two days, not long enough. So the grass site will regrowth is going to be between two and four weeks for that grass to regrow to where it was before it was injured. Now, most of the grasses that we grow in pastures at the height of their life, like crab grass, it doesn’t get very tall and doesn’t get very dense. So what we want is we want to include a variety of species that grow taller and thicker.

And the reason we want this is we’re going to give a quick tour on grass. Sugar lace, when the grass is growing from 4 inches under is the highest sugar because the grass is doing everything it can to establish roots and to establish growth, so it survives. From 4 to 8 inches you have vegetative growth, so you are going to have mid range sugars, mid range fibers. This is going to be the tastiest, most beautiful when you get from 8 to 12 inches, and again, there’s a species that can grow this tall, but 8 to 12 inches, you start to enter the reproductive cycle. This doesn’t mean that you have seed heads yet, but it means that they start putting the sugars towards developing the seeds and it becomes more fibrous and more protein, less sugar.

So it is also very silly and also not quite as appetizing to the force. They still want to eat it, but it’s not like eating Snickers. So when you have a pasture that’s 8 to 12 inches tall, a variety of species, not just one like rye grass, which is super sweet and was designed to fatten cattle. If we’re talking like a variety of species. And you put them out and let’s say you put them out for four to five days on this pasture and the grass is 8 to 12 inches and you in four days and you look at it and the average height of the grass is about 6 inches.

It is time to rotate. You take them off of that. Now if you wait and that drops down to 4 inches, your regrowth just doubled. So you went from getting the same 8 to 12 inch height and nutrients of grass in two weeks to now it’s going to take possibly 4 or longer just in those two days. So we rotate.

So what I like to do with horse owners is I will talk them through having a strategy to where they can move their forces every couple days off of these pieces and that the piece that they grazed has at least a two week break. If this does things above the soil, but more importantly is below the soil. Because when you take the horse off of that area, the soil stops being compacted and the microbes and the bugs and all of the oxygen can return. And those areas will turn into mud pits and dust bowls and nothing will ever grow there because they just keep pounding everything I felt. So then there’s no water, then there’s no oxygen, then there’s no micro, there’s no bug lice.

So we want to keep moving the horses off and allow nature to restore them. So that’s going to be when we talk about pasture solutions, rotational management, what does that mean? It means people that like to cut their grass, that’s considered a grass injury. So this past year I had a lot of my customers ask, OK, I rotated my horse off the pasture. It’s uneven.

I’m just going to go ahead and cut it. And I said I would wait and they want to know why. And I said your horse has grazed that area. So if you mow it super low, that’s considered a second injury. You’ve immediately doubled your regrowth time and.

What do you recommend for places where rotating paddocks maybe isn’t an option? So what you mean that every area like a boarding facility for every pastor is completely? Full and utilized I. Helped a therapeutic riding school here in the western part of the state and they had a similar situation and their budget was tight, which is totally respectable. And I said, look, we can start implementing management practices before we talk about seeding now, like, OK, what does that look like?

Most of their pastures, the horses were not gaining any nutrients from. It was mostly wheat because it had been over grazed and the only thing that could survive was what the horses didn’t want to eat. So they really weren’t utilizing the entire pasture. And So what I had them do is use electric fencing, so temporary fencing and take their existing pastures and cordon the moth. So basically they would take a pasture that was let’s say 3 acres and they had three horses out on it.

And I would say let’s first make a sacrifice area. So basically it’s turning the pasture into just one paddock and it’s the sacrifice area. Like we know that small area is allowing the horses to get some motion and they’re natural needed movement, but it’s also allowing us to rest the other areas. The remaining part of the pasture, we split into three areas. And what we’ll do is on the Super muddy yucky weather days, we’ll put them in the paddock because that’s the sacrifice area for right now.

Actually, we will restore life to it. But for right now, that’s our area. Then what we’ll do is those 3 sections that created, we will put the horses out on one of the sections for let’s say three days, three or four days and then we’ll move them to the second Section 3 or 4 days. Anytime that there’s rain, they come into the paddock and then we move them to the third. So between the rain days and the rotation, by the time they get back to the first section, it has been a long enough that the grass, the desirable species, without them planting anything, the desirable species have started to come back.

And the soil structure and stability, this particular property was very hilly, has started to restore. And this particular farm, within four months, they sent me a video and it was amazing. It didn’t look like the same property and it was a simple, it was still the same area. They were just utilizing it in a different fashion. And when we did talk about seed and they did put down some seed, the seed took off phenomenal because the management had already started to restore the microbes, the life, the diversity, the rotation, the oxygen, the water retention.

It had all already started to move in the direction of restoring the biology and restoring the health. Interesting. So is there like a so like I live? In a place with sandy soil and grass can be tough to grow there. Are there things that we should be putting, say, I’d section off my paddock to try to start growing some new species or at least increase the current what I do have and not including or I guess we can get into, but maybe alongside seeds, Are there soils or manure or like things we should be putting like on top of the ground to help spark that process?

Yes, absolutely. So if you have a manure compost pile, there’s stages to the compost and when the manure does not have a higher temperature, then the ambient air, it’s ready to go on your pasture. If it’s higher, it’s still breaking down and it’s going to end up burning whatever you have that’s growing. So I tell people if you’ve got a compost pile, turn it. But also as the temperature starts to come down, add some earthworms.

Go to your local fishing tack and bait store and get the bigger earthworms and put them in there. And then for the sandy soil, while you’re waiting for that, if people use round bales, I know a lot of horse owners raise their eyebrows at round bales, but if they’re stored out of the weather, they don’t mold and have problems. But what I’ve told them, if there’s a big herd of horses or a lot of horses that go through a round Bale in less than three days, I’ll tell the owners, unroll it. Instead of having one compact area, put it on the side, because that’s what it was designed for, is to be unrolled and put it on the side. You unroll it and then the horses have to walk along that area.

They don’t have one area that’s damaged where all of the urine of poop is accumulating and it’s all muddy. So that does two things. Whatever they don’t eat, it’s spread out and it’s covering the soil and #2 is you want to have organic matter, you can cover it lightly with old hay. Some of the really bad areas, I’ll have people consider putting some kind of mulch and then some kind of hay down. The more that you can have the protection on top the air and the soil and inviting environment for microbes and bugs to come back in and be your worker beans under the soil.

That’s how you start pulling the nutrients and the minerals that are way down deep in the soil back up. A lot of times the horse owners get a little scared because when they start covering things up, the first thing that comes is weeds. Oh my gosh, I have to spray. It looks horrible. Well, weeds, especially the spiky ones, are Mother Nature’s armor.

And they’re telling you what you already know, which is hey, we need this area to rest. We need a break. This has been too much taken from this zone We try to walk people through. That is nature and she’s working with you. And the other thing about those weeds is if you go to pull up the weeds, generally you could pull your whole body weight and that weed is not coming up because that taproot goes all the way down.

And most of the times the weeds are magnificent nutrient accumulators. So they’ll pull nutrients from deep, deep down and bring it back up to the surface because they can do that, whereas grass cannot. And so if you notice that a lot of weeds are growing instead of grass or whatever, is there something you should do or should you just not worry about the weeds? Is that when you would plant seeds for grass to grow? What does that?

Look, there’s two things I would do. 1 is make sure that we are providing the soil with the nutrients they need for desirable species to grow. So if your sandy soil is minerally deficient, then we’re going to focus on putting the minerals back. And then the second thing we’re going to do is we are going to cover the soil. So weeds generally show up when the soil is bare, OK.

So when we cover the soil, like provide the nutrients for what it is, the entire environment of the soil starts to change. OK, interesting. So. Let’s chat a little bit about these metabolic horses who are told no posture yes case I’m sure that grease with I was reading something the other day about how in the wild horses will eat a bunch of different plants yes. So I’m sure getting taken off of pasture and then probably only being fed one type of hay that we mentioned is probably also getting soaked.

What can you do to support the horses who are either on a dry lot or basically not allowed to eat posture and maybe need to eat low sugar or something like that? OK so this is a multi pronged answer #1 is when the horses start showing signs and metabolic issues. When we start getting the fat pads? When you have a horse that wasn’t an easy keeper, all of a sudden starts ballooning and so then the vet or the trainer says it needs to be off of grass or on less grass. So generally what ends up happening is that horse gets moved to a pasture that is nubs.

And the issue with that is every time it rains, those nubs of grass become the highest sugar Snickers bar you’ve ever encountered because they’re desperately trying to stay alive and did grow leaves to stay alive. So we look at it and we’re like, oh, there’s barely any grass out there, but there’s massive amounts of sugar in that grass versus the grass that’s up to the horse’s knees. If you put that horse out in a pack to their knees that you’re probably going to find them standing after about an hour not eating because they ate the fiber and they’re satisfied. Also grants that is that tall generally has much more nutrients in it, which is what that horse is looking for. So we have this metabolic horse.

It has showed signs for the seed or being the pasture of lying being sprayed or whatever. And then it has the fat pads and now it’s being told, OK, it’s on a dirt lot and you have to soak its hay and what else do we do? My first recommendation would be. Instead of just looking at the NSC and that is important when you’re in a situation where the horses that much of a crisis, you do need to pay attention, but it’s not the only thing. So we can feed a horse low sugar while also feeding maximum nutrients.

So I would say stay away from the GMO because the less toxic load that you are providing even to that animal, that easier that animal can start to recover. non-GMO is going to be really important. I would source organic hay. Now some the organic is not, it’s not the be all end all, but it is way better than the hay that is being sprayed multiple times for weeds. So I would say those two things are instantly going to reduce the load on those animals.

The next thing I would say is we want to find a way to get that horse, two soil that is nutrient dense and two grass that is over 8 inches tall because those are going to be the fibers and the nutrients and the proteins that their body is desperately craving. Interesting. So say. I know that you’re based in North Carolina but I’ve gone out to a couple of barns in California and there’s like literally 0 grass like it is complete desert. But what would you recommend for forces that or maybe even a force on stall rest where they’re just maybe there is no access to pasture?

Like how would you recommend feeding multiple different types of hay? Would you recommend? What would that look like? Are you talking about from a boredom standpoint or a nutrition standpoint? Both.

OK. Because I especially the horse on stall rest, I’m sure is bored out of its ever loving mind. But some of these horses in California, they have large posture. There’s just not a lot going on in there. So I guess both in terms of a nutrition standpoint, because I think a lot of people would just think seed more hay, but then you’re not really getting the diversity of things I’d assume.

One of the the horse owners in at least this part of North Carolina call it cowhay. For my horses, I do a round Vale and other people would call it cowhay and what they generally refers to as a pasture that it’s not monoculture. So I have farmers that have a field they don’t fertilize and they don’t see whatever is growing out there is whatever is growing out there and there’s no and it and it’s also they wait until their seed heads. So that’s when they cut it. That’s when they bail it.

I get a round bail and I unroll that round bail and what that provides to the animals. But there’s two things I would look for in regards to boredom is you want lake cut hay, so you want it to be almost with seed heads or with seed heads. The reason for that is going to be the most filly for the horses. So that will keep them entertained. They’re not going to inhale that like they would orchard grass, like they would alfalfa where they’re just going to be hoovering it up and then 40 minutes later they’re standing there bored out of their mind and they house 8 hours until their next meal.

So I would do a diverse hay that is late cut and generally this is good news for your listeners. Generally that’s very inexpensive compared to the Lush product that most of us are used to seeing that’s neon green and full of Leafs and the leaves are great. But it all depends on what are we trying to accomplish? Are we feeding a five store athlete that is going out to perform? In which case that would be great, That’s prime sugar, protein and fiber.

Or are we feeding a horse that needs to not be bouncing off the walls and needs to feel full? In which case they’re not. They’re not going to finish every scrap and shred of a diverse hay pasture, and that’s a good thing. If it’s late cut, they’re still full. If they don’t need whatever weed, it’s in there and you see it, you shouldn’t be alarmed.

Oh my gosh, there’s this weed in there. It’s yes, OK, great. It’s that weed had some nutrients that horse needed. It would have eaten that and it would have eaten it on the pasture. But since the horse can’t have a pasture here, we have a variety.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to find. They are definitely out there, but it is hard to find people, farmers that will sell you this hay because most of the time they’re scared of horse owners saying oh it has stems or it has this or has that and they won’t come back and buy more. And yes, you might get a bail or two that’s got more non desirables. OK, walk out into your pastor and tell me an area of your pastor that is everything you desire and none of us don’t. Yeah, that’s funny.

I recently so like I have a vent horses and show jumpers and in the summer they eat this like lovely, super soft Timothy and it’s so beautiful and but in the winter I want my horses to be eating longer, so I’ll switch to a more coarse Timothy and it’s always funny, like the first couple of feedings they’ll like follow me around the pub. Sherlock, you haven’t given me my hey. But they buy the third feeding. They’re just like, OK, this is what I’m eating now. Cool.

And my horses are all fatties, so they eat it all up. But I recently just picked up a truck of hay and there are different types of flowers in there. And my horses, again, they eat anything and everything. So to be isn’t an issue, but I had a client walk up to my truck because the hay looks really nice. At first glance, you don’t see any of the flowers.

And then you get up close so you see the flowers. And she was like, Oh my gosh, there are flowers in here because like, yeah, my horses eat it. And if they don’t, then OK, whatever. But it’s so funny how picky people can get. And it’s really interesting about your thing of if they feel that they need it, they’ll eat it.

And I had a body worker, I had a force that was having some issues. And I had a body worker who did a lot of Chinese herbal stuff. And her whole thing was you set up 3 buckets of grain and you put one supplement, 1 supplement, 1 supplement. And they’ll pick the one that they actually need. And because it’s herbs, they’re more likely to not like a pellet or whatever that they’re just going to eat because it looks like green.

I find the intelligence of horses so fascinating that they do know internally what they need or what they they like and what they don’t like. I don’t think people give enough credit to them as an intelligent species in that regard. Cows and goats, they’ve been doing free choice minerals for a very long time. They’ll have individual minerals out there and the animals come and pick what they need as they and that’s we look at the intelligence level of a cow versus a horse. At the end of the day, they’re not really that different from us.

If you taste, if you taste a carrot that has good nutrients in it, you’re going to want another carrot carrot and it tastes like cardboard. You’re not going to eat it. A lot of the medicines that we have are tastes pretty bitter. We don’t want them. Most of the weeds have tannins.

They don’t taste good unless there’s a mineral that weed has been able to utilize that that horse needs. And we don’t give our forces the choice. Everything has turned into like, my horse can only have one type. And it’s like horses were designed to pick and choose and sort and travel huge amounts of distance to find what their body needed. And I think the more that we can remember that and provide them the variety, I think we are restoring their health from survival to thriving.

Yeah, no, it’s so important. So as we wind this down, what advice do you have for horse owners that maybe want to improve their forces quality of life? From a management side, I would look at if you’re supporting your biology, whether it’s in the soil, whether it’s in your pasture, whether it’s in your food, whether it’s in your horse’s gut, you’re supporting life. And regarding management, before you spray herbicides, they are not safe, I don’t care what kind. Before you spray that on your pasture line, just remember it’s going to end up in their body.

We want to provide maximum nutrients, we want to reduce toxic exposure and we want to align ourselves was supporting the biology of life full term to get the maximum longevity and thriving from our animals. Awesome, this has been such an informative conversation. How do people find you? Follow along with what you do. So we have a website at directnutrition.com.

We are also on Instagram, you can find me on LinkedIn, I’ve got a blog on the website, we’ve got videos on TikTok and YouTube Shorts and we’re always adding new information. We’ve got a new info series coming out about GM OS and non GM OS and why it’s important and there’s a lot of articles available on our website. For additional information we have a contact us page. We’d love to connect with olders and anyone who is looking to learn more. Whether it’s the feed or the pasture, we do talks and or age groups.

Awesome. Thanks so much for joining me. Absolutely. Thank you.