Posted: 26th August 2014 | Back to news feed
There are not many feed rooms these days that don’t have at least one tub of supplement on their shelves and walk into any feed merchant and the choice of supplements available to purchase can be mind-boggling.
Here, animal nutrition company Alltech provide advice gained with more than 30 years’ experience in this field.
- Horses require minerals to support all the functions of the body, minerals are present in the fluid contents of cells and are involved in enzyme action, the nervous system, and hormone system and blood formation.
- Minerals are found in grass, hay, concentrate feeds and in low growing herbs in good pasture and can be divided into two groups, major minerals and trace elements.
- Supplementation of the horse’s diet is recommended to ensure that they receive adequate intake. Horses in a natural setting would graze a wide area and have excess to a variety of vegetation, meaning their mineral requirements would easily be met. Most horses today are part-stabled and turned out in smaller fields with access to limited varieties of grasses on land that may have had long term grazing leading to the minerals becoming depleted.
- Chelation (key-lay-shun) is the chemical process by which a mineral (iron, cobalt, copper, zinc, manganese) is combined with a mixture of amino acids and peptides.
- Recent research indicates that with minerals bound to amino acids and peptides (chelation), less interaction occurs and more mineral is absorbed by the horse.
- Minerals fed as sulphates or oxides typically are poorly absorbed because, as weakly charged transitional elements, they interact with other minerals flowing through the digestive tract.
- The benefits of chelated minerals include increased absorption, reduced quantity of mineral in the diet and reduction of mineral pollution through excretion.
- Chelated organic trace minerals provides mineral nutrition in a form as close to nature as possible.
The Lifeforce Range from Alltech is designed to optimise the digestive health of horses at every stage of life, from breeding stock to pleasure and performance animals.
For further information please visit www.lifeforcehorse.co.uk or telephone 01780 764512
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