Heat Alert! Your Feed and Supplements Are Vulnerable

By Juliet M. Getty, Ph.D.

Proper handling and storage of your horses’ feed and supplements is critically important during the sizzling summer months. Good nutrition for your horse is expensive! Let’s look at how to protect your investment.

Vitamins detest heat, light, moisture, and air

If temperature was the only issue, the room would have to be as high as 120 degrees Fahrenheit for vitamins to lose activity. But the moisture and oxygen in the air, along with light, both natural and artificial, speed up the oxidative process. Together, these factors are destructive, causing vitamins to degrade and lose activity. Antioxidants such as vitamins A, C, and E, as well as beta carotene, are oxidized rendering them useless. B vitamins change their structure, so they no longer behave as B vitamins.

Even under cooler conditions, care must be taken to minimize light exposure

Do not dish out the morning’s feed the night before. Keep it in a sealed container until ready to use and replace the lid quickly.

Protecting fat from going rancid

You are probably including one or more fatty feeds in your horse’s diet. Common ones include soybeans, plant oils, rice bran, flaxseeds, chia seeds, and hemp seeds. The omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids in these foods are highly unsaturated and can start to turn rancid within a few days if stored in a hot room, due to a process known as oxidative rancidity. Free radical formation is the result of this activity. They are highly volatile molecules that can cause harm to your horse’s tissues.

Pro and prebiotics need attention

Most digestive supplements contain enzymes. These function as prebiotics and are chemically classified as proteins. Heat denatures proteins, rendering the enzymes completely inactive.

Probiotics are living microorganisms that will quickly die in harsh temperatures. Many digestive preparations contain both pre- and pro-biotics. Storing them in a hot barn makes them ineffective for your horse, resulting in wasted money.

Is anything stable in heat?

Minerals, such as iron, copper, zinc, manganese, calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, and selenium, to name a few, never get destroyed. They can be solubilized in water and hence removed from the feed when you drain the water (such as with soaking hay), but they themselves do not get destroyed.

Joint supplement ingredients such as collagen, glucosamine, and chondroitin sulfate are heat stable.

Most protein and carbohydrate sources are stable in summer temperatures unless the protein has enzymatic activity (as with prebiotics) or contains immunoglobulins (such as colostrum).

Copra meal contains coconut oil, which is stable in heat because it is a saturated fat and therefore, not susceptible to oxygen damage.

What is the solution?

It is best to store your feeds and supplements in an air-conditioned feed room. If this is not possible, see if a refrigerator is available.

You can freeze larger quantities of whole foods such as chia, flax, or hemp seeds. But do not store your vitamin supplements in the freezer.

If your barn lacks a refrigerator, store the supplements in your air-conditioned or cooler home and bring out only small quantities to the barn, enough for no more than a week at a time.

Treat your feed and supplements with care. Keep them in tightly closed containers and only open them long enough to get what you need. Never store them outside.

Avoid direct sunlight: Prepare the feed and serve it to your horse immediately. Do not let it sit in the sun.

Do not let your horse’s feed sit in water for more than two hours. Soaking any longer than that will not only destroy nutrients but will promote the formation of mold and bacteria.

Buy smaller sized containers in the summer to help keep them fresh.

Monitor the room’s temperature. While there is no exact rule of thumb, a commonsense goal would be no higher than 85-degrees Fahrenheit. Any higher, and it is best to avoid storage in that space.

Regularly inspect your products. Check for any rancid odor. If you notice mold or a change in the product’s texture or color, discard it.

Plan to finish your products within 60 days, even if the shelf life is longer. The shelf-life date is only valid for products that are either unopened, or stored in sealed containers in a cool, dry, place. Once you open the container, it begins to succumb to the environment.

Bottom line

Summer months can bring many challenges in storing and protecting your horses’ feed and supplements against damage. Heat, air, light, and humidity all work together to degrade and spoil nutrients, making them inactive, or worse, potentially harmful for your horse. Every effort should be made to safely store and handle feedstuffs to maintain the product’s potency and integrity.

For Permission to Reprint

For permission to reprint this article, in part or in its entirety, please contact Dr. Juliet Getty directly at Gettyequinenutrition@gmail.com.