Magic? Nope. Math. A little number-crunching can go a long way toward saving you money on your feed bill.
Dawn Buis is an Area III eventer who runs a Pony Club Riding Center out of the barn she manages and trains, Pony Tail Acres, in Powder Springs, GA. Like many barn managers, going to the feed store isn’t her favorite activity — especially the part when they ring you up.
Dawn has a passion for feed rations and regularly calculates them for the horses in her care, thanks to the education she received about formulating rations while she attended UGA in the Animal Science department, and a while back she decided to try an experiment: Was it possible to feed better-quality feed AND save money? What she discovered may surprise you.
Photo: Public Domain
Another week gone means another trip to the feed store. Anyone who owns or keeps horses feels the pain in their bank account every time they walk in to buy feed. Many of us want to give our horses the best, but we all find it really hard to swallow the cost of that super nice feed, like my brand of choice from Belgium, Cavalor, when the local brand is a good $10 cheaper.
Being someone who doesn’t give up easily, I started to do the math to make it work so I could feed the Cavalor feed. Thank goodness I like spread sheets and I created a lot of them to come to this conclusion.
My main event horse was getting about one scoop of feed per feeding. That’s two scoops a day, 14 a week, and roughly 56 scoops a month. Of course, I thought the easiest thing would be to just cut her feed out completely, but she pinned her ears at me at that suggestion, so I went back to the drawing board.
So Cavalor Sr. is roughly $32.99 per bag and the local Sr. bag is $21.99. That seems like the best choice especially since the local bag is 50 lbs and the other is 44 lbs.
Here is where the math comes in. There are 24 scoops of the Cavalor per bag and 18 scoops of the “local” feed. WHAT??? How is that possible?? I know it doesn’t make sense, but I sat in the feed store with my feed store owner and actually counted scoops into a muck bucket. So when you start looking at how many bags you’ll be going through a week, you’ll be going through a sixth of a bag of Cavalor and an eighth of a bag of the “local” feed.
I liked the idea of going through less feed per week because it meant fewer trips to the feed store which means less fuel in my truck to get there an back. So I swapped my horse anyway.
So when I was feeding the same amount I spent a little more initially but made fewer feed trips on the same number of bags I bought. Cool! As much as I love a field trip, it cuts into the time I get to spend working horses.
Since I started feeding the better quality feed, I noticed my horses were all getting a little chunky despite being in full work. So the better quality feed means that I could feed LESS because the digestibility is higher (A feed rep can give you the run down on digestibility).
Since I cut my horse back to three-quarters of a scoop of feed per feeding. Here’s how it changed the math:
Well that looks much better! So I’m saving roughly $10.90 a month, which is $130.84 per year. I have five horses that I pay to feed, so that savings is about $654 a year, which is enough for me to pay for a horse trial for one of the silly beasts.
Just to be sure that I had made the right decision, I decided to take a before and after picture. The bottom was taken in March 2013 and the top was in June 2013, which was roughly a 90-day trial. It takes roughly 60 days to see a difference and we gave it an extra 30 to make sure that the changes stayed.
Photos by Dawn Buis
Granted, the above math is a rough estimate, but we swapped the whole boarding barn over and haven’t looked back since.
We were spending roughly $850 a week on feed for 15 horses and now our weekly feed bill is roughly $425 a week for 20 horses! I know it doesn’t make sense, but it worked out for our barn.
Moral of the story: Figure out what you’re feeding by volume and then figure out what that is costing you on a per week and per month basis. From there, start looking at your options and the best thing is to remember that not all feeds are created equal.
Talk to feed reps and really figure out what you’re feeding. Look at the science behind how your feed is formulated and make sure you know where your feed comes from. We all remember the mixup of what happens when the milling machinery isn’t cleaned between mixing ruminant and horse feeds.
If you’re happy with what you’re feeding and spending, great! If not, it’s time to look into something else.
Thanks for sharing, Dawn! We love sharing reader submissions — email yours to [email protected].
