May 25, 2002

Is Education Just a Word?

The Legislature has finally gone home. Almost two months later than they promised early in the session. Every day they are in session, taxpayers need to be nervous.

The biggest part of the state budget is the various forms of education funding. If the education lobby asks for a 12% increase over the last budget and they only get a 9% increase, they say they were cut 3%.

Has any taxpayer ever asked what we are getting for our investment? I would guess that we must have very smart people with all the money going to education.

I bring this to your attention because of questions that are repeatedly asked of me concerning hay and feeding horses.

Let's try a few test questions. What is the difference between an 800# large round bale and a 2000# large round bale? Almost without fail, the question asked by the buyer, on the phone, is, how much a bale? If the 800# bale costs $30.00/bale and the 2000# bale costs $50.00/bale, which one will the caller buy?

The same is true of small square bales.

We offer hay cubes as an alternative to round bales or square bales. The most frequent asked question is how much do you feed? My question to the question is how much hay do you feed now? Usually to avoid embarrassment they will tell me a number. How do they know how much they are feeding if they do not have a scale?

Keep in mind that a pound of hay is a pound of hay assuming that they are the same quality (round, square or cubed). Another fact to keep in mind is that only that portion of the hay that gets to the horses stomach counts, not the part in the pile behind the barn.

The same is true of the sweet feed being fed to horses. A three pound coffee can doesn't mean it holds three pounds of sweet feed. Will that can hold the same poundage of corn flakes as ground feed corn?

I have a terrific young man as a hay client that helped me with this issue last winter. I believe he had six horses at the time. He is a good student and eager to learn. He asked how much the round bales cost and how much they weighed? He then asked how much the cubes cost per pound? He decided to try an experiment and put two horses on cubes and four horses on round bales because of the apparent cost savings.

We weighed the round bales and the large bag of cubes. About two months into the project, I asked him how much cubes they were eating? He told me they had backed off to 28 pounds per day. This surprised me because I was of the understanding that full feed they would eat about 1.5 - 2.0% of their body weight per day. I was expecting about 20#/day. I then asked how much the pen of four horses were using per day? We based that on the weight of the bales divided by the number of horses (4) and the number of days the bales lasted. This calculated out to be 51#/day. Remember this will include any hay that is wasted not the amount that is reaching the stomach. The cubes were made from the same round bales. He is now feeding all cubes and no round bales.

These same math skills are important in determining how much we should be feeding of the other feed ingredients. At the recent Horse Expo, a lady came to our booth and asked some very good questions. From these questions, I realized something I had not thought of before concerning the feeding of minerals and vitamins to horses. Ask yourself how much and what kind of vitamins and minerals should you be feeding your horse? Then ask yourself how much is each horse actually consuming?

As this lady told me about her operation, I asked her how much sweet feed she fed to her horses? She had a number of horses and the amount varied depending on their condition and the amount of work they were doing. The amounts varied from as low as 1#/day to as high as 12#/day. All the horses got was a good quality hay and a given amount of sweet feed that included the vitamins and minerals. I then asked her if she thought one horse really needed 12 times as much minerals and vitamins as the other one?

How much education is being used in developing the horses nutritional needs? How much education is being used in calculating the exact rations needed by the horse? What good is the education without a scale? The horses gastro-intestinal (GI) system is very forgiving but it does have limits. When the horse was in the wild, they could search for their needs but the horse in a box stall is pretty limited to their choices. The box stall

horse sure hopes you know what you are doing!

What does an education mean? When I deliver a load of hay to a new client I really wonder. I have been selling hay for many years. I have a DVM degree. As I listen to people, I wonder if experience and education mean anything?

I recently met a fellow hay producer. We discussed the types of hay we produced and I explained my concern about where the health of the horse population may be going. He then made a comment that I will never forget, "your biggest problem is you know too much , just sell them what they think they want".

Maybe we should tell our legislators they are spending too much money on education. Keep the questions coming, I also learn from your questions.