What Ingredients Make up Sacate Feed Pellet?

The idea of feeding your horse a pelleted feed might sound unnatural, but most pets and domesticated animals are fed pelleted feeds. It might help you to gain a better understanding of everything that goes into each feed pellet, so that you realize pelleted feeds aren’t really unnatural — they’re everything a horse would normally eat, just in a different, more convenient form.

Here is everything that goes into each of our feeds.

Hay

The first, largest, and most important thing that goes into a feed pellet is, of course, hay. Our pellets mostly consist of alfalfa hay, with some Bermuda hay and/or oat hay added to specific feeds. A lot of care goes into the hay that Sacate uses in our pelleted feed. We carefully select our hay farmers, monitor their fields, and inspect the hay before it is processed in our factories. Forage is the bulk of a horse’s diet on the range or in pasture, so it makes up most of the ingredients in our pellets. The other ingredients are simply to balance the pellets nutritionally and to hold them together.

Added Nutrients

Sacate intends our pellets to be a complete feed, so the next ingredients that go in are to achieve the guaranteed nutritional content. This means, of course, that first we need to test the hay to find out what it already has in it. After we do the nutritional analysis, we’ll add some corn (for bulk), vitamins, and minerals as needed, ensuring that our feed will meet the horses’ needs. Each of our feeds is geared toward a different level of needs. Some of our feeds, for instance, are designed for horses that have higher caloric needs, such as pregnant or nursing mares, or horses in heavy work programs. Other feeds are designed for horses in less demanding circumstances, such as pleasure horses in lighter work programs.

Molasses: The Glue That Holds It All Together

You’ll notice that molasses is also listed in our ingredients. A lot of horse people worry about their horses having too much molasses, but the truth is, every feed pellet needs this ingredient. Molasses does make the pellets more appealing to horses, sure, but it’s added only partly for that reason. More importantly, molasses helps to hold the entire mixture together, creating the well-formed, dust-free pellets that make feeding with Sacate feeds so convenient.

Understanding the Feed Pelleting Process

So how do we get a feed pellet out of a field of alfalfa? It’s not an easy process, but we like to make it look easy when you feed your horse a bucket of pellets. For more information about Sacate’s carefully chosen ingredients and pelleting process, visit our online tour or give us a call.