09/02/2026
Nobody ever taught me how to read a horse feed label.
For years I went by the rule everybody repeats. Check the first five ingredients. It started with dog food — if the top five looked good, I figured the bag was good.
What I have learned since, mostly the hard way, is that the first five ingredients are the advertisement. It's the last twenty that are the answer.
So I took a real feed tag. No corn, no oats, no soy, low NSC, the kind of bag that looks good sitting on the shelf. And I broke the whole thing down, front to back.
Parts of it are well built. They guarantee threonine, which almost nobody does, and the amino acid ratios are right where they should be. I said so in the post, because if you're going to criticize a feed you had better criticize the right things.
Then you read the back half. Three clays and a dirt. Two iodine sources when at most you need one. A synthetic vitamin K your horse already makes for itself in the hindgut. And a flavor you're not allowed to know.
None of that is on the front of the bag.
I left the brand off on purpose. The point isn't who made it. The point is how to read one.
Full breakdown, ingredient by ingredient: https://nutrisanaeq.com/2026/09/02/how-to-read-a-horse-feed-label/
Forage -> Balance -> Build