by Jacques Beauchesne
President, Semican, Inc.
 
Horse owners who prefer to feed whole grains have good reasons to make oats that grain. For starters, oats are considered the “safest” grain to feed horses. That is because their starch is more easily digested in the horse’s small intestine than the starches in corn or barley. This minimizes the potential for undigested starches to reach the horse’s hind gut, where they can cause colic. Oat digestibility can be particularly critical for performance sport horses or racehorses in training, whose daily grain ration may approach 50 percent (by weight) of their total diet.
 
Oats are also less susceptible to contamination by molds producing mycotoxins than other whole grains such as corn or wheat. This means horse owners can buy, feed, and store them with greater confidence. Compared to processed grains or processed mixed feeds, whole, unprocessed oats can maintain their nutritional value almost indefinitely when stored under proper conditions.
 
Horses like oats as much as their owners. Oats are easier to chew than other grains and horses relish their taste. Their palatability makes oats the grain of choice for finicky eaters, hard keepers, and performance horses such as racehorses, eventers, or cutting horses.
 
Horse oats are available in whole or processed forms. Those who prefer whole oats can choose hulless oats or traditional hulled oats which have been clipped to remove their hairy tip and cleaned to remove foreign matter and dust. Processed oats may be crimped or flaked. Crimping crushes the oats, cracking their hard hulls and softer inner kernels (called groats) which exposes more surfaces to digestive juices. Flaked oats have been rolled flat and sometimes “cooked” with steam, again to increase digestibility.
 
Processing, by whatever means, typically increases digestibility only about 3 to 5 percent compared to feeding whole oats. Since this also increases their price, horse owners need to consider whether the increased cost is justified by the small increase in digestibility versus simply feeding a larger quantity of oats. Since crimping or flaking exposes more of the soft groat’s surfaces to air, stored processed oats are more susceptible to vitamin losses, protein degradation, and fat oxidation. As a result, they have a very short shelf life of only a few months compared to unprocessed whole oats.
 
Oats are sometimes maligned for their highly variable nutritional profile, but this is only true if you look at the spectrum of all available oats. The quality of oats, like any agricultural product, can vary tremendously depending on the variety planted, growing conditions, harvesting techniques and storage conditions. Agricultural product buyers depend on quality grading to help them make wise purchases.
 
Oats grades are based on bushel weight and on the percent of field debris (which can include small stones) and “foreign seeds” (weeds or other non-oat seeds) that are mixed in with them. Textured feeds that include oats as one of their ingredients are more likely to include lower oat grades since the manufacturer can adjust the mix’s nutrient levels with other ingredients. Buying whole oats allows horse owners to visually inspect their purchase for the clean, plump kernels of uniform size and color that are the hallmark of high grade oats. One way horse owners can minimize nutritional variance is to buy Number One Heavy whole oats, often marketed as triple cleaned racehorse or jockey oats.
 
Hulless oats offer even more nutritional consistency. Generations of natural plant breeding have produced oat varieties that shed their loose hulls in the field as they are harvested. Commercial hulless oats are essentially 100 percent groats. Traditional oats are 23 to 35 percent hull by weight and only 65 to 77 percent groat. The indigestible fiber in oat hulls provides little or no nutritive value. The variability in hull weight accounts for a large percentage of the nutritional variability in traditional oats, even those of the same grade.
 
Hulless oats (sometimes called naked oats) are not included in the traditional oat grading system because, without hulls, they are somewhat a class or grade unto themselves. A bushel of hulless oats typically weighs 50 to 55 pounds compared to a bushel of Number One Heavy Oats at 40 to 44 pounds. That means, pound for pound, hulless oats offer buyers more for their money.
 
Hulless oat varieties have also been bred for higher protein and fat content. Compared to traditional hulled oats, hulless oats typically have 30 percent more energy (calories), 48 percent more protein and 42 percent more fat. This means horse owners who choose hulless oats can meet their horse’s basic nutritional needs with less grain. That only benefits their budget but also lowers the likelihood of colic or founder due to grain overload and makes it easier to get enough calories into finicky eaters.
 
Don’t confuse hulless oats with dehulled oats. Dehulled oats are traditional oats whose hulls have been removed mechanically with the result that many groats are cracked and broken. This increases the likelihood of vitamin loss and rancidity. Groats produced by dehulling traditional oats are more costly, have a shorter shelf life, and lack the higher nutrient levels of hulless oat varieties.
 
{Jacques Beauchesne is president of Semican, Inc., producers of Equavena hulless oats and other quality grains and feed products for the horse industry. More information is available at www.equavena.com or by calling 800/668-8823.