How Do You Cook for a Race Horse?
Pretty much like you’d cook for a wealthy human is the answer.
Learning about horse feed at Hallway Feeds, Lexington, KY
When I drive north through Lexington, Kentucky I pass a mill called Hallway Feeds. I know just enough to recognize a feed mill—a cluster of silos with channels out of the top—they are all over rural America preparing feed for cattle, pigs, sheep, and pets too.
I like to look up the names of industries in the places where I live as a way of getting a sense of what makes them tick. So I googled Hallway. Horse feed! And it offered a tour. Yeah.
A couple of weeks later I presented myself at the door. Carly Guinn, the knowledgeable and charming Director of Customer Care greeted me. It appeared that I was the only person that day, indeed the only person for quite some time given the pandemic.
“If the horse doesn’t like what you offer, it doesn’t matter how nutritious it is. He won’t eat it.” Mr. Bob Hall, founder of Hallway Feeds, has specialized in making foods that high performance horses, young or old, fit or sick, will eat.
In the 1950s and 60s, when Mr. Bob Hall was growing up on the family farm outside Lexington and attending the University of Kentucky, race horses were just one part of local rural life. In 1964 with his wife Bonnie, he bought a mill to produce feed for local cattle and hogs.
But over the years, the horse industry boomed in the area and Lexington became a global center of the equine industry. The Hall’s feed mill changed too.
Now the feed mill only produces for high performance horses. It’s as high tech as it’s possible to imagine with a computerized control room just off the entrance, between the offices and the mill itself.
A racehorse, just like a wealthy human, likes grains. Yes, horses do like a nice mouthful of grass, especially if it’s young and fresh. To work, though, race horses need the extra energy that grains provide.
And race horses do work, first training for races. Later, if they are successful, as stud or breeding mares. And this too is work. A stallion can cover 80 to 100 mares during a breeding season.
Trucks roll up to the plant and unload into the pits: corn from Indiana and oats from Canada. All the farms are carefully inspected to make sure that the ingredients are of the highest quality.
Race horses, like wealthy humans, prefer their grains to be ground up and perhaps even cooked. Much easier to digest that way. In other words, race horses like processed food. And since some of them get overweight, Hallway Feeds obliges with a diet line.
It’s not just grains. They also need sugar, fat, vitamins and minerals, a diet carefully worked out for different levels of activity and stages of life in collaboration with the horse dietitians at the University of Kentucky. All these are added in measured quantities, moved up the elevators, and passed through the milling process, back down to the main floor and into sacks.
Two busy little robots seal the sacks and stack them. Some are branded with the Hallway name, others carry the name of the stable ordering them.
More trucks pick up the orders, delivering them across the Bluegrass, across the United States and around the world.
Horse Feeding Through History
Back to grains. This is nothing new. Through the centuries, work horses, whether war horses or cart horses, needed grain. In writing about Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army, Donald W. Engels used the manual of Animal Management published in 1908 by the British Army Veterinary Department to figure out that Alexander’s cavalry horses would have required 10 lbs. of grain a day as well as 10 lbs. of hay.
(As an aside, that explains why horses have always been such a luxury. A horse required 10 lbs. of grain a day, a soldier needed 3, and a peasant about 2. One horse cost as much to feed as five peasants).
In medieval and early modern England, grains (and pulses) for horses were often baked into bread. Bread historian William Rubel has investigated the recipes for horse bread from the seventeenth through to the early 20th century. The quality and quantity of horse bread, just like that of human bread, was regulated by the government for centuries. Ordinary working horses had breads made of peas and broad beans.
When in the seventeenth century, the English aristocracy imported three Arabian stallions, the ancestors of today’s thoroughbred horse, these valuable creatures were fed white bread. They ate better than most of the population.
The horses that Hallway feeds probably still do.
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For an overview of horse feed. Another short piece on feeding performance horses.
On oats (and molasses) in horse feed. More on oats and other grains.
On feeding horses cooked roots (carrots, potatoes, turnips, sugar beet, sweet potatoes) in the nineteenth century.
A chronology of 19th and 20th century horse feed innovations from a British perspective in the venerable Horse and Hound.
Changes in horse feed in the last 50 years from an American perspective.
Fascinating. Thanks.
It’s a very small group of people who care about what race horses are fed. So story is unread.
I would never expect anyone to feel obliged to read my blog posts. I would say, though, that I was surprised both by how interesting it was and how it linked up with modern human food.
I thought it was interesting. Never would have thought horses ate bread.
Very interesting Rachel. I’m glad it looks as though the oil added to horse food is not palm oil. It seems palm oil is now a regular part of the diet of dairy cows in Canada and it is for this reason that our butter is now much harder than it used to be. Palm oil is in most of the processed food produced for humans and I gather this is not good for our health.
A bit more complex than the feeding of hunters and ponies when we were young!