About Us |
The Paradise Farms de-hulling plant has HACCP certification for human food chain products and this essential qualification is maintained using high standard quality assurance procedures, which are essentially part of the production of the Omega Feeds products. Our quality ingredients have been specifically selected to provide your horse with a safe, palatable and nutritious feed to ensure optimal health and vitality. Our unique formulas all contain a balanced blend of vitamins and minerals, which has been customised to each individual product to ensure your horses nutritional needs are met.
Due to the large scale growth and success of the company, Omega Feeds welcomed an in house, full time Equine Nutritionist Danielle Boland (B.E.Sc.) to their team in January 2012. Danielle has been focussing on enhancing the nutritional value of all the feeds and formulating a new feed to add to the Omega Feeds product line, which will be launched at Equitana 2012.
Horses have evolved on high fibre diets, and should be fed a minimum of 1% of their body weight per day in fibrous feeds. Fibre has many important roles in horse heath. It is a source of energy, provides the horse with gut fill (bulk), horses spend more time chewing the fibrous feed, so they produce more saliva which buffers the stomach and protects it from ulceration, and the fermentation of fibre also produces B vitamins.
It is known that grain based diets are often responsible for causing ‘fizzy’ or stereotypical behaviour, gastric ulcers, tying up, laminitis, and colic. Horses have a limited ability to efficiently digest the large amounts of starch present in grain based diets due to limited enzymes in the small intestine. When excess grain is consumed, it will escape digestion in the small intestine and overflow into the hindgut where it is rapidly fermented into lactic acid. The build up of lactic acid causes a decline in faecal pH, killing the good bacteria and releasing endotoxins in the blood, often resulting in metabolic conditions and digestive upsets.