Conditioning Livestock Feed with Ground Raw Flax

Our livestock recipes tend to evolve over time. This year, we increased the amount of flax in our basic feed, and we also quit cooking it. We have been using this feed not only for the horses, but for the goats and the cow as well. They all love it. The recipe below is enough for our three horses, three goats, and one cow. We feed in the evening, so this is started in the morning.

3 quarts whole oats
3 quarts alfalfa pellets
1 quart whole flax
1-2 cups apple cider vinegar

 Optional additions:

up to 2 cups vegetable oil 
up to 1 cup molasses

Morning:

Grind the oats, and combine with the vinegar and enough water to make about 3 cups of liquid.  Mix this into the oats. This allows the vinegar to work on the oats and help reduce phytic acid that can impede mineral absorption.

Dump the alfalfa pellets into a wide bin, pour 6 cups of water over them, and leave them to soak. (The wide bin makes it easier to break them up later, as they will puff up and stick together in a big clump.)

Evening:

Break up the alfalfa pellets, which will have become nice soft pellet puffs. Dump the soaked oats in with the pellet puffs.

Grind the flax, and dump that in, too. Mix it all up into a nice fluffy mass.

If using the oil, add that too, and mix it all together. If you want to use molasses, combine it with the oil in a separate container first, and then add it to the solids. The oil will carry the molasses through the mix, which is much easier than dumping molasses straight in by itself and trying to work the sticky stuff in.

Notes:

1. I don't use molasses very often, and then only in the winter, when there are no flies to be drawn by it.

2. I grind the flax in a Vitamix, a powerful blender that is quite efficient. It has a pusher that goes through the lid, and I use that to push the unground flax down into the blades. I have also used a regular blender, and this works, too, although not quite as quickly.

3. I grind the oats in an old cast-iron mill that we keep in the feed room.  It is adjusted just tight enough to crush the hulls, but not so tight as to grind the oats into meal.

4. The biggest point of this feed, really, is to get flax into the animals, because it makes so much difference in their skin and coat condition; and with horses, as my farrier reminds me, whatever is good for the coat is also good for the hooves.

5. We have made this with only two quarts of oats and two of alfalfa pellets, but still using a whole quart of flax, and it works fine. Each animal doesn't get as much total feed, but still gets her ration of flax. The idea is to get about a cup of flax into each large animal. 

6. This could also be done with just oats, in which case I would probably use about 4 quarts of oats and a quart of flax; or just alfalfa, if one prefers to skip the carbohydrates, and there I would also use about 4 quarts of alfafa. We have done this, too, and it works fine.

7. In deciding how much water to add, I have been using the rule of thumb of about one part water for two parts alfalfa pellets, and one cup of total liquid for each quart of oats  (as measured before grinding), the total liquid being meant to include the vinegar.

8. Barley is nice stuff, good for vitamin B5 and whatnot.We don 't always keep it on hand the way we do oats, but if using it from time to time, I would probably use two quarts of oats and one of steam-rolled barley, along with the alfalfa, or three of oats and one of barley, if skipping the alfalfa. As you see, the recipe is pretty maleable.

9. There is a lot of discussion online about whether to cook flax seed, and whether to grind it, so I won't go into that in this post. With the amounts that we have been using, though, the uncooked flax has been working fine. With grinding the flax as we do, I have more confidence that the animals are actually getting the maximum benefit that it has to offer.

10. One of our horses tends toward an itchy-skin condition during the warm season, and the flax helps enormously with this.

11. Our horses are drafts breeds, and there is much discussion online about steering away from carbohydrates, as the draft breeds (and some others) sometimes suffer from a metabolic disorder involving difficulty with glycogen storage (polysaccharide storage myopathy); so we never feed large quantities of grain in any case; and we have at times fed the flax with just alfalfa. However, there are questions in this direction, too, as flax with just alfalfa makes a pretty high-protein feed, around 19%.  The combination of oats and alfalfa with the flax gives us some balance among these factors.  The options for what to do with this ratio should take into consideration what kind of forage the animals are getting.  For our part, we usually feed only grass or mostly-grass mixed hay, never straight alfalfa except to a cow in milk, at milking time.

12. Flax is low in calcium, so adding in some alfalfa improves the calcium balance in the ration. With the mix described above, our draft horses are getting approximately three cups of oats, three cups of alfalfa pellets, and one cup of flax.  For an animal the size of a draft horse, even a small draft horse, this is not very much.  But it is enough flax to really make a difference, and therein lies the magic.