Welcome to our farm!

This week, our horse group hosted an equine nutrition conference for horse owners at LongView Animal Nutrition Center, which is our research farm in Gray Summit, MO. I really enjoy these events, because I get to meet so many interesting and successful horse professionals who have been personally invited by one of our Equine Specialists to attend. I also love the opportunity it gives us to “show off” our facilities and our people! I realize that it is probably impossible for most people to truly understand the level of commitment that Purina has to making exceptional horse feed….until they come to the research farm. I think that once someone actually sees first-hand what goes on “behind the scenes”, the immense amount of time and energy that goes into making our feed becomes obvious. Since we’d never be able to have every single horse owner in the country come to the farm in person, the entire purpose of this research blog is to serve as your personal “behind the scenes” view of our farm...so you can get a feel for our daily activities and our commitment to “do best by the horse” in all things.

If you were at our LongView conference this week, your daily agenda would have included the following lectures by our experts:

• Ingredients and Process Research
• Feed Quality
• Equine Reproduction and Growth
• Equine Sports Nutrition (this was my lecture topic)
• Equine Digestive Physiology
• Body Condition Scoring

In addition, you would taken a farm tour and seen our:

• Horse palatability lab
• Exercise physiology equipment, including a demo by one of our treadmill horses
• Herd of 70+ research horses of all ages
• Veterinary services lab
• Dairy, beef, and other species research units

It’s hard work putting this type of event together, but totally worth it. I hope that as time goes on, you will understand and appreiciate that we take equine nutrition research seriously at Purina. Stay tuned, there’s a lot more to come!