SpringWaterStation.com blog

  My Kiger Mustang seem to eat anything.  My wife’s pine trees, blackberry bushes. To say the least they are easy keepers. But one thing they do need is water. For equine athletes the winning edge means the right nutrition, and your horses drink enough water, then their bodies can make energy efficiently and fuel top performance. However getting your horse to drink during competition is imperative and more often than not difficult. There are many trick riders and trainers try soaking their hay, feeding soaked beet pulp, but the best approach I’ve found is green grass.Water is the most important factor in sports nutrition. Water makes up approximately 60% of body weight and 70% of green grass.  It is involved in almost every body process. Your body cannot make or store water, so you must replace the water eliminated in urination and sweating.

But water rich in minerals and nutrients, chloraphyl, found in green feed. That’s the key to winning.

Grain as a livestock feed is no longer tenable. Production of onSite and on-Demand green feed is a must. 

World hunger statistics are staggering: Over 1 billion people, over a sixth of the world’s population, are chronically undernourished. Between 700 and 800 million people lack sufficient income to obtain the basic necessities of life. An estimated twenty million people die annually due to hunger.

2. Children are particularly victimized by malnutrition. Three out of four people who die due to hunger are children. Over 8 percent of children in poorer countries die before their first birthday. According to a UNICEF report on the “State of the World’s Children”, a child dies of malnutrition or starvation every 2.3 seconds.

3. One important reason why many are starving today is that tremendous amount of grains are used to fatten animals for slaughter. It takes 8 to 12 pounds of grain to produce one pound of edible beef in a feedlot. Half of U.S. farm acreage is used to produce feed crops for livestock. Animal agriculture also requires tremendous inputs of chemical fertilizer and pesticides, irrigation water, and fuel - commodities which are becoming scarcer worldwide.

Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer estimated that if just 10 percent of the worlds cattle were taken off grain, enough grain would be released to feed 60 million people.

The wealthy nations feed more grain to their livestock than the people of India and China (more than one-third of humanity) consume directly.

  The “Circle of Life”, “God’s Plan” call it whatever you like, but it’s no surprise to livestock breeds that the flush of spring grass corresponds with the breeding season and the birthing of new foals.

Now scientist like Dr. Yasuo Hotta are researching why? A substance provisionally dubbed P4D1 found abundantly in spring grasses, not cubed alfalfa or dry hay bales, but new growth has shown, in laboratory testing, the ability to stimulate the production and natural repair of reproductive cells and it’s DNA structure in both humans and livestock.

What does this mean? That the P4D1 found in the new grass growth seems to be able to increase potency, reproductive powers and stimulate the repair of DNA.

Food scientist Dr. Charles Schnabel has shown how fresh grasses returned fertility to Dairy bulls, increased milk production and extended the longevity of milkers.  In addition research grass-fed hens, winter egg production went up by 150% per bird!

The effect of Spring Grass is probably news to the scientist-not farmers.

 Well maybe that’s dreaming, but sperm Sexing, for horse breeders, to predetermine the sex of offspring prior to breeding, thereby maximizing, profitability, is soon to be a reality.

Sorting by sex is not entirely new, the technology has been available since the late 1980s; it was used by a research team to produce the world’s first lamb, of a pre-determined sex in 1995, although the procedure used then was too complex to be taken up commercially.

But today, pre-selecting a foal’s sex, has become a commercial reality. The ability to select sex will have a beneficial impact on horse breeding. In a horse market already flooded with unwanted animals smaller pinpoint breeding program can fill market demand.

Serious horse breeders,” including Kiger Mustangs, quarter horses, Arabians and others, have preferences, for which sex they want in different equestrian sports. If you’re a performance horse breeder, say for jumpers then you want males, the most successful jumpers are usually male because of greater strength and muscle mass, if your market is breeding animals quality fillies sell three to one plus the profit margin is two fold over trained geldings. So gaining a reliable way to select for sex will be beneficial to breeders.

The economic returns from sex selection for other livestock should be even larger. In cattle, dairy farmers want cows to be born, rather than bulls. So if the sex ratio can be skewed to make almost all of the calves born female, the number of pregnancies needed to build a herd will be cut in half. We know that about 10 million dairy calves annually born male are slaughtered at birth, because bulls are useless in the milk business, except for a few needed for breeding. Similarly, beef breeders prefer males, and breeding only to get big, muscular bulls could significantly improve profits for the meat industry.

The new technology does not involve genetic modification, is non-invasive. I anticipate this inexpensive approach will launch possible in 2008.