Lysine, the first limiting amino acid

Lysine keeps coming up in my personal research both for me & my horses.

I have known for ages that most horse feeds are actually low in Lysine despite what the label says.
Basically these days if the manufactured feed does not contain soy protein then it will be low in Lysine. My horses are mostly native grass fed, so they will be low in Lysine. That means Jude has skin issues, Sonny has foot issues & Cassie is fast becoming IR (she's developing a huge crest even though she gets no sweet feed).

This is one reason why I feed the very expensive mineral supplement that I use. It is one of a very few that actually does contain a fair amount of this amino acid. But being so expensive I can only afford to feed 1/4 of the recommended daily dose. Although I do wonder about the ratio & relationship of supplement cost -V- vet bills.

However I struggle to find online info regarding sources of Lysine for the horses. I can find sources for me such as some cheeses, salmon, tuna & eggs. Apart from soy, Seaweed meal seems to be one of a few viable sources for horses.

During my investigations of the locally available horse feeds, I discovered I was wasting my money buying expensive feeds as they really have no more Lysine than cheap feeds because the Lysine is provided by the soy content. Expensive feeds do contain lots more of most other nutrients. However these same feeds are too high in protein due to the soy content & can cause nitrogen build up in horse bladders.

Apart from the horse feed issues, this soy content thing has recently become an issue for me personally regarding my chook's feed & my health issues. They won't eat the soy part of any purchased chook feed. I think low Lysine might be one reason why my chooks are always sick. There are other very important reasons like they are aged commercial layers so their genes are letting them down heaps. I don't force them to eat any soy foodstuff so unless I find them live crickets & grasshoppers, they basically don't get any Lysine. Therefore their eggs have no Lysine, therefore I don't get enough Lysine & that might be a reason for my kidney failure.

So to make up the deficit for the chooks, I feed them a 'spam' type meat meal that I make in the food processor out of beef liver or kidney, bandsaw dust from the butcher's bandsaw, beef mince, calcium powder(DCP) & filled out with 50% home made bread made with stone ground wholemeal organic flour. I freeze it in ice cube trays so I can portion control it. Due to the cost of feeding my chooks this spam, I use their eggs as most of my protein food. Feeding meat stuffs to chooks is a double edged sword because digesting the protein requires more calcium & makes their egg shells weak so I loose a lot of eggs, they get retained eggs & shell-less eggs which are had for them to pass.

So back to the horses requirements for Lysine, I am at a loss as to where I can get it from if not from meatmeal type products like blood & bone made for garden use. It is illegal for manufacturers to add meatmeal to any animal feedstuff in my state & to a lesser extent in the whole of Australia. Some manufacturers get around it by dubious means in other states. But I wonder if a small amount of meatmeal might actually be good for my horses & help their health issues. The law was made back when blood & bone was a far lesser processed meal from the meatworks. It still had obvious bits of bone & it did smell. These days it is far more processed, finely ground, heat & steam treated to a far higher temperature & has far less smell.

The chooks like eating a bit every few days so I wondered whether I should try the horses with a little occasionally also. I have no idea how much Lysine would be left in any sort of viable form after all that processing & heat treatment. Maybe nothing remains other than nitrogen & phosphorous. To be a complete feed for plants it needs 10% potassium sulphate added. So feeding just B&B to animals would not be a complete feed anyway.

Here are just 2 of many 10's of articles I have read over the last few years.
http://equine.uckele.com/Resources-Arti ... /L-Lysine/
http://www.vitaflex.com/res_lysinea.php

Interesting, I had not read much about Lysine. I looked up the supplement I give the horses and it supposedly has 34 grams in it, which if that's true is probably a good amount. I have noticed in the past couple years since I began giving the vitamin and mineral supplements consistently that I've had less issues with skin. They used to get various things like small patches of fungus or bacteria, rain rot, scratches. They also would get very scurfy, flaky stuff in their manes and tales. Recently I've noticed they haven't been having those issues, and also Halla's one remaining sarcoid between her legs has disappeared. I think good nutrition is very important, and while horses can get by without these trace things, they seem healthier with them.