How to read what this tool shows you - and, just as importantly, what it doesn't.
Equipedia Feed Finder is a free resource for finding and comparing Australian horse feeds. View manufacturers' declared nutrient values side by side, within the same feed category, and make better-informed choices for your horse.
Nutrition matters. It shapes your horse's health and development, underpins athletic performance, and is one of the most overlooked drivers of the behavioural issues owners notice every day. It is also a significant, modifiable risk factor in gastrointestinal diseases like colic, gastric ulcers and hindgut acidosis.
This tool compiles information already published on manufacturers' own websites. Equipedia takes integrity seriously: every record is checked directly against the manufacturer's own listing, and dated records are on the way as that verification work continues. It is free to use, and no income is earned from any listing on this site.
Looking for practical how-do-I answers instead? See the FAQ.
A free way to find and compare what Australian feed manufacturers declare about their products, so you can view declared nutrient values side by side and make better-informed choices for your horse.
Every card is tagged Website, Lab verified or Feedipedia. Website means the values are exactly what the brand publishes, not independently tested. Lab verified means the manufacturer has sent us their own batch lab-test results for that feed. Feedipedia means the figures come from Feedipedia, an independent published nutrition reference database, used mainly for raw base ingredients like wheat bran or lucerne chaff that don't have their own manufacturer page to draw from. None of these guarantee every value on the card, panels and reference entries vary in coverage, so where we know which figures they actually cover, we say so on the card rather than let the badge imply more than it does.
This is general information to help you read labels and ask better questions. It is not veterinary or nutritional advice, and decisions about your individual horse stay between you and your vet or nutritionist.
Values are taken from each manufacturer's own website, on a stated date, and archived so the record is fixed. Every card shows the date it was checked.
Bag labels may differ from websites. We use the website because it usually carries more detail, and because a dated, archived page is something anyone can verify.
Some manufacturers also state how a figure was worked out, whether it's calculated from the ingredients, a typical (average) analysis, or a batch-tested result. Right now, most website listings don't say. We're starting to capture this where it is published, but for most feeds today the honest answer is not stated. That's worth noticing in itself, and it's a fair question to put to any manufacturer directly: how was this number worked out?
If you're a manufacturer and would like your data validated or updated, email us, free, no charge, no paid placement.
When a card says Not declared, the manufacturer simply hasn't published that value. We show the gap rather than hiding it or guessing.
An undeclared value is never treated as zero. A blank means unknown, nothing more, nothing less. Naming the gap is part of the point of this tool.
Sugar is declared two different ways, and they aren't interchangeable:
WSC is always the larger number, so two brands using different methods can't be compared directly. Each card tells you which was declared.
NSC (non-structural carbohydrate) is generally understood as the sum of WSC + Starch. Some brands publish NSC directly, as its own declared figure. Others publish starch and sugars separately, and you add them together to reach an NSC value.
This matters most for metabolically sensitive horses, whose total NSC should generally be 10% or less, depending on the individual.
Where a manufacturer has published NSC directly, we show that figure exactly as declared, we don't recalculate or second-guess it against the separate sugar and starch figures. Where NSC itself hasn't been published but both WSC and starch have, we add those two together and label the result calculated - not declared, so it's never mistaken for the manufacturer's own figure. If none of NSC, WSC or starch have been published, we don't estimate one - it's left as Not declared rather than understated.
This is the big one. A feed called Fibre, Low GI or Safe is telling you how it's marketed, not what's in it. The only way to know is the numbers.
Starch and NSC are separate levers, and they matter to different horses:
High-NSC feeds are also linked to the behaviour owners notice day to day, fizzy, reactive, hard-to-settle horses. Large starch and sugar loads drive blood-glucose swings, and for many horses that shows up as excitability under saddle and on the ground.
Almost every bag gives one fibre number: crude fibre. It's important to understand this is a rough laboratory measure, it does not mean useable or digestible fibre. It tells you roughly how much is there, not how much your horse can actually ferment and use.
The same is true of protein. "Crude protein" is estimated from nitrogen content, not measured as useable protein. It tells you the quantity, not the quality or how digestible it is, and the amino acids that actually matter (like lysine) may not be declared at all.
And more protein is not automatically better. Excess protein is broken down and the nitrogen excreted as urea, which increases water intake, urine output, and ammonia in urine and manure. For a stabled horse, that ammonia is a real airway irritant. A higher protein percentage isn't a better feed, it's only right relative to what your horse actually needs.
More useful fibre measures, ADF and NDF, would tell you far more, but in Australia hardly any manufacturer publishes them (in this dataset, NDF appears on a single product and ADF on none). Overseas markets often do declare them. It's another whole class of useful information the local industry leaves out.
Protein quantity is only half the story. What actually matters is which amino acids are in it. Horses need 10 essential amino acids from their diet, ones the body can't make for itself: lysine, methionine, threonine, tryptophan, arginine, leucine, isoleucine, valine, histidine and phenylalanine.
The horse can only build protein up to whichever of those 10 is in shortest supply, usually lysine. Feed a horse plenty of "crude protein" but skimp on lysine, and most of that protein goes to waste. That's why "high protein" on a bag is a quantity claim, not a quality one.
Most Australian feeds declare only lysine, and sometimes methionine. The other eight are rarely published at all. A card showing "2 of 10 declared" isn't a flaw in the feed, it's the transparency gap made visible: the industry mostly doesn't publish the figures that would let you judge protein quality properly.
A percentage is per kilo. What actually reaches the horse is percentage x how much you feed.
That's why feeds are separated into categories here, and why you can't compare a balancer against a hard feed side by side. The percentage alone doesn't tell you what the horse receives.
The tool shows the minerals, vitamins and amino acids each brand declares, grouped so you can see the gaps. Copper, iron and calcium sit on the front of every card because they're what owners ask about most.
What the tool won't do is rate, colour or judge them. Whether a level is right depends on the whole diet, forage, water and everything else the horse eats. Iron in bore water alone can outweigh what's in the bag. A feed-only tool can't see that, so it doesn't pretend to.
The tool is free and stays free. The neutrality is the whole value of it.
Found something wrong? Feeds get reformulated and websites change. Flag an error, and manufacturers can update their own figures or send through lab results, free, no charge, no paid placement.
A Lab verified badge means the brand has shared its own batch lab-test results for that feed. Where the test didn't cover every value on the card, we note what it did cover, so the badge never overclaims full coverage.
