Why We Created Four Seasonal Formulas
Nature Never Feeds The Same Plant Year-Round
One of the most overlooked aspects of horse nutrition is that nature is never static.
As the seasons change, so do daylight, temperature, rainfall, plant growth, and the natural chemistry of forage. Horses have evolved alongside these seasonal rhythms, adapting to changing environments throughout the year.
At StableFeed, we asked a simple question:
Should a horse’s nutrition change with the seasons, too?
Looking Beyond Nutrients
For decades, nutrition has focused on measuring protein, fiber, vitamins, and minerals.
Those nutrients remain essential.
But plants contain thousands of naturally occurring compounds beyond what appears on a feed tag. Together, these compounds create a unique chemical fingerprint that interacts with your horse's hindgut microbiome and may influence biological processes throughout the body. Modern metabolomics allows researchers to study this broader layer of plant chemistry.
Why Four Formulations?
Using untargeted metabalomics, we analyzed each of our four seasonal botanical blends.
Although some ingredients were shared, every formulation demonstrated its own distinct metabolomic fingerprint, a unique collection of naturally occurring plant compounds.
That means each season presents a different chemical landscape to your horse's microbiome.
Rather than changing ingredients simply for variety, each formulation was intentionally designed to provide seasonally distinct plant chemistry while maintaining balanced nutrition.
Food Is More Than Fuel
Food is also biological information.
Every meal delivers more than calories and nutrients; it delivers thousands of naturally occurring plant compounds that become part of an ongoing conversation between plants, microbes, and the horse.
Nature Changes. Plants Change. Your Horse’s Needs Change.
That's why StableFeed developed four seasonally distinct botanical formulations to work with the horse’s biology, not against it.
Traditional equine nutrition has established the essential roles of protein, energy, fiber, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and other nutrients. These remain the foundation of responsible feeding programs.
However, nutrients represent only one dimension of what a horse consumes.
Every mouthful of forage, herbs, seeds, flowers, and other plant materials also contains thousands of naturally occurring small molecules. Together, these compounds create the chemical identity of the food and form part of the environment presented to the horse’s hindgut microbiome.
Metabolomics provides a way to study this broader layer of nutrition. Using high-resolution analytical technology, researchers can detect thousands of molecular features and examine how groups of metabolites relate to known biological pathways.
The Research Question . . .
If nutrients tell us what food contains, what can its chemistry tell us about what food may do?
From Individual Metabolites To Biological Systems
Why Pathway Analysis Was Used
Identifying thousands of metabolites creates an enormous amount of information. Studying each metabolite individually would provide only a fragmented view of the system.
Pathway analysis offers a broader perspective.
Databases such as Reactome and KEGG organize metabolites into functional networks associated with biological processes. This allows researchers to examine whether groups of detected metabolites are statistically associated with systems involved in:
- Cellular energy metabolism
- Lipid and carbohydrate metabolism
- Amino acid metabolism
- Digestion and absorption
- Immune regulation
- Signal transduction
- Gene expression
- Molecular transport
The Chemistry Behind the Formulas
Since the chemistry carried by food influences microbial metabolism and biological function, understanding that chemistry becomes essential. We therefore conducted an untargeted metabolomics analysis of the four StableFeed Seasonal Biome Blends to determine whether each formulation produced a distinct chemical profile and to identify the biological pathways associated with the metabolites. Together, these analyses allowed us to examine not only how the chemistry differed among the formulations, but also how those chemical differences related to biological function.
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a statistical technique that simplifies complex datasets by reducing thousands of individual metabolite measurements into an overall picture of chemical similarity and difference. More than 24,000 molecular features were detected, with over 2,600 metabolites identified across the four different formulations.
Although several ingredients were shared among them, PCA demonstrated that each formula occupied distinct chemical space, demonstrating that every formulation possessed a unique metabolomic profile.
Figure 1. Principal Component Analysis of StableFeed’s Four Seasonal Botanical Formulations
From Individual Molecules to Biological Systems
Chemical fingerprints told us that the formulations are different. The next question was whether those differences correspond to biological systems that are relevant to the horse.
Pathway analysis provides one way to explore that question. Rather than examining thousands of metabolites individually, databases such as KEGG and Reactome organize them into functional networks involved in metabolism, immune regulation, digestion and absorption, cellular communication, gene expression, and molecular transport. This transforms a complex list of detected compounds into a systems-level view of the biology they may influence.
How to Read the Pathway Map
Each tree represents a broad biological pathway and its related functions.
- Yellow branches indicate pathways enriched by the metabolite data.
- Darker yellow indicates stronger statistical enrichment.
- Branches farther from the center represent increasingly specific functions.
Figure 2. Biological Pathway Map of Metabolites Enriched and Detected in StableFeed’s Four Seasonal Botanical Formulations
