Transcript:

[0:00]

My name is Dr. Jennifer Ellis and I'm an assistant professor at the University of Guelph. My area of research focus is animal systems modeling. We have a research project that's starting in collaboration with Mad Barn looking at developing a model of nutrient digestion and metabolism for horses.

[0:19]

A model is a mathematical representation of some biological concept. We develop models to try to increase our understanding of how a biological system works. We use these models to predict how an animal would respond to a given intervention. This research project with Mad Barn is aiming to develop a digital tool that can be used to optimize nutrition, health, and well-being of animals.

[0:48]

There's lots of good research determining the nutrient requirements for horses, but what we don't have is a robust foundation or model to build off of. We want to develop a very robust database to build off of that allows not just us but the entire industry to improve feeding practices for horses. These models can be developed to improve our prediction of nutrient digestibility.

[1:13]

This model can be expanded in the future to look at different scenarios, such as if an animal has a metabolic condition — looking at how we can optimize nutrient delivery for those specific animals to reduce the risk of disease.

[1:28]

Compared to other agricultural species, the equine sector receives considerably less funding for research. Mad Barn's investment in this project is really quite unique in that it is supporting primary research which will benefit the entire sector. Mad Barn essentially was built to fund this type of research, and growing up loving horses and getting into the science and understanding modeling, it just became so apparent that this needed to be done. From that, I was fortunate enough to be able to build a business that could help start funding some of this research.

[2:01]

As we move forward to enhance our understanding of equine nutrition and again improve the welfare and well-being of these horses we take care of, what we are going to do is really groundbreaking work. Work like this hasn't been extensively done in the equine sector.

[2:14]

Currently, we've already implemented the NRC model in our platform, madbarnfeed.com, which we make available for free for anyone to use. We have an extensive database approaching about 3,000 different ingredients and feeds that allows us to look at the data in a non-biased manner. We can see very factually: are we feeding the correct amount of nutrients? Now what we want to do as we build on this model is move from this static set of nutrient requirements to a more dynamic situation where we're better able to predict the outcome of the different nutrients we feed or the diets we put in front of these horses.

[2:46]

I often get asked, why is this open source? Why are you just giving all this amazing information away for free? It really is for the greater good of the equine community. I don't think any one individual company or one person is going to be able to do this on their own, and so we want to spearhead this and drive the direction it needs to go.

[3:00]

We know from looking at model development and application in other species that models are very influential and become ingrained in the fabric of everything that we do in terms of feeding animals — tying nutrition with management, environment, and behavior. These models can be used to understand those interrelationships better, in the end leading to healthier, happier horses.