Tanya Buckingham

Dengie Field Day

I was very kindly invited to spend the day looking around Dengie Horse Feeds field and production operation in Essex today. I travelled down with Anne Preistman, the Northern Regional Sales Manager, and met up with Chris Allen, the National Sales Manager, Michael Glover, the South East Area Manager and some Dengie retailers who were also invited along.

In the morning the guests were all treated to a guided tour around the field operations where we saw how Alfalfa is grown, cut and taken to the drying and production site. It was very informative and we were even allowed to have a go at driving the very impressive machinery that is used to harvest the crops!

After the tour of the fields we went off to the production site where, donned with high visibility jackets and ear plugs we were given a guided tour around the site, seeing how the raw product is produced into the finished article we buy in the shops. I was amazed at just how much work is involved in turning the Alfalfa raw crop into a product that is chopped, dried thoroughly and then baled into huge Alfalfa bales to be stored until the bagging unit is ready to bag the product and send it off to sell. The shear amount of Alfalfa used per day was mind-blowing - one thousand tonnes of raw Alfalfa produces just 300 tonnes of the finished product and this is done day in day out during the growing season. There's alot more to producing horse feed then I ever thought!

Once we had finished the tour at the production site and had lunch, Katie Williams, the Dengie Senior Nutritionist gave a presentation on nutrition and explained the benefits of feeding the Dengie products, again this was a very informative talk and was interesting to listen to.

I would like to say a big thank you to all involved with the day, I thoroughly enjoyed it and learnt an awful lot about the Dengie fibre feeds.

Tanya