Thoroughbreds go green bananas for unique feed supplement
When Bart Cummings was 81 and still attending auctions, fellow trainer Mark Kavanagh made the papers one day with an admiring line that most people that age wouldn’t buy a green banana let alone a yearling.
Funny how a few years later there’s a growing band of trainers seeing the benefits of doing exactly that.
You don’t readily think of horses eating bananas, but an enterprising businessman and farmer, inspired by Mother Nature, has become a pioneer of a dietary supplement which is starting to change the look of feed bins, not just here, but abroad too, with rising numbers attesting to its impact on gut health, temperament, and more.
Robert Borsato grew up near Coffs Harbour, in the shadows of Australia’s most famous banana – the big fibreglass one that’s been attracting tourists for decades. When he was out riding his horse he’d notice its insistence on stopping to eat bananas which had fallen to the ground around the town’s farms.
“Not ripe bananas, but green ones,” Borsato says. “And it wasn’t just horses, I’d notice many animals would be eating them. The chooks, the possums, the koalas.
“And cattle? They’d knock down the fence if they could see or smell a bunch of green bananas.
“And I noticed with my horse – it wasn’t trained or fed in any serious way but it ate bananas plus the grass – if I ever went riding with my mates, who were all keen feeders of their horses, mine always had the best stamina.”
Borsato would later relocate to Australia’s other banana stronghold in far north Queensland, running a successful family farm, but always with the notion in the back of his mind about non-human distribution. Nearing an age to think about retirement, and with no sons to take on the physically demanding task of working the farm, he set about putting to the test what these green banana-eating animals had been suggesting to him for decades.
One thing to remember was that if it seemed unusual to think of a horse eating a banana, it would be positively perverse to imagine a horse peeling one. Therein lay part of the secret. It would transpire that much of the nutritional benefits lay in the skin.
Armed with a firm belief there was something to this, and mindful of the vast amounts of farm waste regularly dispersed in bananas that were not the right look for human consumption, Borsato, in conjunction with business partner John McArthur, got to work. They formed a Cairns-based company called Banana Feeds Australia and, while Borsato had no real connection to thoroughbreds, that was a logical start.
“We decided to target the horse industry, because we thought that was probably more affluent than pigs or cattle,” he told ANZ Bloodstock News. “It’s not all that cheap a product, because it’s a lot of work going into bananas.”
The pair commissioned research, which would continue over two years, on the potential gut health benefits to horses, conducted at the University of Adelaide’s Equine health and Performance Centre. Researchers took a pool of 90 horses, with 30 fed green bananas, 30 fed a common drug used for treating stomach ulcers in horses, and 30 a control group.
“We did well,” said Borsato of the study’s results, published on the company’s website. “We were always saying it’s more to do with overall gut health, rather than healing, but we did find it had an effect on ulcers, to heal or prevent them.”
The new enterprise also demanded a new factory since the pair were, after all, ploughing a green field.
“We built a factory, searched the world for the right sort of machinery, because no one else has done what we’re doing,” said Borsato.
“We receive the bananas in half-tonne bins and wash them through a bath. They go into a slicer, a drier, then through a milling process to give a consistency roughly the same as muesli.”
With a standard dose of just 100 grams per horse each day, Borsato said one of the major benefits – aside from the area of ulcers – is a calming effect on horses. This is most likely due to micro-nutrients which build the mood stabilisers serotonin and dopamine – which is not only why animals eat green bananas but why humans drink green tea.
The product, which is called B-Complete and is made from just the one ingredient, is now sold to around 30 racing stables, mostly in Queensland. But it’s not just trainers who are going bananas.
“We’ve got a lot of people who use it in dressage and showjumping, and they like the calming effect it has on horses, because of all the micro-nutrients,” Borsato said.
“The biggest thing in our product is we utilise the banana with the skin on. We found through our testing that most of the benefits come from the skin with all these important micro-nutrients, such as with serotonin and dopamine.
“And it’s a green banana, not ripened, which is more to do with the carbohydrates and the starch content. When it ripens, the starch becomes a sugar, so it changes what a banana does to the body.”
Borsato reports B-Complete is now being trialled with the Queen’s stables in the UK, polo clubs in Dubai, and is being exported to Ireland, Singapore and New Zealand. There’s a line now being produced for dogs, and it could also play a role in another area currently causing great environmental concern.
“We’ve done several trials in the bee industry with some pretty big apiarists, and they’re very impressed with what they’re seeing,” Borsato revealed.
“We’re actually doing some research with the Queensland University of Technology and the University of Western Australia, on feeding bees when they’re not having much pollen. So hopefully, it could play a part in addressing the whole bee issue that’s becoming more and more important.”
It takes roughly seven kilograms of bananas to produce one kilo of B-Complete.
“So there’s a bit of a cost factor, and there’s transport to consider,” Borsato said. “But it’s also good for the growers because we’re buying all that fruit which otherwise would have been discarded.”