One nutritionist. Every ration. Every bag.
Complete Nutrition. Simple and Safe.
It started with one question.
In 2000, a veterinarian asked Dr. R. Harry Anderson a question:
Can you make a horse feed that can feed any horse, at any age or activity level?
It had never been done. He thought he could do it, and the formula he built became Total Equine® — still a complete feed for 95% of horses today.
He could answer that question because he had spent thirty years working toward it without knowing that was what he was doing.
Overall health is dependent on the gut.
In his doctoral program, Dr. Anderson arrived at the theory that still underlies every formula he writes. Every animal is built from individual cells, and every cell requires the same micronutrient package. The digestive tract is populated with single-celled bacteria that need those same components. Feed the gut correctly and it takes care of the body.
Overall health is dependent on the gut. Feed the gut and it takes care of the body.
— Dr. R. Harry Anderson, PhD
The theory was decades ahead of the industry. It is also the reason a single nutritionist can formulate for horses, cattle, goats, and dogs, and the reason every Total Feeds formula shares the same foundation. Different animals, the same cells, the same principle.
He wanted to build a more efficient ration.
Dr. Anderson holds a PhD in Animal Science and spent fifteen years as a nutritionist inside a Fortune 500 feed company, where he learned precisely how the industry formulates: to a price.
He believed in paying more for efficiency — in chelated minerals the animal could actually absorb, and in ingredients that earned their place in the bag. A large organization in that era had little room for either. So he went out on his own, in his 60s, where he could make his own decisions about his own formulas, selling from the back of his pickup while still doing nutrition work full time.
He was worth more to the animals, and to their owners, that way.
The decision that changed the company.
A customer suggested extrusion.
Dr. Anderson had spent decades formulating for cattle operations, where his method was consistent and unglamorous: change one variable, then wait and observe the animals. Not a laboratory assay, not a supplier’s data sheet — the animals themselves, over enough weeks to see something real. He applied the same method here, and the results came back better than what he had been producing.
Extruding cost considerably more at a time when almost no one was extruding horse feed at all. He did it anyway, and helped bring extruded horse feed into the mainstream. That year, 2007, is the one the company counts as its real beginning.
For years, it sold in a plain white bag.
No logo, no artwork, no name on the front. Just the feed.
Don’t pay for a fancy bag. It’s what’s in the bag that counts.
— Dr. R. Harry Anderson
It worked anyway. Word about the results passed from one horse owner to the next, and then to owners of other animals. The feed had been working for years before there was ever a printed bag to put it in.
A personal logo.
Dr. Anderson was born in a one-room house in Benson County, North Dakota, with no indoor plumbing and no electricity until he was a teenager. The nearest town held a couple hundred people, most of them Norwegian immigrants. Margaret grew up on a neighboring farm under similar conditions.
The Total Feeds logo is the Norse rune Fehu. It means a herd of cattle or horses. It also means wealth earned through hard work.
It is on every bag to respect how the family got here.
Why he’s still at it.
People ask why a nutritionist his age is still formulating every ration himself. The answer has been printed on the back of every bag since 2012:
That is not a slogan someone wrote for him. It is the reason there is a company at all.
A family business, run by the family.
Margaret joined him at trade shows and horse expos in those early years. She is also the one who came up with the name Total Feeds, Inc., which was incorporated in November 2011 and officially opened on January 1, 2012. Every product has carried the name Total since.
Their youngest son, Cory, started building websites and artwork for his father in 2008, self-taught and unpaid, and moved to Texas in 2010 when there was finally enough business to need him full time. Their eldest son, Eric, joined in 2013 after serving in the Army in Desert Storm and a career in corporate logistics. He started on the road with the family, then built the logistics operation that runs the company today.
For nearly two decades the family worked the expos, the ropings, and the rodeos out of a booth, teaching dealers and distributors how the program works and why it works, one conversation at a time. That is how the first 1,400 dealers were signed. Total Feeds has since expanded to more than 3,700 retail locations.