Industry loves to sell you back their waste whenever they can. This is pretty much where the supplement industry came from. Magnesium oxide’s a mining byproduct, and at some point the miners got tired of paying to have it disposed of and came up with a way to get people to pay them for it instead. Now you can go to the store and give them money for the privilege of taking it off their hands.
Ideally, the people who purchase the magnesium oxide from miners want to sell it for as much as possible - this means boutique supplement sales. Unfortunately, we’re not all paying $80 a bottle for Ancestral Supplements, so some companies have to target a more impoverished buyer for less margin. Even with the lower-priced companies there isn’t enough demand to eat up all the magnesium produced though, so they started putting it in animal foods and selling those at a lower price still.
Within the realm of veterinary products, there’s yet another quality range. Things people give their indoor pets can be considered the boutique of vet supplies, while things farmers use are the impoverished Walmart alternative. A good example of this - pine cat litter costs $20 for a 40lb bag. I can walk in to my local Theisen’s right now and buy an identical 40lb bag of pine pellets for $3 dollars though.
Why?
It’s sold as horse bedding instead of cat litter. Farm product. Higher volume, lower margins.
I just saved you a few hundred per year if you’ve got cats, so I’m gonna leave this here:
Anyway, what I’m getting at here is that the farm supply store has awesome bang for buck if you know what you’re looking for.
Back when I wanted to teach myself to suture, I got the supplies from a vet med store. Sutures, scalpels, lidocaine, syringes, disinfectant - all for about 1/50th what the human equivalents cost. I practiced on pork for while before moving on to a small cyst in my quad. I did the newbie meme of not pulling the sutures tight enough so the wound closed with a bigger scar than I’d like, but other than being less than perfect aesthetically it’s fine. I keep the supplies on-hand now just in case I encounter some sort of major “whoopsie daisies” incident I’m too embarrassed to tell a surgeon about, like one of those overly-zealous zipper pulls after using a urinal.
I’ve been perusing the farm supply stores looking for interesting stuff ever since. Some of the good ones were the highly-memed 250w red chicken incubator lights - about $5 a bulb and even better than the $100+ red LED alternatives in terms of the red light therapy benefits. A bad one was this gallon of
“Goat Molasses” I bought. It said molasses on the jug so I just naturally assumed it was mostly molasses. This was incorrect. It was mostly propylene glycol, with some added “goat power enhancers.” Propylene glycol theoretically isn’t harmful to consume, but I never feel good after doing so. I left it outside for the raccoons.
Lately, I’ve been playing around with the electrolyte packages.
The electrolytes themselves are actually total garbage and in awful ratios, but the vitamins were interesting.
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