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Heidi's remarks started me thinking about food processing and I realized
that almost all the grain we purchase for human consumption has been
processed.  Some of the stuff stays on grocery store shelves for weeks
before we buy it.  Oatmeal and Cream of Wheat come to mind.

Did your mom ever tell you, "Don't bother to eat this oatmeal I made for
you.  It consists of rolled oats that were processed several weeks ago."?
Yeah, right.  Or, "Here's some nice, warm Cream of Wheat.  It's useless
nutritionally but it tastes better than the equally useless oatmeal I make"?

So I began to wonder if there were any studies to show the rate at which
rolled and/or crimped oats lose nutritional value compared to whole ones.
I Googled and found this site which had a lot of what I was looking for,
except it's for barley in cattle instead of oats in horses:

http://www.montana.edu/etd/available/unrestricted/Rainey_04.pdf

Page 25pdf (paper 13) has a chart showing the improvement in digestibility 
for several grains including oat when rolled vs whole.

This and numerous other sites show clearly that dry processing 
(rolling/crimping) of grains improves their digestibility, sometimes 
substantially.  If these feeds are consumed within a short time of 
processing, say two weeks, I don't think there is any doubt that they will 
provide more nutritive value than their whole counterparts.

I could not find the rates at which various grains lose nutritional value 
under normal storage conditions and the degree to which processing 
(rolling, crimping) affected that rate loss.  Perhaps Dr Garlinghouse has 
some data on this.  However, I would think that a bag of rolled/crimped 
oats, not subject to moist storage conditions or large swings in 
temperature, wouldn't lose more than a percentage point or two of 
nutritional value over say a 2 month period.  If so, the processed version, 
assuming identical cost/lb, would still be a better nutritional buy.


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