Strict Liability in a Scoop: Auditing Hemp Feed Against the 2026 Competition Rulebook

Ask ten competition riders what's in the bucket and you'll get ten confident answers. Ask them for the paperwork behind it and the room goes quiet. That's the gap this piece is about — not because hemp feed is dodgy, but because the rules governing competition horses put the responsibility squarely on the person holding the scoop, and "I didn't know" has never once worked as a defence.

Hemp-based feeds — seed, expeller meal, hurds, oil — have moved from the fringes to the feed room in the last few years, and plenty of UK horses do perfectly well on them. The question for a competing horse is narrower and duller: can you prove what's in the bag, and can you prove it again if someone asks?

Why hemp attracts more scrutiny than a bag of oats

Hemp is Cannabis sativa, grown in the UK for fibre and seed under licence, with THC kept low by law and by breeding. Low is not the same as absent. Trace cannabinoids can turn up in seed, in dust, in chaff blended on the same line, and THC sits on the prohibited lists of the bodies most UK competitors answer to.

The other thing to understand is strict liability. Under FEI rules and under the BHA's racing rules, the person responsible for the horse is answerable for what's found in a sample, regardless of intent. You do not have to have doped a horse to fall foul of a rulebook. You only have to have fed it something you couldn't account for.

What the rulebook actually says — and where it stops

A few honest observations, all of which you should verify against the current text rather than take from a website article, including this one:

• The FEI Prohibited Substances List is revised on a rolling basis. Check the 2026 version yourself, on the FEI's own site, and check it again if your plans change mid-season.
• The BHA operates a prohibited-at-all-times list. Racing's tolerance for cannabinoids is effectively nil.
• British Dressing, Eventing and Showjumping, the Pony Club and Riding Clubs generally align with FEI or maintain their own anti-doping rules. Your membership handbook is the document that binds you, not a forum thread.
• Nobody publishes a reassuring "safe level" of THC in horse feed. If a supplier tells you there's a threshold you can sit under, ask them to show you where that's written.

If you want the calm version: the rules aren't designed to catch people feeding hemp. They're designed to catch horses with something in their system that shouldn't be there. Your job is to make sure those two things never meet.

The NOPS logo is a start, not a finish

The BETA NOPS scheme is the UK feed industry's answer to naturally occurring prohibited substances — the caffeine in a stray cocoa husk, the theobromine in a hedgerow plant, that sort of thing. It's a genuinely useful assurance and a supplier who holds it is taking the question seriously.

But read what it covers. The scheme's standard panel is built around the classic plant-derived contaminants. Cannabinoids aren't automatically part of every supplier's testing regime, and NOPS certification doesn't mean a batch has been tested for THC at the level you might want. Combine it with the questions below rather than treating the logo as a finish line.

Six questions to put to a hemp feed supplier

Put these in an email so you've got the reply in writing. A good supplier will answer all six without bristling.

1. Can I see a certificate of analysis for the actual batch number on my bag? Not a generic spec sheet, not a 2023 lab report — the batch.
2. Which laboratory ran it, and is that lab accredited? UK labs such as LGC, formerly HFL, are the sort of names you're looking for.
3. How is THC reported? You want a figure in mg/kg and a stated limit of detection. "Below 0.2%" tells you about the crop; it doesn't tell you about the bag.
4. Does the formulation change between harvests? Hemp is an agricultural product. Varieties, growing sites and blending partners shift. Ask how you'd be told.
5. How is the product stored and segregated? Hemp in a shed next to a molassed mix, sharing a loading shovel, is a different proposition to a dedicated line.
6. Will you notify me in advance of any change to the recipe or the supplier? This is the one that separates the serious operators.

The horse side of the audit

Paperwork is half of it. The other half is what you can show about the individual horse.

• Keep a feed diary and write down batch codes and dates when a new bag is opened. Tedious for a fortnight, invaluable for a season.
• Retain a sample from each new batch — a couple of hundred grams in a dated freezer bag, kept dry and cool. If a question ever arises, you have the actual material, not a memory of it.
• Treat bedding as part of the picture. A horse on hemp bedding will nibble. It's a small exposure, but if you're asked to account for everything in the stable, you want to be able to name the bedding supplier too.
• Don't stack changes. If you're switching feed and heading to a stay-away show in the same fortnight, you've made your own life harder for no reason.

A pre-season calendar that fits on a postcard

• Twelve weeks out: decide whether hemp stays in the ration, request batch certificates, and read your governing body's current list properly rather than skimming it.
• Eight weeks out: confirm the feed and stop changing things. Collect the paperwork into one folder — digital is fine, but keep it somewhere you can find at 6am in a lorry park.
• Four weeks out: check whether your body offers any feed screening or elective testing service. Some do; ask the question even if you don't use it.
• Show week: nothing new. Take your own feed, in its original bag, with the batch code legible.
• Any time you're sampled: stay calm, provide what you've got, and note that you kept a retained sample. Cooperation reads well.

The bottom line

Hemp feed and competition horses can coexist perfectly happily. What they can't coexist with is vagueness. If your supplier can give you batch-level analysis, a named lab and a straight answer about notification, you've done the job. If they can't — or if the answer arrives wrapped in three paragraphs of marketing — you've learned something useful before it cost you a season.

This isn't scaremongering, and it isn't a reason to avoid hemp. It's a reason to keep a folder.