MAG® is very safe to use and handle. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) uses a document called a Material Safety Data Sheet(MSDS) to standardize information about all materials. On this form OSHA uses an industry standard for toxicity called an LD50, which is the amount of material that is required to kill at least 50% of the test subjects. While this is a morbid thought, it is the standard that the government has established and is recognized industry wide. The LD50 for strychnine, a rat poison, is 16 (milligrams per kilogram of body weight). The LD 50 for aspirin and calcium chloride is 1000 mg/kg. The LD50 for table is salt 3,000, and the LD50 for MAG is 8,100! That means that MAG is 2.5 times less toxic than table salt, is about half as toxic as baking soda and is very comparable to vitamin C, ascorbic acid. There is a side benefit to MAG® stabilization that has not been mentioned: freeze proofing your ring. You will never again be forced to shut down in winter because the water saturated footing in your indoor froze up, and you could not ride in it because it is like a frozen moonscape. MAG® will keep the same consistency in your footing throughout the year including those sub-zero days when you were not able to ride because the indoor was hard as a stone.
No! MAG® is not a liquid it's dry flake form! Recently, others have begun to try to capitalize on the enormous success of our MAG®. Some companies now offer a modified liquid product which appears to be a blend of unknown waste corn or agricultural chemicals and claimed to be mixed with an unknown source of magnesium. Do not be mislead by others claiming to offer the performance of our MAG® magnesium chloride in liquid form. It is impossible to have the same performance of a dry product in liquid form, even if you were to liquefy MAG® and then mix it with something else. These are not MAG® which is the ONLY product to offer the absolute performance guarantee for dust control in your footing. ONLY MAG® products have the benefit of experience of more than 15 years of use in Europe and North America. These unknown liquids are new to the market, are unproven, and there is NO TOXICOLOGICAL DATA on them as to long term effects on equine health in legs and hooves over a long period of time. Know what you are buying and be sure to demand a certificate of analysis which certifies the minimum MgCl2 content. Our MAG® is guaranteed to be 100% MgCl2, hexahydrate while liquids chemically cannot contain more than 33% MgCl2. There are NO agricultural or distiller?s waste products in MAG® it is a pure natural product that is extracted from the Dead Sea, a source of life giving minerals. The costs of these liquids seem to average $0.15-$0.30/ft2, which is equal to about $2000 per treatment and $3000 per year on the average indoor. That is more than five times as expensive as MAG®?! Don?t be fooled by imposters who are claiming to perform the same as our MAG®!
The amount needed varies depending upon your arena, but generally speaking, we find that it takes 2 to 4 pallets of MAG® to achieve complete dust stabilization. Once the ring is completely stabilized you NEVER need to water again. In fact, watering the ring after it is stabilized with MAG® is counterproductive and only rinses the dust control agent into the base where it does you no good. We recommend a maintenance dose of approximately one pallet per year to touch up around doorways where traffic and rain may remove the treated footing, and also to combat dust arising from other materials that are added to the indoor arena such as contaminants from boots, hooves, and manure.
