Barley Fodder - The Perfect Livestock Feed Supplement?

we've been using a hydroponic indoor fodder growing system in order to give our livestock an extremely nutritious supplemental feed [Music] hi my name is Nick and welcome to the Reagan Farm YouTube channel feeding our chickens and pigs has been very expensive because of the rising feed costs and the fact that we have very little forage grown in the winter months we've been doing extensive research to find a highly nutritious and inexpensive option to help us save money and provide a lot of health benefits to our animals which in turn gives us really high quality eggs and meat the first step we've taken was setting up an indoor fodder growing system this system is also portable so we'll be able to move it outside when it's consistently warmer so what exactly is spotter fodder is something that is specifically grown to feed the livestock technically a bag of feed or hay is considered fodder because it's not something that the animals are able to graze or forage for themselves we're also going to build an extremely inexpensive duckweed Pond that will essentially give us infinite food for less than two hundred dollars and of upfront costs we're using Secretariat barley seed for our fodder our local feed store sells 48 pound bags for 24.99 we're currently paying 13 for a 50 pound bag of pig feed and 15 for a 50 pound bag of chicken feed as long as the barley gets double its weight from the started seed we'll be saving money the seed contains about 12 percent protein whereas the sprouted barley fodder contains about 17 protein and it's more digestible to maximize absorption think of barley fodder the same way you would microgreens in fact barley grass is considered a superfood for humans and actually tastes pretty good now let's talk about how to grow it you'll need a wire rack and at least eight trays but our system uses 12 trays every other day we start two trays instead of one so that we're able to feed our animals a tray and a half every single day there are two main configurations when setting up your barley butter system the first and easiest is using perforated trays the second one is drilling holes just on one side of the tray and then having them sloped with whole side down kind of staggered like this so that the water goes from one end to the other drips down and goes into the next drips down to the next level at first we tried doing a hybrid using perforated trays and the slope method but we found that it was growing unevenly so after a few days we decided just to go ahead and level out the trays once your setup is complete you can start by soaking your first batch of barley seed it's best to go overnight or at least six hours at a minimum we're gonna use one pound of seed per tray but to start we'll weigh up two pounds that will be split evenly between two trays foreign The Barley is covered with cold tap water by at least a few inches and allowed to soak overnight after removing the floaters and draining off the excess water we went ahead and put a tray on the scale and zeroed it out it absorbed so much water overnight that it was actually almost double the initial weight that tells us that after a week we're going to have a lot of moisture absorbed into the spotter for this first batch we wanted to be extremely precise with the weights so we did weigh out the two trays separately to ensure that they were the same starting weight we watered the top tray several times a day and the water drips down to the trays below it in order to prevent the seeds from drying out during this process we had our first round of trays set up the first day and that night we decided to weigh out a pound and a half of seed to go into one tray to see if the extra seed would actually produce a similar or better yield than one pound now we'll show you what each day of growth looks like [Music] thank you on our last day of growth our rack was completely full of trays in various states of growth it was time to remove the first tray and a half in order to make room for the next batch of seed our trays that started off with one pound of seed yielded about six pounds of fodder after seven days of growth and our trays that had a pound and a half of barley seed only got to eight pounds in our experience it's more economical just to do a thin layer that barely covers the bottom of your tray [Music] let's see what the chickens think of the barley fodder [Music] they appear to absolutely love it now let's go check and see what the pigs think of theirs it's a hit with them too we also fed it to our goat masala [Music] foreign it isn't her favorite she definitely prefers the dry hay but maybe it's just because it's new The Barley fodder is not meant to be a complete replacement for feed just a supplement to add extra nutrition into their diet there is one animal we have on our farm that can survive solely on barley fodder and hay alone the rabbits absolutely love this stuff let's review the cost of growing barley fodder we got about six times the starting weight when we grew Our Father out for a week we also know it has a lot of water content unless we dehydrate an entire tray and weigh it afterwards there's no way that we'll know for sure exactly how much water content it has but let's just say there's about two-thirds water content in The Barley fodder that means that we still doubled the initial weight of the seed at the beginning of this video I said as long as the barley gets double its weight from the started seed we'll be saving money dry feed weight isn't the only Factor here so let's see what some of the experts have said during their research fodder is about 90 percent digestible whereas the barley seed is only 40 digestible protein content is about 39 higher than the seed lysine content increases by about 49 and that's an amino acid that's absolutely essential to good pig Health butter also contains high amount of Omega-3s that's an extremely beneficial thing to have in your animal feed in an entire video could be done just on the benefits of Omega-3s the health benefits for our animals and ultimately the meat eggs and dairy that we get from those animals to consume ourselves is priceless we plan on growing barley fodder for the foreseeable future it doesn't require a lot of work and the setup doesn't cost much we'll actually provide links in the video description below of what we use we hope you learned something in this video and consider growing barley fodder for your livestock thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time [Music] thank you

Channel: Riggin Farm

Views: 15,682

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Id: bzQytbsqBBo

Length: 8min 0sec (480 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 27 2023