DIY Fodder System Cheap Livestock Winter Food

hello I'm Chris Anthony most people call me the straw hat farmer and I'm with Gro dinner aquaponics and today I want to talk to you about growing hydroponic fodder for your livestock not to be confused with aquaponics this has no fish involved this is a high nutrient grass that grows in strictly pure water so I want to show you how this system works it's a cheap economical way to have winter food for your livestock but also it's very nutritional much better than hay in most commercial feeds let me show you a little bit about how the system works you can see we just have a nice thin layer of seed I do keep a light bulb on this I keep a 100 wat light bulb now this seed here is a day old you can already see it starting to swell getting ready to start opening up we go on over to the next one the next one here is actually going to show you some sprouted grass and I can pull that up and just kind of get you a better look at it it's starting to sprout out so a couple of days another day or two and this one here you can see down in there it's already sprouted nicely starting to get some little green grass now here we have some nice pretty grass that will keep maturing over a few more days here's some that's a little bit thicker then as we move on up here we get into the full growth this right here is probably going to be harvested in the next day or two it's not quite 7 days old yet but it's got a beautiful green color to it if you take a look you got to see I've got a little extra seed in this one where it shouldn't be any seed on the bottom it didn't all get uh didn't all germinate because it was a little bit thick that's what your grass should look like your nutrients are not only going to come from your grass your nutrients are going to come from the root matter that's in the grass that's where your nutrients are now this is a tray that I have left growing just to show you something here so you can actually see what we're dealing with if you notice this one here doesn't have near the dark green color the reason for that is because we've run out of nutrients here grass can only sustain about seven or eight days without a boost of nutrients to keep it growing so if the grass starts to getting much over 10 days it will actually start losing that bright green color now it doesn't mean that it's not okay to feed it get to your livestock it just means that it's not going to last much longer and there is your root matter look at that this stuff is really binded together nicely okay now that our seeds had some time to soak over night we've done our process with our preparation from the evening or morning before now we'll come in and we'll load the seed I'll show you how simple it is you want to pull your bucket up pretty slow because the water takes a second to drain out then basically you'll just pick your seed up and just spread it out inside your trays my system just got through running so I'm running my cycle while I'm loading which is not the most convenient thing to do because you still have water running so unless you want to soak your floor you kind of have to uh work with the water dripping you can't set the tro the actual tote out to the floor without getting your floor soaking wet so in my case I'll just be working it in here now how you want to do this is you actually want to make sure that you just have enough seed to just barely cover the bottom you'll notice that if you're getting too much seed you'll be able to see that pretty quickly because you'll have a lot of grass and root matter but you won't actually you'll have a lot of leftover seed in the bottom that didn't Sprout because it was too thick so you don't want to have too much seed now what I do each day is I pour most of that water into my reservoir and that'll take up for any evaporation okay this is our Reservoir this is where we put our water and it is pure water no nutrients and inside this Reservoir this is where we have our pump which is a small pump and also a little bit of seed will actually sometimes come through a hole and go down to the reservoir so I keep a panty hose or you can get a pump string to put on it I just use a panty hose they're very cheap and I wrap the pump now what the pup does is it actually hooks to a tiger now I really can't tell you what to set your timer on whether it's 3 or 5 or 10 minutes every 2 or 3 hours a lot of that's going to depending on your climate what how the temperature inside of your building is or inside your unit it also it's going to determine of how big a pump you've got of how much water you're actually moving I can tell you that what you want to do is you want to get your seed base nice and moist you want to keep it from I'm drying completely out during the cycle now the actual fod system res can be a tote um about anything you'd like for it to be but it does need to hold I'm going to say somewhere around 10 or 15 gallons for a small fer system because you're going to get some evaporation because the grass is actually going to absorb a lot of moisturi on the system now how M works is it comes through a hole in the front of the reservoir it works its way through a piece of irrigation pipe this is the hose that's connected to irrigation pipe it'll actually follow up the irrigation system it goes up to the very top of the system and what we're going to do is I'm going to kind of show you the basic tools of how I installed this as we go along this is actually called a Mr landscape line it's just a rubber tube that you can actually install right into this plastic line very simply they actually have a little tool that's made for it you just punch a hole then we have a fitting fix it in there and then that'll go directly into your hole in your landscape to me now the little sprinkler heads this is for a Mis I'm going to pull one out and let you kind of see it working there it's actually just called a g sprinkler mister and I've got two that drop into every tote and I've got a couple of empty totes here so you can see how this works so the water starts at the very top and drips through into the sprinkler and it goes down here and by the way this tote has a in of f to it then it's got holes it drips into this one this one drips into this one this one drips into the lower one and the lower one drips into the gutter okay this is a hefty 34q or 32.1 L tote now the first thing I do is I take the totes I discard the lids I drill three holes on each side right ins the side of this little Groove here that's the lowest point and that's so the water can drain out it is small enough that the seed can't fall through I also have a little piece of shower board trim that has been adjoined with silicone caul and this is kind of a guide you may need this you may or not and also here I use the same piece of shower board trim that's actually a guide that keeps it positioned correctly for me so that each time I slide it in it actually goes right back in the place it's supposed to to collect the water so it'll drip into the gutter once the water drips into the gutter it'll actually drain back to the reservoir and start the cycle all over again the pump will pick up the water take it back to the top tray and each tray will drip back and forth until it works its way back to the gutter and the gutter will feed right back into the reservoir see this particular row right here the holes are in the back side on this side the holes are in the gutter on the one above it the holes are on this side so that this one drips into this one this one drips into this one this one drips to the bottom so it's actually going back and forth all the way down now my gutter system has got PVC pipe that drains back into the reservoir I did drill through the side put an elbow on it that way my tote can seal up nice with a lid if you'll notice the PVC pipe goes through the bottom of the gutter and I have a bulkhead fitting now this vinyl guttering has a lot of lines in the bottom of it so I find that the bulkhead fitting had a little bit of a trouble Silling down tight on such a rigid material so what I did was is I put a little aquarium silicone around it and then I slid the bulkhead in tightened it up and I've had no problems now this is also a vinyl endcap you can purchase this it just pops right on and you have vinyl hangers now your gutter is going to need a little bit of f from the other end back to the reservoir what we have here is about an inch of fall in a 7 or 8 ft run okay now what we're going to do here is we're going to go prepare tomorrow's grass seed and we're going to go feed this tote here to our animals now I want you to keep something in mind this tote will not be ready for 7 days so for every tote here it takes seven days so if you only need one tote per day say you need 10 or 12 lounds of grass per day then you're only going to need about seven or eight toes if you need 20 or 25 lbs of grass per day then you're going to need two trays two totes every day so that means you would need a total of 14 totes and I would always give myself a few extra for colder climate hotter clim when it's warming and cooling so if you needed uh say 20 lbs of grass per day then you're going to probably want to run about 18 toes and that is probably going to produce you about uh 20 to 20 5 lbs of of nice healthy nutrient fodder to feed your livestock every day okay so this will hold about 10 or 12 lbs so uh this makes it easy to pull out easy to handle and deal with um we'll go and feed this to some animals and we'll prepare tomorrow's seed so that we can start to process all over again like I say it takes me about six minutes every day to maintain this system when I'm just rushing through it not doing a video so let's let's go feed our animals and prepare some seed for tomorrow of course now all we do now is just throw our fodder right into our hay rack our little Buffalo he kind of likes it it's nice fresh winter grass with a nice root matter on the bottom you can see the roots and how it's all matted together that's actually your nutrient content way more than what the grass itself has then I'll go over and feed some to the rabbits and kind of work my way through until everything's nice and fed around here I don't actually calculate my time of actually feeding my animals as far as part of the fod system just because I've got to feed regardless you're curious what that was I just picked up that's a 20 mil vinyl that keeps them a little warmer of course they're waiting for it they know exactly what it is these are California meat rabbits it's actually warmed up quite nicely so we'll leave that up today they love the F hey how you want to prepare your bucket for the for the actual seed prep is going to be you want to take a bucket and drill a lot of holes in it now they need to be pretty small so the seed doesn't wash through them and the reason for that is let me fill this up with water and I'm going to show you how it works okay now we've got our water in here we filled the bucket up to about here okay now the reason we've got all those holes in the bucket so when we get ready to get our seed out it'll actually drain down inside the bucket very quickly and just leave our seed in the bottom of the white bucket won't make a mess in our F room okay now you'll go to your seat bag now there's two types of seed that I have tried and both of them seem to work really well my preference is a barley now I've ran completely out of barley so what I've got is actually a rye I had a about 25 or 30 lb of Rye left so I'm going to use it up before I pick up another uh bag of barley make sure uh you're getting a seed that has not had any kind of pesticides or used on it some people have a tennis to throw plugs of rat poison you don't need to really use a human consumption barley or rice seeds it could actually be just regular old field grade crop seed all right now what you do is in my case I just keep a feed Barrel a trash can a pretty close amount is actually going to be uh it's going to be close to a cup and then you let this set in there and it'll actually soak down into the water uh some animals are very very sensitive to mold and mold can actually kill them pretty quick and rabbits is one of those animals some animals are not sensitive to it at all excuse me horses are very acceptable to mold so you don't want to get molds for in some animals and a good way to keep that out is put a little bit of of course the bleach will actually evaporate out in 24 hours so I put a couple caps full of or bleach inside of my system Stir It Up good that'll kill any mold spores that was on the seed from being in stored so long well that's it now in the morning we'll be ready to put this in our F system and be able to uh start the process all over again this is our process each day we mix up our seed Fe in our bucket and we feed our animals now once a week we have to clean out our Reservoir wipe down our gutter system and things like that I hope this really helps you feed your livestock especially in those cool winter months it's much better than hay or most commercial feeds be really careful though because too much of the hydroponic fodder can actually create some problems for some livestock just from too many nutrients and I will put a couple graphs at the end that'll actually show you about how much hydroponic f to feed an animal of weight and also I want to give you some better uh drawings and things of how to build your own hydroponic F system so thanks again for joining me my name is Chris Anthony most people call me the straw hat fber and check out our website because I bet you're going to find a lot of other interesting topics about aquaponics and hydroponics and backyard farming take care I hope to see you again soon

Channel: Grow Dinner Aquaponics

Views: 292,409

Keywords: Do It Yourself (Hobby), Fodder for livestock, Pig feed, Horse feed, Cow feed, Rabbit Food, Hydroponic fodder, Grow Fodder, How to build a fodder system, DIY fodder, grow dinner, grow dinner aquaponics, Starw Hat Farmer, How to grow fodder, Urban farming, sustainable living, Living off the grid, mother earth news, Rabbit (Domesticated Animal), how to grow hay, how to grow grass, how to aquaponics, Aquaponic, aquaponics systems, backyard aquaponics, diy aquaponics

Id: D2eQaKcYYfU

Length: 17min 28sec (1048 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 03 2015