Ferment Your Chicken Feed

[Music] hey everybody this is Josh with homesteading family and today I'm going to show you how we say 40% and more on our feed bill for our egg-laying hens for our meat chickens all of our poultry and even our pigs which we grain feed along with other things and the way we do that is by soaking and fermenting our grains now your grains are made with a protective coating that seals in all the nutrients and helps them to be able to store well that's why you can store your wheat in your oats long term it'll dry you know temperature-controlled place that's why they will store in the ground so that protective coating locks up the nutrients and our bodies actually have to work harder whether it's our bodies physically or the chickens or whatever you're feeding the grain to they have to work harder to get that nutrient out and a lot of it passes through so if we can make it easier and release those nutrients and make them more available then you're going to be able to lower your feed bill feeding less because the chickens or the geese or the pigs or whatever you're feeding has more access to that nutrient by soaking the grains you soften them up that's just exactly what happens out in nature those seeds are in the ground the spring comes it starts to warm up those seeds get damp and wet they start to expand and the nutrient in there begins to soften and release so that that little seed can start to sprout we're just mimicking that and we're going a little further by actually fermenting which adds probiotics and actually increases and you know multiplies vitamin content and again by doing that you are increasing the nutrient availability and you're going to need less feed so let me show you how we do this and then we'll talk about how you can make this work for your particular situation okay so I've got to kind of work you backwards because this is a work in process so what we have to do first is empty the day's grain which we've drained all the water off so this bucket has a hole in the bottom and I poured it from these ones have been soaking for several days and this lets all the water out and usually I would just feed from here but for the sake of demonstration I'm going to go ahead and dump this into another bucket all right and then we're going to take the last bucket we've got three here we're fermenting for three days you can do four if it's really warm you might be able to get even 24 hours or 48 hours we're getting three and it's still we're doing three days and it's still a little cool so our ferment is very light but at least they're getting well soaked and we're starting to warm up so this fermentation will get going even better so yesterday's we're going to take it and we're going to pour it out into a bucket it has a hole in the bottom and that allows the water to drain out and then these grains are ready to be fed and we're just gonna kind of move our buckets over okay now you could just switch buckets okay you could just take your empty one put it there I like to dump them because it mixes everything up and makes sure that all the grains are getting exposed if you're doing something smaller you could stir it it does the same thing but these are a little bit big to stir to do the same thing with our first bucket which this got started yesterday right now we've got to add our grain to the first bucket right and now we're going to add water so this is day one this is day two this is day three and then the final bucket has holes in it so that when you pour it into there the water drains out and it's ready to feed again you might be able to get away with one or two days at least 24 hours to get them soaking and get the ferment going now before I forget you don't have to add a starter if you research this and look up people will talk about doing starters you don't have to but it is helpful so you can start with any kind of lacto-fermented [Music] any kind of fermentation lacto-fermentation all you can just add a little bit of that the other way is just to add water and get going and what you can do is take some from this bucket here can just add a little bit of that water okay that's going to help get this going now the grains are swollen and a lot of times after I've moved the bucket it needs more water in it you want to make sure you always keep the water well above the drain you don't want any moles developing or anything like that so make sure it's submerge and when you start to pet it on the size of your container start with a few inches above the grain and that grain will swell and absorb the water and so check it the first couple days and you may see that you've got to add water in the middle of the day once you get going you're going to know how much water to put in there each time and you're rolling with it okay so again you're soaking the grains the grains will naturally start to ferment that soaking is softening the seed and is making those nutrients more available and then by taking it even further and doing the fermentation you are adding probiotics and you are adding your you get a growth in there that starts to happen that is multiplying nutrients that can significantly lower your cost right there okay now we in addition to that you can use whatever grains you're using you know I've read up some people doing this with a mash or pellets I haven't done that that seems kind of messy I don't know how well that would work so we're using whole grains and cracked grains they both can work I use a scratch to even further lower the cost and it's non-gmo we don't have organic readily available that is either we can afford if you can go organic I would highly recommend that that's even better at least try to go with a non-gmo and a quality feed again a quality feed there's just more nutrients there as well and we want to get rid of any pesticides herbicides any of that anyways but if you have the ability to move your chickens around or free-range them you can go with the lower quality feed so instead of a high protein feed if your chickens are free-ranging or you can move them like we have ours back here in the garden right now and they've been eating the seeds eating the bugs now they've kind of worked that garden down pretty good and we can tell the protein is not there the we're starting to get a few less eggs and we don't want that so we've either going to add some protein back in well we're going to move the chickens out so again doing the scratch part is an additional using scratch instead of a higher quality protein feed that you would usually use for layers is an additional cost saving but you have to have a way to get that extra extra nutrient to the chickens so they've got to be free-ranging or they've got to have a large area whether it's vegetation and there's plenty of bugs and there's a couple different ways to manage that like I was explaining let's see you know where to start as far as how much do you feed you you know if you read most recommendations on feeding egg-laying chickens is a quarter to two-thirds of a pound a day at feed so I'd recommend you start on that lower end about a quarter a pound and go from there see how that's working for you and you just each environment each one of your environments is going to be different so you've got to just have a baseline to start at and again depending on what access your chickens have the other feed how how they're how your housing them all those different things are going to affect your feed requirements so I would start with that quarter pound if you're using a high quality feed higher protein feed you're probably going to be able to take that down pretty quickly or if your free-ranging them you'll probably be able to take that down as well but that is the place to start as that quarter to two-thirds of a pound let's see you know it as far as containers if you have a few chickens you're probably gonna want a smaller container than this we've got chickens we've got ducks we've got turkeys we've got geese so we're doing quite a bit of feed here this works real well for us now the other thing that you can do besides going to smaller container is you can do a large container like this get to your last bucket and leave it in the water and then scoop out what you need I like moving it every day it just keeps me involved with the process making sure that I'm changing it out I'm aerating it I'm adding water but people do do that they'll put a lid on it you don't want it to get yeast in it you certainly don't want to add yeast and turn it into an alcoholic format dot will kill your chickens or certainly make them silly so if you do decide to work out a one bucket for multiple days and do a batch of it just make sure you cover it and you leave everything completely submerged but again for our size and what works here I like just changing it out every day moving through that make sure that the process is working good I'm keeping my eyes on it and when it starts to ferment you will see that it will start to bubble and you probably can't see it in here but even in these already you can see the little bubbles coming up and the more that fermentation goes the more visible at it and it should smell some people don't really like the smell but it should smell pretty sweet you know some people describe that as bad we're all different in our house and what we think about it some people think it's kind of yucky it just reminds me of some of the other fermented products but if it gets to smelling really bad moldy icky then you've let it sit too long or you're letting grain up on top there's something wrong it should have a sweeter fermenting smell even if you don't particularly like that smell okay it shouldn't just really get icky and you know I think that's about it if you start doing this you're going to have lower feed costs you're going to have healthier chickens and it's been shown that the fermenting increases the thickness of your eggshells and the weight of the eggs so you're getting besides lowering your feed cost you're getting a healthier animal you're getting healthier food for yourself and man that's just a win-win so you guys try it out and feel free to come back here and comment ask me any questions and once you get it going let us know how it's going okay see you soon for more videos like these sign up at WWF in family calm also follow along on Facebook Instagram and YouTube you [Music]

Channel: Homesteading Family

Views: 136,640

Rating: 4.9337015 out of 5

Keywords: chickens, grain, fermented, poultry, pigs, save money, chicken feed, sprouted, ducks, geese, turkeys

Id: tZQ_jWFrzWk

Length: 12min 28sec (748 seconds)

Published: Thu May 04 2017