Fodder For Chickens! How To Build A Fodder System And Save Money!

good afternoon welcome back to the homestead today we're going to be showing you how to build a chicken fodder system something to grow fodder for your chickens to help reduce costs in feeding them let's go so the important first part of the system is the pre-soak and you're going to need two five gallon buckets for that or two buckets that fit into one another depending on how much grain you want to soak initially for the size of your system from there we're going to drill holes in the bottom of one of the five gallon buckets we have a 7 64 inch bit here so that the water drains out but the grain doesn't come through so the most common three grains to sprout are wheat barley and oats you can sprout sunflowers you can sprout other things but those are the three most common of those wheat and barley are easier to sprout but our feed store only had oats this time so we're going to be showing you how to sprout these oats we've got a 50 pound bag and what we're going to do is we're going to just fill in the bottom probably we're gonna put maybe five pounds of the barley in there because that's going to be the best size for our system five pounds of barley and that's going to swell up and actually grow to probably about twice the size so we have our bucket of water we're going to just drop one bucket into the other and get these things soaking this process takes between 12 and 24 hours you can leave it a little longer but make sure you continue to change the water out after the 24 hour period if you leave it longer so the cool thing about this process is sprouting grains doesn't require any light if you want to put a small light bulb in in near your sprouting system you can but it doesn't require it because those seeds have enough energy to take that grass and grow it to a certain point after that it will start to die without any nutrients and or light but it's not necessary to to get it to the point where we feed it to the chickens no lights necessary that's really cool so this portion of the build is the rest of the system itself and that is the rack to hold your trays the system to circulate the water up and around if you don't want to do it manually we're going to do an automatic system like that which i always love to do less work in the end but the things you're going to need are here on the table we're going to talk about we need a couple of treated two by fours two you need four regular two by fours you need six in this case we are going to use our grow trays for this our seedling starter trays you can use any type of tray and we are going to talk about the modification you're going to need to do to the different or to the rack itself to accommodate different trays so we're going to use these 10 by 20 seed starting trays we have some tubing now your tubing may vary and here's why we've got this awesome 800 per or 800 gallon per minute pump here now the 800 gallons in when you're buying your pump 800 gallons is per minute at a flat level each foot in elevation that you go you're going to lose some gpm some gallons per minute up until eight foot with this one so you can pump it up eight foot and you're gonna get about 200 150 to 200 gallons per minute and after that it just it won't pump it up that far so this is a good pump to pump it up just a few feet and 200 gallons a minute for our system is going to be perfect we're going to set it to go off with a timer a couple times a day but make sure you pay attention to that when buying a pump so that pump is going to dictate what size hose you buy in this case we've actually necked it down to our irrigation line and i'll show you that in a second your pump is going to get come with several adapters hopefully for different size hoses so i'm not going to tell you the size of the hose because it's going to vary so we're going to put ours together using all the parts that we usually have i'll list those parts in the description below as always i'll list links to them all that kind of deal so additionally you're also going to need a bulkhead fitting that bulkhead is going to go in a vinyl gutter now you can use a metal gutter it doesn't matter just a gutter you're going to need two gutter caps for the ends of it and a couple of brackets to hold that gutter onto your rack system after your bulkhead fitting you're going to need several fittings to adapt it to pour into where your water reservoir is in that case we have this 18 i think it's an 18 quart tote how much is this 30 gallon i'm not 100 sure make sure it's enough water you can hold about eight gallons with some room here at the top for our pipe to come in the side to recirculate the water back into it and to hold our pump and of course some sort of fastener in this case screws for us you can use nails it really doesn't matter let's start to assemble the rack for you and of course before i forget you're going to need some pvc pipe for your fittings for your bulkhead fitting to divert that water back into the tote again size is going to vary depending on what size bulkhead you buy doesn't really matter one inch three quarters it doesn't matter so if you didn't notice lumber prices have tripled recently so we're trying to use the least amount of lumber possible we're going to have three shelves on our system with two trays side by side to get a good spacing for that we are going to cut each one of our treated two by fours in thirds which is two foot eight so we're going to have six pieces that are two foot eight inches long next step is to take our four legs the four remaining two by fours which will form the legs of the rack and we are going to take 15 inches off of each one of them sorry about that my microphone died so now we're back here with the complete build i'll tell you where all the parts and pieces go so on the front portion of the shelf we've got our front post which is six foot seven inches tall from there we're gonna come down seven inches and place our first cross brace from there we're going to go two feet on center all the way to the bottom with the next two shelves so all of those are two feet on center from top to bottom starting at seven and a quarter here on the back portion of the shelf we've got our first cross support set at six and three quarters inches down from the top that will give us our fall to the front so the water drains through our pans this next shelf is set at 24 and three quarters inches down from the top one and that is so that the water falls back this way in these pans next down to the next level it'll need to fall back to the front so the next shelf support on the back side is set at one foot eleven and a quarter you may decide to have your shelves closer together you may decide to have them at a little bit more fall it's up to you but just make sure it falls in a zigzag pattern from front to back because your water needs to flow through that system so zigzag pattern the next shelf needs to be lower than the front the next shelf lower than the back and so on and so forth now that we have the front and rear portion of the structure completed with our shelves and our trays sitting on there we need to tie the structures together and we're going to use our scrap pieces for that so one place here about a foot from the top and the other two feet up from the bottom so on to the next part the gutter we've got a 10 foot long gutter here but we obviously don't need that much we need actually only about three and a half feet we're gonna overhang it a little bit on each side here and that's just so we can accommodate our piping coming down into our tote and that will perfectly catch everything that it needs to catch here on the bottom now these end caps are made to be used without silicone but it's always good to add some silicone around the inside so they don't leak and we will be doing that to all of the pieces including the bulkhead when we're finished we have our gutter assembled here and now we need to hang it from the front i have three brackets and these one and a quarter inch screws pretty simple to just hang it on the lower half of this bottom shelf cross brace so you want to have a level handy too because we need some fall on our gutter about a quarter inch is fine just so it slopes down toward our bulkhead drain and in where it goes back into our tote so make sure you always have the proper parts before you start a project this is embarrassing this is a bulkhead i already had it's too big the flange is too big for the bottom of the gutter it will not seal properly so i'm off to the store and i'll be right back and we're back we had to actually wait a few days to find a bulkhead fitting that was the proper size that will fit in the bottom of our gutter here that flange is the right size to snug down onto the flat part of the gutter now we have to drill the hole through here and we'll get the rest assembled for you let's go so our water reservoir is going to be tucked in nicely underneath and we're actually not going to cut a hole in the top we're going to cut a hole in the side of our tote right here to receive our piping now we've got two six inch pieces of pipe we've got an elbow and a connector for the bulkhead fitting right there we're going to dry fit everything together first and that's important to do dry fitting before you glue it because you never know with a pvc piping so once you've got everything dry fit together mark out where the hole is going to go roughly so that you can tuck your tote nice and neatly underneath your shelves so for us right about here we're going to mark it you can cut it out with a hole saw if you have one if not really easy just use an x-acto knife so the next thing we need to do is cut a hole in our tote for our water hose and that water hose is connected of course to our pump which sits in the water reservoir and pumps our water to our system so the pump comes with several different fittings you're gonna have to determine for yourself which fitting is the best for you for the size of your system and the hose that you purchase so we've got this three quarter inch hose here we're going to run that through the side of our tote so we're coming together we've got our drain assembly here with the gutter we have our pump set in our tote with the water hose that's run through the side and up the side we've got it secured with some of these pipe straps here top and bottom and then we're going to be actually cutting off that hose to run our irrigation line at the top of the entire shelving assembly okay we've got our water line secured we've got it attached by a barbed connector to our irrigation line which is a half inch irrigation line the same type we use in our garden on that irrigation line we're going to punch in and place these little button drippers these little button drippers are two gallon per hour button drippers and that should give us plenty of water through our system so place the trays where you want them and then we're just going to use the punch and punch a hole through the bottom of our irrigation line and we are going to insert our button dripper just like that so we will have three of them hanging over this tray and three of them hanging over this tray over here we're getting towards the end of the process one of the last steps we're going to do here is punch holes in the edge of our growing trays here which is where our seeds are going to germinate and sprout with this little awl i usually put eight nine holes just so the water has enough area to get out depending on how your tray is shaped you're gonna need to determine where those holes are going to need to go and the this tray has these little ridges so we're going to poke them on the bottom of these little ridges so all that water gets out of there so we have everything primed set up and ready to go we're going to do a quick test run and show you how things move through the system and then we're going to fill it up with our grain and get our fodder grown for our chickens [Applause] [Music] now we're going to get our pre-soaked oats in our trays and get that pump on a timer in a future video we will show you how the fodder is grown in each stage but right now check out this video which shows you exactly how we built our predator resistant outdoor chicken run have a great day we love you we'll see you on the next video bye

Channel: Country Living Experience: A Homesteading Journey

Views: 109,609

Keywords: fodder for chickens, Fodder For Chickens! How To Build A Fodder System And Save Money!, best fodder for chickens, growing fodder for chickens, hydroponic fodder for chickens, oat fodder for chickens, sprouting fodder for chickens, chickens, fodder, chicken fodder, chicken fodder diy, chicken fodder growing system, growing chicken fodder, how to grow fodder

Id: USbjfW6XFPY

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 11 2020