Our Experiment with Fermented Food for Meaties

I just spent most of yesterday and this morning reading all 115 pages of this tread: https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/644300/fermenting-feed-for-meat-birds, plus many of the links. My eyes are buggie and I have four pages of notes.

I started this thread to document our experiment and keep all our observations in one place.

Right now, we have 35 hens (lots of different breeds, including muts we've hatched ourselves), 1 roo and 1 mamma raising 6 chicks (2 weeks old). We give the adult chickens feed store-bought crumbles (we get all natural when we can fit it in our budget), scratch (not sure what's in it, I guess I should look next time), lots of kitchen scraps, culls from our garden and grocery store type rolled oats as a treat (about a cup two or three times a week for 36 birds). We don't really keep track, but we figure we feed about a 50 lb bag of feed a week, plus 4-5 bags of scratch a year. All the birds (except mamma and her babies) live in a 12x4 coop with a 16x32 run and they are let out of that run for at least 3 hours almost every day. We get 20-24 eggs a day now that they are out of their molt and the intense heat has subsided. We will soon be culling birds who have stopped laying.

The floor of the house is wire with 1x1s with an inch between them so most of their poop drops to the ground (the house is 2' above the ground). The run is deep litter, sprinkled a few times a year with DE to keep the flies and smell down and totally cleaned out once a year to become fertilizer for our garden. No fuss, no illnesses, no concerns. We will not experiment with these birds, I only mention them, so if you are following this post, you know where we are coming from.

We've raised two batches of meaties in the last two years (both CX and Freedom Rangers) with great success, although the smell . . . .

Thursday, we will be receiving 13 CX and 13 Red Rangers from McMurray. We have 2 tractors for the birds and at first we were going to put each breed in their own tractor. But, after reading the above mentioned post, we are going to split each bread and experiment with the feedings.

For the first two weeks, all the birds will be in a brooder and will eat FF chick starter crumbles. After the two weeks, we will put half of each breed in each tractor and feed one tractor FF and the other the same grains, except not fermented. We will probably experiment with adding oats, barley, wheat in with the feed, but we'll feed the same ratios to both sets of birds. Our tractors are pretty big for the number of birds (6x8), so we don't think we will let these range, but we'll see. Splitting the birds up this way, we can see which breed fare better on FF, or if it makes a difference at all.

Today, I measured my chick starter crumbles. 2 cups weighs 9.4 ounces, so a 50 pound bag is 168.42 cups. I put 6 cups in a bucket with a half cup of whey (from home made yogurt) and covered the grains with water. By the time the birds get here on Thursday, the mash should be well fermented.

We don't have any high hopes for bigger, faster growing birds. Our number one goal is to reduce the smell of the poop. Our second goal is to reduce the cost of putting birds in the freezer. Anything else is a bonus!

We're a homeschooling family, so this experiment is now an official school assignment!

Twenty eight chicks arrived today - 14 Red Ranger Broilers and 14 Jumbo Cornish X Rock Females (White Broilers) from Murray McMurray Hatchery. They are all in one brooder drinking water and eating fermented grains from the 6 cups I started fermenting 5 days ago. After I filled their trough, I added another 2 cups of dry grains to the bucket.

I weighed each bird.

The white broilers average 1.2714 ounces per bird. There is one bird that is .8 ounces and another that is 1.6 ounces, but most are 1.2 - 1.3 ounces.

The Red Rangers average 1.2788 ounces per bird. The smallest in this batch was 1.1 ounces and there was one that was 1.5.





I forgot to post that the grains with whey were not bubbling after a day, so I added about a quarter cup of Braggs vinegar. A day later, still no bubbles. Then I realized my bucket was inside next to the air conditioner vent. I put the bucket outside (covered with panty hose to keep the bugs out) and within 2 hours the bubbles started. I stirred the bucket every day.

We had one of the white broilers die. When I went out to feed them this morning, the chick that was only .8 ounces had died. I kind of expected that. The first day's food was almost all eaten. I gave them more food and then added another 4 cups of dry chick starter crumbles to the fermenting bucket.

This should be interesting! I'll be following your thread to see how things turn out.

I'm interested, too.

I do the fermented feed with my layers and the smell is gone, poops are firm, and they seem to need less feed. I'm new to chickens and never imagined meaties until Beekissed linked from the Old Timer thread to the FF thread.

I look forward to hearing about your progress and learning about the comparison between the breeds. Thanks!

The chicks are just over a week old (hatched 9/5/12) and we are THRILLED with the result of the fermented feed. We cleaned out the brooder today because the poop build-up and they had spilled some water. In the past, we had to clean it out because of the smell. There is really no noticeable bad smell!

They are looking like what we would expect from meat birds. The chicks are all very active and their feathers are starting to come in. We will weigh them to record their growth before we move them to the tractors. We thought we'd weigh them every week, but we really don't see the point at this stage.

This is the end of the second week we have had the chicks, although they are 16 days old. They have consumed a total of 51 cups of grains, measured dry (just about 15 pounds).

Some of the chicks have a good amount of feathers on them. I think they feather better when they are not so warm. We removed the heat lamp totally today. We will watch the weather and if it gets too cold, we may add it back, based on the activity of the birds. This evening when I went to feed them, they were huddled a little, but not too bad. We will give them a few more days without the heat lamp before we decide if we will move them outside to a tractor.

We will wait to weigh the birds until we move them. We have not changed their litter since last Thursday. There is still NO BAD SMELL and the poop is not piling up!

Sounds like things are going well! You'll have to post some pics if you can so we can see them grow...love pics of other people's birds!

Thank you so much for tracking this.
I wanted to do a quantifiable side by side with dry feed to see if there was a savings, but I did not want to be harvesting birds in November.
Some have surmised a 50% feed savings, but I would need to verify what % could be reduced before I come up with the infrastructure to ferment feed for 2,000 birds over the course of next season.
If nothing else I would love to see if we could eliminate some of the ingredients from our feed to save money. Our feed is made of freshly cracked corn, wheat, peas, flax meal, fish meal, crab meal, kelp meal, and seashell flower. We could save money by eliminating some or all of the sea products (though i like having some non-plant protein in there) and just going with the seeds and grains.
Looking forward to your results!

We moved the chicks outside this afternoon! They are 19 days old.

We weighed the chickens as we moved them in to the tractor. All weights are in ounces.



White Broilers

Red Rangers


The birds gained a total of 172.5 ounces by eating 57cups of feed, or 267.9 ounces of feed. They realized a weight gain of 64% of their total feed intake. Since I've never quantified our feed to meat ratio, I don't know how this measures up.

They are now totally cleaning out the trough between feedings. Because there is such a large difference between the smallest and largest birds, we think some birds are not able to get to the feeder. We are going to start feeding them in two troughs and more at each time.

We will keep all the chickens together in one tractor for another week or two until they get used to the weather and get more feathers (besides, our other tractor is occupied with baby chicks for our egg laying flock). It is supposed to get down to 60 tonight, so we will put a heat lamp out for them. The tractor is big enough so they can move in and out of the heat as they need it.

Here are some pictures:


Draining the Mash - we're going to change the way we do this now that they are eating so much more. This drainer holds about 1 1/2 cups of wet mash.



Our brooder - 2 small swimming pools cable tied together and a hole cut out of one side. We put the heat lamp directly on the wire opening. Not pretty, but it's kept inside an outbuilding, so no one sees it but us. Besides, it works great and is easy to clean!



The chicks going crazy over their food in their new home. They aren't sure what to make of the grass - they are walking quite funny and pecking at the blades. The grass is about 2' long. I hope they find some bugs in there too.



There are two interesting things in this picture - 1) the other chickens checking out their new neighbors. We have 30+ egg chickens that free range most of the day.
2) All the chicks are piling up on one feeder and leaving the other alone. They were all on the other one first, but when I put the second trough in the tractor, they "flocked" to it instead. They are such funny birds! After about 20 minutes, they evened out and were exploring the rest of their new home.