Anyone have experience making homemade fish meal?

[Barred Rockstar]

I live on the coast and a lot of my family are avid fishermen. Rather then just burying the carcasses I was thinking of trying to process them to feed back to my chickens. Anyone done this?

 

[fl_deb]

No, but I asked a next door neighbor to bring me his guts and stuff the next time he goes fishing so I can try. I did try weeks ago to feed my chickens some live minnows from one of my ponds and they just could not be bothered....I think they were finding too many of their favs to even think about the fish. LOL It was their first few days of free ranging back then.

I would think if you cooked the fish stuff and then blenderized it for awhile.....uhmmmm... yummy.....that they would eat it- maybe freezing/canning pints to mix into feed (oatmeal) for cold mornings???

I'm glad someone brought this up.

 

[the4heathernsmom]

Well this may sound really gross or bad but when we go fishing and bring home to clean we just toss the "unused" parts of the fish over the pen fence to ours and they devour them. After a couple of days the bones are picked totally clean and I just rake them up scoop em into a bucket and they go in the compost pile or I dig a hole in the garden and plant 'em. If I can eat sushi I figure it isn't gonna hurt the chickens to have raw fish and so far after a year of doing this no problems. I was worried about bones, someone actually eating them or getting one caught in the throat but they just pick the bones clean!!!! Pig grabbed one from under the fence and ate it whole I panicked on that too but no problems!!!!

 

[Barred Rockstar]

I definitely want to find a way to preserve it so it will keep for a while. I'm talking about a lot of fish carcasses here, rock fish, salmon, halibut, ling cod, etc. They would easily rot before my birds could pick them clean. (I also don't want to feed the neighborhood pests, dogs, etc.) I like the idea of freezing but we really don't have all that much freezer space. (It's full of fish for us to eat!) Canning would also work but might not be an economical choice. I think drying them would be a good option, maybe give them a hard smoke? That would just leave the grinding/blenderizing process. Seems like it would be a pain without some sort of large commercial grinder. What do you all think?