Growing fodder for chickens

[Bamachikken]

I have my second batch going right now. It sprouts a day after soaking. Here is a pic of the corn on day 3

How long do you soak? And i was wondering do you do the usual 6-9 days before feeding it to the chicks

 

[holm25]

How long do you soak? And i was wondering do you do the usual 6-9 days before feeding it to the chicks

I start soaking mine at 7 pm and will put it in trays at 8:30 am the next morning. So about 11 hours. I am still experimenting on how long to let it grow.

 

[NaturalMomOfTwo]

I'm new to growing fodder. So far, it's the coolest thing. I'm just wondering, I have 62 chickens, how much fodder should I put out each day for them? What size pan or how many pounds of fodder per day, any info would be great. I don't want to completely replace their feed but I do want to cut my feed costs. Thank you.

 

[Don P]

I grow fodder but you don't get 6 or 7 pounds of feed from 1 lb as many wrongly claim. You still have 1 lb of feed and 5-6 lbs of water.

Fodder does not add anything to the seed. You can't get something from nothing. The seed loses some protein changing it to carbs as it grows the sprout root and leaf.

So it is fine to give them some greens, and just sprouting a whole grain makes it easier to digest, more bio-available, but does not give you more food or nutrition.

Even if you add minerals to the water, the sprout is getting all its nutrients from the seed until it is consumed and the tiny root hairs grow out enough to collect minerals and nutrients from the soil.

Just like a chick, everything it is made out of is in the egg until it hatches and starts eating food. Or a fish eats off its egg sack for a while until it develops enough to eat outside food.

The whole grain is harder to break down and digest so that is why soaking or sprouting is useful or using cracked grain feed and having Granite Grit for their gizzards to grind it up. These are all ways to get more out of the grain than feeding it whole.


But fermenting fresh cracked grain for 3-4 days would be the best way to get the most nutrition in my opinion.
Then you are growing lactobacillus and enzymes that begin to digest the food and provide probiotics and extra enzymes to the animal or person eating the grain or veggies.

 

[NaturalMomOfTwo]

You may want to check out this article about what happens to the protein, fiber and the nutritional value if you harvest at 7 days. http://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/sprouted-fodder.aspx

 

[Don P]

That unscientific article is misleading. 1st of all, you cannot create matter from nothing. If you have a pound of seed you have a pound of matter. There is nothing else to work with. Sunlight eventually triggers photosynthesis but does not add nutrients or mass.

So the only increase is the water weight. To say you have increased mass is a flat our lie!!! Its foolish and ridiculous. You have water weight. You can prove this by drying the sprout and weighing it. You may get it to 90% dry and then you will see there is nothing more there than there was before as far as weight.

What has changed is the grain has given up some starch to become sugar and the root and leaf are carbs primarily.

Now when they say the % of protein has changed, what are they talking about? The overall protein of the entire seed and spout? Or the sprout itself alone? Or the Sprout leaf and root alone? Or do they mean because it is more bioavailable than a hard dry seed, that the end result of assimilation is a higher % of protein because of their estimated digestibility?

Do you see how misleading this is since they did not specify where this supposed extra protein is or what % it is of the whole or part?

And if you actually got 5 more pounds of feed and nutrition than you had originally, wouldn't there be 5 x more protein??? Then even commercial farms would all do it if they could cut their feed bill by 4/5 just adding water!!
So that is all not true.

I have found only a couple of obscure studies claiming protein or nutrient increase in some way and usually in sprouts hydroponically grown for more than a week..
But this is only considered a possibility for ruminant animals who can efficiently break down the cellulose plants. Chickens can't do that as well. So for cows, Goats, sheep maybe even horses it could be a possibility. So that is another factor many do not consider when speaking of foddering for poultry. The nutrients availability is not the same for poultry as ruminants.

Even if you add minerals to the rinse water as some people do, you are not adding significant or measureable weight in 7 days. The root has not developed to the point it can take in and utilize nutrients until 4 days after sprouting and then only nitrogen and a few nutrients not all. The growth all comes from within the grain. Amazing!

Soaking to soften or sprouting does make it easier to digest whole grain, so the hens may get more nutrients from the grain. But even with just soaking there is a loss of protein and nutrients that leach out into the water and the total mass of Dry Matter declines.
It is worth noting that roughly half of the increase in percentage of crude protein on a Dry Matter basis that some may claim happens is due simply to the reduction in DM loss, which concentrates the weight of protein present. So the total amount of protein in the whole sprout is about the same but the % of protein appears to go up primarily because it has lost overall weight, not because it has gained something more.

You actually have less overall feed, just a changed form. If you have 10 lbs of grain and it is 10% protein then you soak it, the total mass drops so the % of protein of what is left may now be 12% because you lost some of the feed and only have 9 pounds 13 oz of dry matter left. So the same 10% protein is now %11 or 12 % of what is left.
The water weight is the only weight that went up.

After day 4 and once the plant roots develop significantly to start assimilating new nutrients from the soil or hydroponic medium, only then is new mass being added to the plant as it grows to give you something more. And most of the time there is little difference in protein and nutrient % pound for pound in the mature plant than there was in the week old sprout. There is just more pounds of plant since it has grown from the soil nutrients.

This is why some large ruminant farms have giant hydroponic systems that allow for longer growth time of the plants, more than a week, with the addition of man made nutrients to recycled growing water or Aquaponic source growing medium. These older hydroponic grown wet feeds of course have more nutrient density, and more even than natural pasture. But to measure that fodder and then say if you sprout some grain and let it grow a week in a few troughs or flats that they will have the same nutrients as these commercial hydroponic fodders do, is not true. And that is where most studies about fodder nutrient increase comes from. Its not comparing apples with apples.

So if you don't have access to fresh cracked grain it may be good to soak some whole grain and if hens don't have access to live plants then adding some fodder to their diet may be useful
in my opinion, as it gives a more natural and broader diet similar to free range. But when hens eat grass they eat less grain so they do not get as much protein and care must be taken to not feed too many scraps from the house, cooked rice, bread and other veggies, especially in the winter when there aren't as many high protein insects to compensate and restore the protein levels back up from all the low protein high carb food.

But if you give grass fodder or pasture you should supplement chickens protein with peas, lentils, fish meal, Camelina meal or other high protein sources, because Barley is low protein already and so is its fodder.
I won't use soy, corn or wheat because even the organic has often been cross pollinated from GMO crops and I don't want GMO anything.
Laying hens need 16% or higher total protein in their diet for optimal health and production. The more lower protein plants they eat, the higher protein their feed supplement needs to be to balance it because they will eat less grain feed. And feeding only one grain or two is not a well balanced diet either. So feeding Wheat Fodder only or Barley fodder only is not a healthy diet even if they get out to pasture. Will they live a few years and lay eggs, yes, but not as healthy or as long or as much egg production.

When hens do not have adequate protein they are more likely to lose more feathers in a moult and be slower to regrow them back. My hens seldom lose many feathers at once, and it is very light when they do moult with rapid re-grow. I do add some fish meal to increase protein levels sometimes to the feed when I see feathers dropping. And I may add some Brewer's or Baker's Yeast to increase B Vitamins to support stress. And they get kelp meal periodically on damp feed or sprouts as a plant source of extra minerals that is easier to digest and more bio-available than Oyster shells or even Crustacean or Crab meal which they also get.

If I have some pullets or new hens quarantined, not allowed out to pasture then they get Fodder more regularly, until they pasture. And I grow Fodder in the ground under a wire mesh in their runs so they can eat it as it grows up but can't bite it off too close to the ground so they have a continual growing supply they can't scratch out all the roots and seeds and it roots and nutrients are gained in the plants. Eventually they get it all plucked up and I replant a new tray of fodder under the wire.

Live food is great! But Remember a dead looking grain is live food already. It is not dead or old.
But old cracked feed sitting around a mill warehouse for months then shipped off to a feed store where it sits longer may have lost much of its nutrients. And pellets, don't even get me started on thatsugar laden, heated, by products and dust, cardboard junk.

I still believe fermenting fresh cracked grain feed is the best method to improve feed and digestibility for poultry and many other animals as well.
Along with the the dry cracked feed I ferment the feed often and give them only what they can eat within an hour because it spoils and molds especially in the warm weather.
When not feeding wet fermented feed I soak whole grain 1-2 days as a treat and to help pick up any of the fines left in feed troughs, and I let some sprout and feed that along with their dry feed.
And sometimes I let it grow to grass for 8 days or longer because that is when a protein increase really can begin to show up with minerals added after the 4th day.
I sprout: Triticale, Barley, BOSS and Peas and use it as a treat.

I have been raising my own hens for over 20 years and as a Naturopthic Physician I have made my life's work studying nutrition in humans and animals working closely with natural holistic veterinarians for over 35 years. I bring in chemically free grown non-GMO and freshly cracked grain feed by the tons and supply people, many who drive over an hour and a half to get our feed because when they switch they see the better health of hens, shinier feathers, increased egg production and size and better looking and tasting eggs.

I keep my hens for at least 3 years instead of 15-18 months as many commercial famers do because mine are still laying well then and many people tell me they have older hens who start laying more, even 1 who had a 10 year old hen who laid 1-2 times a month but after a month or so on our feed she started laying 2-3 a week. That is hard to believe but I see this all the time. You are made out of what you eat ate!

We give Granite Grit free choice so they can grind the whole or cracked grain and get more efficiency out of the feed so they eat less and are nourished better. This is similar to the benefit of soaking grain.

Note the studies below speak just to Sprouting, not about letting them grow to grass for a week. It is in the initial germination process the nutrient utilization occurs. As they move toward more cellulose from Photosynthesis this may decline, especially for digestibility in non-ruminant animals. Grass fodder is great for ruminants who can better digest it.

During soaking and germination seeds lose dry matter (DM). Chavan and Kadam (1989) state that the original dry weight of the seed decreases during soaking and subsequent sprouting processes due to leaching of materials and oxidation of substances from the seed.
When seeds are soaked, solutes leak out of them. Leakage is fastest at the start of imbibition (water uptake) and comes to a halt after about one day (Simon 1984 as cited in Chung et al.
1989). Solutes that leak include proteins, amino acids, sugars, organic acids, and inorganic ions.
During germination DM is lost due to the increased metabolic activity of sprouting seeds. The energy for this metabolic activity is derived by partial degradation and oxidation of starch (Chavan
and Kadam 1989).

Source: Cuddeford (1989), based on data obtained by Peer and Leeson (1985).
Increased nutrients: “ Sprouting grains causes increased activities of hydrolytic enzymes, improvements in the contents of total proteins, fat, certain essential amino acids, total sugars, B-group vitamins, and a decrease in dry matter, starch and anti-nutrients. The increased contents of protein, fat, fibre and total ash are only apparent and attributable to the disappearance of starch. However, improvements in amino acid composition, B-group vitamins, sugars, protein and starch digestibilities, and decrease in phytates and protease inhibitors are the metabolic effects of the sprouting process.”
Increases in Essential Fatty Acids - An increase in lipase activity has been reported in barley by MacLeod and White (1962) as cited by Chavan and Kadam (1989) Increased lipolytic activity during germination and sprouting causes hydrolysis of triacylglycerols to glycerol and constituent fatty acids.
Increases in Vitamin content - According to Chavan and Kadam (1989)most reports agree that sprouting treatment of cereal grains generally improves their vitamin value, especially the B-group vitamins. Certain vitamins such as α-tocopherol (Vitamin-E) and β-carotene (Vitamin-A precursor) are produced during the growth process (Cuddeford, 1989).
According to Shipard (2005) - “Sprouts provide a good supply of Vitamins A, E & C plus B complex. Like enzymes, vitamins serve as bioactive catalysts to assist in the digestion and metabolism of feeds and the release of energy. They are also essential for the healing and repair of cells. However, vitamins are very perishable, and in general, the fresher the feeds eaten, the higher the vitamin content. The vitamin content of some seeds can increase by up to 20 times their original value within several days of sprouting. Mung Bean sprouts have B vitamin increases, compared to the dry seeds, of - B1 up 285%, B2 up 515%, B3 up 256%.
Even soaking seeds overnight in water yields greatly increased amounts of B vitamins, as well as Vitamin C. Compared with mature plants, sprouts can yield vitamin contents 30 times higher.”

Chelation of Minerals Shipard (2005) claims that - “When seeds are sprouted, minerals chelate or merge with protein, in a way that increases their function.”
It is important to note that while these changes may sound impressive, the comparisons are between dormant non-sprouted seed to sprouted seed rather than comparisons of sprouts to mature vegetables. Compared to dry seeds there are very large increases in nutrients whereas compared with mature vegetables the increase is less.

 

[holm25]

I am confused... U have to be able to get more weight. And it cant all be water weight. If I planted a seed I would get more weight from it.



Any ways I started another batch of corn fodder today. Should see sprouts by tomorrow. That is if it grows like the last batch...

 

[Don P]

Not until it grows new roots that can take up new minerals from the ground. Until then it is all from the seed. That is the amazing power of stored energy in the seed.

 

[NaturalMomOfTwo]

Okay, I'm really confused because first you said the protein doesn't increase and then you said you sprout your own and after day 8 is when the protein increases. Everything I have read about fodder says to feed between days 7-10.

And, your very own resources say: Chelation of Minerals Shipard (2005) claims that - “When seeds are sprouted, minerals chelate or merge with protein, in a way that increases their function.”
It is important to note that while these changes may sound impressive, the comparisons are between dormant non-sprouted seed to sprouted seed rather than comparisons of sprouts to mature vegetables. Compared to dry seeds there are very large increases in nutrients whereas compared with mature vegetables the increase is less.
Sprouts are better than seed is what I take from that and of course a mature vegetable is better.

I respect your opinion and there is a ton of information that says otherwise. I'm not ONLY feeding fodder. I add herbs, flax, oatmeal, garlic and probiotics to their organic feed. I'm doing the fodder to give them greens for the winter. I'll see how it all goes and I'll probably offer it through out the year.

Thank you for taking time to type all of that out. I appreciate that you care

 

[lynnehd]

Okay, I'm really confused because first you said the protein doesn't increase and then you said you sprout your own and after day 8 is when the protein increases. Everything I have read about fodder says to feed between days 7-10.

And, your very own resources say: Chelation of Minerals Shipard (2005) claims that - “When seeds are sprouted, minerals chelate or merge with protein, in a way that increases their function.”
It is important to note that while these changes may sound impressive, the comparisons are between dormant non-sprouted seed to sprouted seed rather than comparisons of sprouts to mature vegetables. Compared to dry seeds there are very large increases in nutrients whereas compared with mature vegetables the increase is less.
Sprouts are better than seed is what I take from that and of course a mature vegetable is better.

I respect your opinion and there is a ton of information that says otherwise. I'm not ONLY feeding fodder. I add herbs, flax, oatmeal, garlic and probiotics to their organic feed. I'm doing the fodder to give them greens for the winter. I'll see how it all goes and I'll probably offer it through out the year.

Thank you for taking time to type all of that out. I appreciate that you care

X2.
I grow mine mostly for greens, not for a staple. Mine seem to really miss foraging for them in the winter.