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!
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!
Last edited: