So, I'll admit that I've been leery of fermented feed and really didn't see the point. my phobia to it probably stems from growing up in a farm house where fermentation was rather accidental most of the time and even when deliberate, was done rather haphazard with varying results, namely funky tastes and smells, balls of cheese that weren't supposed to be blue and memories of occasional upset stomachs, never quite knowing of their cause. Frankly, at times I felt like a guinea pig for my "back to earther" father's o'natural culinary experiments. Fast forward nearly half a century to a couple of months ago, when someone encouraged me to start brewing kombucha. I decided to get into it because my kids were constantly asking for it from the health food store and at $3.50 for a 10 oz bottle I thought well, I can definitely make it cheaper than that... and then my plum tree produced the most outstanding plum harvest ever, like 500 plums and I suddenly found myself "discovering" the wonders of fermentation, as I had way more plums than I could eat. And then the same thing happened with the peaches and the figs and now the grapes. the brew that has come from our various fruit crops this summer has started somewhat of an all out blitz obsession with fermentation because, the product has been "out of this world" delicious. the combinations of sweet, sour and tart lend themselves amazingly well to making a dizzying array of flavor combinations with ginger and just about any spice you can imagine going well with fruit! we now have lots of frozen fruit and fruit juice in the freezer for our winter enjoyment and have even acquired a used fridge that functions as our fruit and kombucha storage. it kind of feels like the missing piece to our urban homestead approach is finally in place. I can't help but having this surreal feeling, like I'm rubbing shoulders with ancestors, at times feeling like I'm looking back in time to a lost art, before refrigerators and freezers and canning to when farmers ended up being faced with way more fruit than they knew what to do with in the short time before it rotted, having plenty of reasons to ferment their fruit to prolong and diversity it's use, while also being a source of probiotics to help maintain a healthy micro biome. the health benefits have been fairly evident for me if for no other reason than it's now taking the place of coffee in the morning and regular alcohol consumption at night, my energy is more consistent, I stay more well hydrated and my gut health seems to be vastly improved, my skin even feels healthier.
Then some weeks back I showed up at a farmers market where a woman who promoted scratch and peck started getting into the benefits of fermenting chicken feed and it kind of all circled back around and a light went off in my head, "could controlled fermentation be as good for my chickens as it has been for me and my family?". not only did I want to try fermenting the chicken feed, I began thinking about whether starting with kombucha would offer advantages. if you start with water, and not adding any starter, you are starting a wild ferment with whatever happens to be in the feed and blowing around already and at least to some extent, you are more susceptible to the wrong things growing, in particular, toxic molds. it would seem like giving the fermentation process a little turbo charge with an already cultured starter, like you typically do with sour dough, would help assure the ferment goes in the right direction and doesn't go south. In reality, Kombucha is just a fancy word for what was surely the old garden variety fermentation that was carried out around the world, surely started by accident originally. the word scoby, for instance, is simply an acronym for symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast, it's not even a Japanese term. the most common misconception seems to be that it's the scoby that is key to a good batch of kombucha, but as it turns out, it's the fluid that is just as if not more important. kiombucha can be made without a scoby, just starter fluid, about 2 cups per gallon of brew. the starter fluid does two things, it adds millions of the right family of microbes to speed up the initial process of fermentation and it helps to drop the PH, inhibiting mold and bad bacteria. it favors the good stuff and inhibits the bad stuff, so why wouldn't it be good for fermenting feed?
while you start with a scoby and starter fluid, it is still a type of wild open ferment, meaning it evolves and incorporates microbes from the surrounding environment and is continuously "evolving" and therefore it would reason that it's probably not super specific to it's origin of Japan and China but is basically the general fermentation approach used throughout Eastern Europe, Russia and Japan for many centuries. Kombucha is likely a fancy exotic term for the actual traditional approach to fermenting a wide range of things, maybe even including chicken feed. I suspect that applying some of the concepts typical to kombucha brewing would improve on typical practices of feed fermenting and maybe, just maybe lead us back to a long lost tradition of a more controlled fermenting process, perhaps not entirely unlike making silage for ruminants.
if anyone has actual experience with using kombucha for fermenting chicken feed, please chime in. so far in this thread is seems like there is a lot of skepticism and not a lot of solid experience or information to add to the original query, so I'm continuing eagerly on my search. I may just venture forth into testing out a small batch and seeing how the chickens do (and what comes of it, of shall i say, out the other end, lol) to determine if it's beneficial.
As a side note: As for the potential for alcohol, open wild fermenting as is customary in fermenting chicken feed will produce alcohol just the same, and as long as the gasses are allowed to escape, the actual alcohol content should remain low, about that of over ripe fruit, just like kombucha (below half a percent) since alcohol is very volatile and wants to become a gas and escape. you can make kombucha beer, which deliberately retains alcohol, but that it another thing altogether.
