Crushing Corn?

[jabowery]

I live in Iowa so there are LOTS of corn cobs lying around in the fields after harvest just waiting to be eaten by deer.

Since I have chickens and a good relationship with my neighboring farmers I just go out and gather corn off the ground, bring it inside and hand shell them. Its good exercise to gather the corn and shelling by hand just feels good.

So, now, we have a bunch of kernels that we can mix in with other ingredients. Problem is we don't have a grain mill and for crying out loud the chickens don't want corn flour anyway!

All we want to do is crush the corn.

Are there any alternatives to buying a mill? (And, no, the days when you could take grain to an elevator and have them grind a few bushels are over, my friend.)

And given that these birds have these incredibly muscular built in mills called gizzards complete with grinding stones, is it even necessary to cush it for them?

 

[Clay Mudd]

FWIW, my chickens eat whole kernel corn quite happily.

 

[BairleaFarm]

My do kernel corn as well. My mill makes is into powder and they get mad when i feed them powdered corn. Id like to find a cracker.

 

[Bear Foot Farm]

They will eat it whole.
No point in doing more work than needed

 

[gale65]

We just throw it in, cob and all. My dh is a farmer and there was some acreage that he couldn't combine, so he's going to hand shuck it. I'm hoping to get a bunch of that for the chickens.

Normally he grounds it all for the cattle and hogs.

 

[galanie]

Home grain mills are adjustable so you can make cracked corn too rather than just corn meal. But if they'll eat it whole, no real need.

 

[homesteadapps]

They will eat whole field corn just fine. They will also pick it off the cob.

 

[dakotasnake]

my chickens eat whole corn to just make sure they have grit. ok now if ya want to crack it heres a simple deal i use to do for crushing grains for making beer. get ya a plastic bag- fill with grain and put it on a peice of plywood out in the driveway. put another peice of plywood over that. now just drive over it a few times with a car. its a v-8 grain mill.

 

[jabowery]

Quote:
OK, I"m going to feed the whole corn (shelled) to my chickens from now on. I've tried to get them to go out into the corn field across the road, and they do venture out there themselves a little bit from time to time, but it seems they'll go no further than about 20 yards into it looking for corn even though there is plenty out there. I've got a couple of herding dogs that I might have used for this but I had such a hard time with one of them (a Blue Lacy) "playing" with the chickens and injuring them that I had to train her to avoid any interaction with them at all.

On the beer front, have you actually done that with corn? It seems it would trash the plastic bag!

 

[southerndesert]

Quote:
OK, I"m going to feed the whole corn (shelled) to my chickens from now on. I've tried to get them to go out into the corn field across the road, and they do venture out there themselves a little bit from time to time, but it seems they'll go no further than about 20 yards into it looking for corn even though there is plenty out there. I've got a couple of herding dogs that I might have used for this but I had such a hard time with one of them (a Blue Lacy) "playing" with the chickens and injuring them that I had to train her to avoid any interaction with them at all.

On the beer front, have you actually done that with corn? It seems it would trash the plastic bag!

Use old feed bags, works like a charm.