Feeding your flock amidst of feed shortages

[Rangergord]

I don't know how to quote both of your posts.

Your grandmas is right. Pasteurized milk won't clabber because the enzymes and lactic acid bacteria are killed off along with the harmful microbes. In raw milk, the enzymes and lactic acid bacteria kill the harmful microbes and mold. Theoretically, you could add some back but I don't this that is realistic for people who don't have a cow.

Yogurt and buttermilk are also cultured/fermented which is what processes the lactose so I think so. I'm not sure today's version is as beneficial as what people fed during the great depression because today's versions are made by adding a few strains of lactic acid bacteria back into the milk. Not all the beneficial things are added back in.

Yogurt varies a lot in how much lactose it contains, so maybe not all of it is. And, of course, use plain yogurt.

I did not see this comment when I made my initial reply. On the farm where I grew up the milk was raw and unpasteurized and so it clabbered. Clabbered milk is different from pasteurized sour milk. As Saysfaa mentions clabber contains the bacteria from the cow and Pasturized milk has killed many of those off. Two other factors in this are temperature and time. Temperature selects which bacteria survive and reproduce. Yoghurt is a thermophylic culture needing around 105 degrees Fahrenheit to reproduce, once it cools to below this the culture dies and lactose stops being broken down. Yogurts vary also in the time they are cultured. A mild yoghurt can be cultured in two or three hours. A sour yoghurt containing less lactose may take 4 to 5 hours to culture.

Modern buttermilk is not milk left over after making butter. It is ordinary pasturized milk that is inoculated with a mesothermic lactic acid bacteria that only reproduces at room temperature. Above and below room temperature it stops culturing. It usually needs 18 to 24 hours to work before buttermilk is thick. Buttermilk, sour cream, cream cheese and cottage or farmers cheese all use a buttermilk culture.
Different cultures produce different textures and flavours in the milk. Clabbered milk has a better texture and flavour than soured pasturized milk. Still the longer clabbered milk is cultured at room temperature, the more off flavours can be detected. Off meaning bad tending toward rotten. For this reason modern cultures have been selected for flavor that is buttery, cheesy or other desirable characteristics. In the old days it was left to chance. Some locales had better bacteria than others. Cheddars natural culture came from a particular area and only in modern times spread around the world.
Maybe clabbered milk is really good for you but the smell of it never enticed me to want to eat it in more modern times!

 

[BigBlueHen53]

I did not see this comment when I made my initial reply. On the farm where I grew up the milk was raw and unpasteurized and so it clabbered. Clabbered milk is different from pasteurized sour milk. As Saysfaa mentions clabber contains the bacteria from the cow and Pasturized milk has killed many of those off. Two other factors in this are temperature and time. Temperature selects which bacteria survive and reproduce. Yoghurt is a thermophylic culture needing around 105 degrees Fahrenheit to reproduce, once it cools to below this the culture dies and lactose stops being broken down. Yogurts vary also in the time they are cultured. A mild yoghurt can be cultured in two or three hours. A sour yoghurt containing less lactose may take 4 to 5 hours to culture.

Modern buttermilk is not milk left over after making butter. It is ordinary pasturized milk that is inoculated with a mesothermic lactic acid bacteria that only reproduces at room temperature. Above and below room temperature it stops culturing. It usually needs 18 to 24 hours to work before buttermilk is thick. Buttermilk, sour cream, cream cheese and cottage or farmers cheese all use a buttermilk culture.
Different cultures produce different textures and flavours in the milk. Clabbered milk has a better texture and flavour than soured pasturized milk. Still the longer clabbered milk is cultured at room temperature, the more off flavours can be detected. Off meaning bad tending toward rotten. For this reason modern cultures have been selected for flavor that is buttery, cheesy or other desirable characteristics. In the old days it was left to chance. Some locales had better bacteria than others. Cheddars natural culture came from a particular area and only in modern times spread around the world.
Maybe clabbered milk is really good for you but the smell of it never enticed me to want to eat it in more modern times!

Thanks, @Rangergord, that was really interesting! I have a gallon-size Daizy butter churn and have made butter a few times using it. I love the "buttermilk" left behind, which I suppose is really more like skim milk. It's thin and sweet, not thick and salty like cultured buttermilk at all. But my late MIL said that, to her, THAT was "real" buttermilk - not today's cultured kind.

 

[saysfaa]

I did not see this comment when I made my initial reply. On the farm where I grew up the milk was raw and unpasteurized and so it clabbered. Clabbered milk is different from pasteurized sour milk. As Saysfaa mentions clabber contains the bacteria from the cow and Pasturized milk has killed many of those off. Two other factors in this are temperature and time. Temperature selects which bacteria survive and reproduce. Yoghurt is a thermophylic culture needing around 105 degrees Fahrenheit to reproduce, once it cools to below this the culture dies and lactose stops being broken down. Yogurts vary also in the time they are cultured. A mild yoghurt can be cultured in two or three hours. A sour yoghurt containing less lactose may take 4 to 5 hours to culture.

Modern buttermilk is not milk left over after making butter. It is ordinary pasturized milk that is inoculated with a mesothermic lactic acid bacteria that only reproduces at room temperature. Above and below room temperature it stops culturing. It usually needs 18 to 24 hours to work before buttermilk is thick. Buttermilk, sour cream, cream cheese and cottage or farmers cheese all use a buttermilk culture.
Different cultures produce different textures and flavours in the milk. Clabbered milk has a better texture and flavour than soured pasturized milk. Still the longer clabbered milk is cultured at room temperature, the more off flavours can be detected. Off meaning bad tending toward rotten. For this reason modern cultures have been selected for flavor that is buttery, cheesy or other desirable characteristics. In the old days it was left to chance. Some locales had better bacteria than others. Cheddars natural culture came from a particular area and only in modern times spread around the world.
Maybe clabbered milk is really good for you but the smell of it never enticed me to want to eat it in more modern times!

I wasn't enticed to try it either; we fed clabbered colostrum to calves sometimes when we had several cows freshen at once so didn't have a way to refrigerate that much milk. Although, at that point, I'd never tried yogurt either or even heard of kefir. On the other hand, I don't find colostrum enticing anyway except as precious for the calves.

 

[saysfaa]

I talked about this thread with my brother who did most of the ration balancing for dairies for a few decades. He suggested haylage. For one thing, most of us have little mini hayfirlds surrounding our houses. I didn't think it could be done on a small scale because you lose a minimum of several inches around the outside and have to feed it fast enough to keep from losing more inches at the cut edge. Evidently, it can be done if you do it in barrels, maybe with a plastic liner. He said the first attempts at haylage that he knew of put some corn or molasses in with the grass to help the fermentation along, that might be a good idea for my attempts (if I try it). Our cool weather now would help too - the moisture level will be more forgiving than if it were the middle of summer.

He also suggested getting a pencil, calculator, and feed charts out to balance whatever you can get. He just saw an article in Poultry World on feeding tomato peels and rose hips.

 

[Hensintexas]

I had chick starter issues this year, too, but I think it had more to do with the sudden chick-craze that swept through here. After August the starter became easy to find and I have no issues buying right now. Feed prices are supposed to keep going up this winter.

Yep. Like everything else that deeps going up!

 

[Hensintexas]

Corn per bushel here is $5.57 which is ridiculous. I was paying $11.00+ per 50lb. bag.
Now it's almost $16.00. Been slowly stocking up. I suggest anyone reading this to do the same. This is not going to improve any time soon, if in fact -- ever.
Time to be a "farmer" again.
"Toil in the soil" folks, the good days are coming to a close."SOCIALISM" is NO GOOD.

I agree, Minister! In building our henhouse, we recycled, repurposed, pieced together as much as we could because of prices. Lumber is ridiculous, hardware, too. The only “new things” are the nest box we bought from Premier1, and screws to hold everything together. I’m not sure recovery is possible for our economy. We’ve gone into survival mode on this small farm.

 

[Ponypoor]

My family is from Newfoundland, and I can tell u that there were no fancy feed mills to buy feed for livestock.

Sheep, goats, ponies/horses and cows were feed hay only in the winter, they all foraged for whatever they could find to survive the rest of the year. There was very little in the way of grain other than in winter.

Chickens were fed table scraps, leftover scraps of meat, fish guts and heads, any 'vegibles' (hahaha as we call them) left over and old bread. There was no fancy chick starter, grower, layer, etc.

And guess what? They laid eggs and provided meat just fine. My menagerie here love when I throw them left over 'vegibles' and scraps of fatty salt beef left over, they go mad for the boiled carrots, turnip and potatoes, not such a fan of the boiled cabbage but they pick at it throughout the day.

Chickens r opportunistic feeders they would eat the paint off my truck if they could I am sure!

 

[Thetinyfarm]

My family is from Newfoundland, and I can tell u that there were no fancy feed mills to buy feed for livestock.

Sheep, goats, ponies/horses and cows were feed hay only in the winter, they all foraged for whatever they could find to survive the rest of the year. There was very little in the way of grain other than in winter.

Chickens were fed table scraps, leftover scraps of meat, fish guts and heads, any 'vegibles' (hahaha as we call them) left over and old bread. There was no fancy chick starter, grower, layer, etc.

And guess what? They laid eggs and provided meat just fine. My menagerie here love when I throw them left over 'vegibles' and scraps of fatty salt beef left over, they go mad for the boiled carrots, turnip and potatoes, not such a fan of the boiled cabbage but they pick at it throughout the day.

Chickens r opportunistic feeders they would eat the paint off my truck if they could I am sure!

I agree completely. I grew up in the70’s & 80’s in London England and we only ever fed our dogs and chooks scraps. Not one of our dogs died from cancer or the like. No skin allergies. They lived long lives. As did the chickens and the cats and the rabbits. All this fancy pants stuff now is to gouge us in the pocket and feel guilty about what the Jones’s might be feeding their critters.

 

[Ponypoor]

I agree completely. I grew up in the70’s & 80’s in London England and we only ever fed our dogs and chooks scraps. Not one of our dogs died from cancer or the like. No skin allergies. They lived long lives. As did the chickens and the cats and the rabbits. All this fancy pants stuff now is to gouge us in the pocket and feel guilty about what the Jones’s might be feeding their critters.

Have to say though I do appreciate the convenience of the horses feed

...and the chickies feed also. Very easy and convenient to throw down some ration for them. We don't by always have enough leftovers to feed them. But it's not some fancy feed, just a feed the local mill makes for the chookies! Twice a day I soak it in hot water to make a mash which they gobble up. They don't need anything expensive or fancy. Chickens are easy to please

 

[NatJ]

Chickens were fed table scraps, leftover scraps of meat, fish guts and heads, any 'vegibles' (hahaha as we call them) left over and old bread. There was no fancy chick starter, grower, layer, etc.

And guess what? They laid eggs and provided meat just fine.

I grew up in the70’s & 80’s in London England and we only ever fed our dogs and chooks scraps. Not one of our dogs died from cancer or the like. No skin allergies. They lived long lives. As did the chickens and the cats and the rabbits. All this fancy pants stuff now is to gouge us in the pocket and feel guilty about what the Jones’s might be feeding their critters.

Feeding the animals without purchased feed is much easier if you learn it from someone who already knows how. Of course, it would be important to keep the number of chickens or dogs low enough that there are enough scraps for them.

For people who have no idea how to feed chickens, but who will be very sad if anything happens to them, it is much easier to recommend purchased food for 90% of the diet.

Yes, I am one of those people who has no hesitation about feeding scraps to chickens or dogs, but who recommends predominantly purchased food for people new to chickens.

I do not keep a list of what to feed and what not to feed, but when I look at the scraps it is obvious to me which things should go to which animals, and in what quantities. But knowing it when I see it is very different than trying to explain it to someone else.