FERMENTED FEEDS...anyone using them?

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I have been feeding ff for about a week now and I have 2 concerns
1 I am keeping my ff containers in the unheated garage and its not freezing but I dont think its fermenting very well and. Im curious if I have to move it back inside or if im doing something wrong
2 my 7 month old birds want nothing to do with the feed. I have tried mixing it with dry, putting scratch on top, withholding their dry feed, they wont eat it and then it freezes and gets bedding and poop in it and then they def won't eat it. So instead of making my bag of feed go further im wasting food.
My chicks absolutely love their ff so idk if its something im doing since the chicks eat theirs....
 
Mine would rather eat their dry pellets so the FF freezes also...and my FF smells so good I want to try it. Once it warms up and they free range I'm going to take the dry food away and just offer a bowl of FF.
 
chickengirl1193 said:
I have been feeding ff for about a week now and I have 2 concerns
1 I am keeping my ff containers in the unheated garage and its not freezing but I dont think its fermenting very well and. Im curious if I have to move it back inside or if im doing something wrong
2 my 7 month old birds want nothing to do with the feed. I have tried mixing it with dry, putting scratch on top, withholding their dry feed, they wont eat it and then it freezes and gets bedding and poop in it and then they def won't eat it. So instead of making my bag of feed go further im wasting food.
My chicks absolutely love their ff so idk if its something im doing since the chicks eat theirs....
Click to expand...

Move it inside so that it ferments well. Could be you are merely feeding wet feed and that's why your older birds are avoiding it. That way you are bringing them room temp feed that is well fermented and they will eat it. Offer nothing else, just the FF and they will eat it. Most chickens won't starve themselves in the face of available food and your chickens are no different. Take away choices and only offer the nutritious food and they will adapt.
 
Okay ill try that. I have a feed trough on the wall of my coop to feed dry feed and I was thinking of.just putting the ff in that trough and cleaning it once a month. Or should it be cleaned more often
 
Drill some holes in the bottom so the liquid seeps out. I never clean my trough...it gets picked clean by the chickens. When they flirt bedding up into it, I just scrape it out with my hand and keep on feeding. The old is covered by new and it's all eaten together.
 
Most of my birds will race to get any "treats" we put down, so they ate the first serving of ff before they knew what it was. Another pen with birds I bought at a few months old were not so treat motivated, so I had to ease them into ff. First, I got them used to treats by feeding them some scrambled egg. Then I started mixing some dry supplements into their treats (a livestock yeast supplement and nutri-balancer). When they were used to that, I began putting a little ff into their scrambled eggs. That's the stage I'm at with them now ... increasing the proportion of ff in their treat.
 
Mine will eat it...but they are nibblers...when free ranging, they got used to coming by after searching for forage and eating some chicken food and then right back to foraging. With snow on the ground they have transferred that behavior to coming out of the coop to get water and feed before going back in the coop to scratch around....FF is frozen when they come back out.
 
kpgoldstar said:
Agreed, I feed, refresh and ferment in the same way. I didn't know it had a name! Hey, I'm a backslopper!
Click to expand...
lol! I'm a backslopper too and didn't know it.
I've recently put my 10 chickens on strictly fermented feed. I have a 5 qt ice cream bucket that's been transferred over from a 2qt mason jar that I started with and got a real good "mother" going in a few months back.

I feed half the bucket once a day in the morning. I then refill with about 3 scoops of crumbles, add water till it looks right and stir. By the next day it's fermented beautifully again.
 
Okay thanks guys. I guess ill keep trying. I was getting discouraged this morning because everyone talks so highly of ff and I couldn't even get my birds to eat it... and I fermented layer feed so I couldbt even give it to my chicks lol. I wont give up yet
 

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