Fermenting Feed for Meat Birds

[ChocolateMouse]

I just imagine people giving up on it being like my sister... She "gave up" on trying to get her baby to nap when he wasn't in the car because it was too much effort and for the last two years has wasted countless hours and gallons of gas and miles on her car driving her baby around in the car for nap time day after day after day for two years. All because she wouldn't put up with a week of dealing with a kid crying himself to sleep at naptimes. It's much the same concept. If you're giving them the option, the chicks are going to refuse to eat the "weird food" every time, like my sister's baby refusing to nap in a crib when he could nap in the car. But if you just push it hard and firmly once, just once, for a day or so, they'll come around just fine and eat the FF. And just like my sister's baby wouldn't die from a day with no proper nap... The chicks will be fine without food for a day. If you're hungry enough, you'll eat just about anything and the chicks are the same way.

I like to make my first FF a little dryer if I'm transitioning, tbh. I will mix some dry crumbles in with the FF and make it kind of damp and crumbly. But they never get the option of picking out the dry crumbles off the top or eating from a feeder.

 

[Beekissed]

Speaking of meat chicks - I just got my 35 Cornish cross a week ago. I fed them dry feed the first few days and now tried to switch them over to the fermented feed. They absolutely will not eat it! I even cover the top with dry feed - they eat that and then leave the rest.

I work during the day, and I do need them to gain weight, so I put 1 feeder with dry and 1 with fermented feed. When I got home, they didn't even touch the fermented feed - and they were starving! I used fermented feed last year with my meaties and don't remember such a big protest!

Am I missing something?

Meaty chicks that won't eat? Yep...something is missing. If you fell down in the coop and passed out from it they would consume you before long.

What should be missing is the dry feed, as others have said. Just give them the FF and make sure the top is not getting hardened from the heat lamp or from sitting. It helps if you don't try to "free feed" at first, but feed in meals so the feed doesn't bake into the feeder....even then you might have to remove it from under the heat source and stir it up for them now and again. Pretty soon you won't have to do even that as they will eat it before it could ever harden on top.

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I so agree! Feeding FF is so incredibly easy that I have to do a double take when folks say they just couldn't make it work so they gave up. Been doing it for four years now and haven't lost patience with this easy method yet, not even in the winter months. Just makes too much sense to feed like this to ever give up. I even leave for 5 day vacations and feed the FF while I'm gone by just loading up the big trough and letting them eat it all week free choice.

How hard is adding a bucket of feed to a bucket of water, stirring it up and waiting until it ferments, dipping in a scoop and tossing it into the trough? Don't have to make feed again for a week, sometimes for two weeks depending on the size of the flock. Next time, no waiting for it to ferment.....leave some feed in the bottom of the bucket, add water, add feed, stir it up, feed out of it the next morning. Scoop, dump, scoop, dump until the desired amount is in the trough.

For chicks it's a little more fiddly but not near as fiddly as the mess of dry feed all over in the bedding, sifting down to the bottom and getting lost, getting tracked into the water and vice versa. Just dump some FF in a trough, keep it away from the heat source~or better yet, use a heating pad brooder~come back in a few hours and make sure the top hasn't hardened....after the first couple of days you won't even have to do that. Just feed them twice a day, just enough that they have it cleaned up by the time you come back out to feed again. Simple stuff.

 

[eviemethugh]

I'm sure y'all have seen it all. But wanted to share that I was a naysayer to fermented feed last year (because animals need a certain amount of dry feed...anyway) and my brain is still swirling with all of the back and forth. But I tried FF last year with meaties and decided it wasn't for me. This year...the squirts...oh my meaties had horrible squirts that were...ohh it was just bad. So I brought in some gut health and fermented their food (a grain mash from a local farm) for about 24 hours (they were eating 50lbs a day, it took four 5 gallon buckets full of FF...no way I was storing 3 days worth!) and in two days they were 99% better, it was amazing. We were early in the year, March, and the flies weren't bad, so I just went with it. They free ranged and gobbled the stuff up, and our egg layers found out about it and would come running for feeding time too...
And when we processed the chickens...THERE WAS NO STINK. I mean, it didn't smell like roses...but it wasn't rancid and poop smelling either.
That said, I don't think I can do it for 6 months over the summer for our turkeys....the flies!

 

[ChocolateMouse]

So glad to hear that it worked out for you! I found much the same thing. I had some "rescued" 6+ month old meat chickens that when I got them stank to high heaven, horrible poops, had the worst livers I'd ever seen on any animal, were lazy and horrible birds. One month on FF fixed everything and they had clean, dark, solid livers afterwards. It was a big change between the one I processed on day 1 and the three I processed later.

 

[Amandakae]

Hi again! I have been quite addicted to this forum the last few weeks!! My 50 chx are 3 weeks old now, I can't believe it! They free range all day and get quite far from their house, but they come running when I call them... such good little chickies!
Anyway, I have had their feed fermented from the start, but since the bag ran out I just switched to grower, but it is 20% protein. I read somewhere on here that if you want them to grow slow and get nice and big, that they should be on either 16 or 18%. Do you all have a suggestion as to what I could mix in to lower the percentage? Wheat? Oats?

 

[Beekissed]

Oats or barley ferments well and can give you some bulk and filler to your feed while lowering the protein a bit.

 

[ChocolateMouse]

I always fed fermented 20% and just let them forage for greens all day.

 

[sonofabish1]

Those of you with trough feeders, what do you do about when it rains and the rain water lays on top of the FF? Do drain holes along the feeder take care of it? Do the birds not care and eat through the layer of water on top?

 

[Beekissed]

Those of you with trough feeders, what do you do about when it rains and the rain water lays on top of the FF? Do drain holes along the feeder take care of it? Do the birds not care and eat through the layer of water on top?

I don't feed out of doors, so don't run into that problem but you might want to arrange a hood over your feeder to help with it. I've tried drilling holes in feeders to help drain off excess moisture and find that the feed just eventually clogs those holes.

 

[Molpet]

Those of you with trough feeders, what do you do about when it rains and the rain water lays on top of the FF? Do drain holes along the feeder take care of it? Do the birds not care and eat through the layer of water on top?

I feed what they eat in 20-30 min 2x a day.... I use a gutter on an angle with no ends so the rain drains out... the run is sloped.so I just piont an open end downhill.
but it is gone so quick that the angle is so the rain doesn't sit for next feeding