Hi thunderbolt&marjorie! I am somewhat new to FF too, but what has worked well for me so far is to just soak enough feed so that I have some left in the bucket after feeding and then mix the new feed into the old (with more water of course). I have found that if I get the water content just right, it will be poofed up and a nice moist mash consistency, with no need for draining. I add ACV to the first batch, and then will add a bit more occasionally to keep it fermenting well. My feed btw, is a homemade mix with ground and cracked grains, & powdered supplements including fishmeal & Poultry Nutribalancer. For new chicks we just grind the grains a little smaller. For our laying hens, I have two buckets, one for their morning feeding, and one for the evening feeding, so each bucket can have about 24 hrs to soak in between feedings. We have a lot of extra old goat milk and kefir right now, so I will occasionally mix some into the fermented feed before I give it to them - they seem to like it when it is even more sloppy and wet!
Hope this helps! Congrats on your new babies!
This is what I do also....just keep a running mix going. Especially with using the finer grained stuff that turns into peanut butter...all that thick mash is filled with the yeast spores that is in the original fermented water. After using the same water~just adding to it~for over 10 wks, there was no spoilage in the bottom bucket. When I emptied it all at the end, there was a fine, silty flour goo at the very bottom of the bottom bucket that looked like pancake batter and smelled great~like sourdough bread mix~when I picked it up in my hand and sniffed it.
I use ACV in my water buckets, so when I need to freshen water and refill feed and water in the FF bucket, I'd just use the old water in my water bucket into the FF bucket first. This makes it so that I don't waste any water~particularly my ACV water~and the mix got a fresh shot of ACV each time. Then, if needed, I'd top off the FF bucket with fresh water.
It's a great system~ if you mix more than you need for one feeding, which I seem to see people with just a few chickens doing. Fermented is fermented and it can only get more fermented if it stays around, which is good...doesn't mean it's going "bad". I encourage those who are just mixing enough for one day to go with bigger containers and just add to your old mix...this makes it less labor intensive and worrisome.
If you are constantly adding new food to the old mix, your FF shouldn't go bad in any way. The spores have new sugars on which to feed, which keeps them active and growing, each time you add new grains/feed to the bucket. This is important in FF grains...sourdough bread mix will go bad if you don't occasionally add a cup of flour and stir it in. When the cultures have nothing on which to feed, they die and the bad bacteria can then take over the mix...this results in that rotten smell that some are reporting.
