What Pdirt said.
Add to that......
I used to make quark and yogurt with raw grass-fed whole milk. Quark is a German traditional food that is somewhat like cottage cheese. To make that you actually make your own starter using just raw milk concentrating the clabbering process until you get whole buttermilk which you use as a starter. Yogurt, you can buy a starter or use some yogurt as your starter. Quark is the one fermented milk I made from raw milk without getting any starter because you use the bacteria that are already present in the milk. I think it's really cool to be able to make such a wonderful food without having to buy starter - especially good if you have your own cows.
Quark uses the bacteria in raw milk to ferment it and then you have your cheese making process that produces whey. When I made yogurt I liked it thick so I would get some whey from that.
Btw - you can make cultured butter when you take the cream off the top before making these cultured yummies and then you would get butter and traditional buttermilk rather than whole cultured buttermilk. I know, the wordage is confusing and all this took me half a year to figure out.
As far as seeds go I use every organic seed except beans and lentils and pumpkin seeds in the bins at my Whole Foods store including sproutable brown rice so it's a large variety. I don't use pumpkin or lentils because my chickens always leave those for last so I know they don't like them as much but even so I will once in a while add some just for nutritional variety - but never beans.
I put all the bigger seeds in one glass jar (it's a BIG glass container) and use a big colander with big wholes for rinsing and use a small glass jar and rinse in a tight strainer the tiny seeds.
Let me know if you have any questions. No one tells you that you don't have to either cull, give away or have a yard filled with birds that no longer lay. I went to a lecture on chicken nutrition and the gentleman said that in recent history chicken went from being a delicacy to a cheap food just because of the changes in diet that were developed (most of which is subsidized soy and corn likely). He was very proud of that. oy. These changes in diet are great for cheap eggs and chicken, but not so good for human nutrition and definitely not so good for the chickens. We now get fast fat birds and chickens that will lay ridiculous amount of eggs just for a year or two at the most and they have to be culled so it's now generally accepted that you have to cull birds. This is very different than the way it used to be on farms with heritage breeds and different feeding and feeding leftovers like whey to the chickens. No one ever studied what you need to feed chickens to keep them healthy and keep them laying - especially with a natural bent to it. I might be the first person that every has done that?
It's possible - just really weird, more time consuming and not cheap. Weird, time consuming and not cheap most people won't be interested in but us few odd "ducks".
