LENTILS>>>YAY OR NAY??

[tonkatuff]

I made some lentil soup tonight and soaked more lentils than I had room for in my stockpot! Can I feed them to my chickens in the morning?

 

[MissPrissy]

Cooked, yes. Not cooked, no.

 

[NYREDS]

Quote:
Why not? We routinely feed chickens uncooked grains so why would legumes need to be cooked?

 

[MissPrissy]

There is a toxicity in some beans that can harm chickens.

 

[patandchickens]

Quote:
Why not? We routinely feed chickens uncooked grains so why would legumes need to be cooked?

Because raw beans and raw lentils contain various compounds which have some degree of acute toxicity and which also reduce the body's ability to absorb certain amino acids from food.

Red kidney beans, fava beans and lima beans are generally the most problematic (just 5 raw red kidney beans is said to be enough to cause major problems in human children, don't recall what age), but all legumes have these type things to some degree or another. My impression (which may be rather unreliable here and don't quote me) is that dried peas are on the whole less likely to cause problems than lentils, and lentils less than beans.

Most need to be cooked to deactivate these compounds before they can be safely fed. In the case of some that didn't contain all that much in the first place, soaking and sprouting for a couple days can do an equivalent job of it.

If you know exactly what's in the particular legume you're feeding, and you know it contains nothing gonna be acutely toxic, you might I suppose decide that an occasional snack of something with trypsin inhibitors is not going to cause overall malnutrition. But, a much safer and easier rule of thumb is "cook dried legumes before feeding".

(Notice that soybeans used in animal feed have to be heat- or otherwise treated, for exactly this reason)


Pat

 

[Anny]

very interesting. Good to know.

 

[patandchickens]

yeah, I thought so too when I first learned of this, last spring or so, by reading a BYC thread about it several minutes *after* feeding my laying chickens a bunch of raw lima beans

They were ok, but, it did make it stick in my memory a bit more

Pat

 

[NYREDS]

Thanks-you learn something new every day.

 

[cmom]

I give mine almost everything. Here is the link to BYC Chicken Treat Chart.
https://www.backyardchickens.com/web/viewblog.php?id=2593-Treats_Chart

 

[HennysMom]

so its okay to feed COOKED Lima beans then?