milk for chickens

[Promiselandfarm]

In that old book link someone posted the lady who wrote it suggested giving it to chickens....old milk. I read the whole book it was very interesting written in 1914 I think or maybe it was 1814 anyway it was very interesting.

 

[Mac in Wisco]

Quote:
Farmers have been feeding leftover milk to poultry for hundreds of years, they let it clabber in a bucket and mixed it in with the feed.

The problem with milk and chickens is the lactose sugars that they can't digest. If they eat too much it gives them diarrhea. Clabbering the milk converts the lactose into lactic acid which curdles the milk and the natural bacteria make a product similar to cheese whey or yogurt. This worked great on a farm with milk wastes from cream and butter making. Clabbering only works with unpasteurized milk though. Try it with pasteurized milk and you'll end up with a stinking, sour mess. To do it with pasteurized milk they say you can innoculate it with buttermilk...

Unless you have a farm with an excess of cow or goat milk, milk makes pretty expensive poultry feed.

 

[Cara]

I always give our old milk to mine. It's so wasteful to just throw it away, they love it, and they have never seemed remotely sick afterwards.

 

[Anny]

Quote:
Being a mammal, I'm pretty much ok with it...

Actually Humans are the only Mammal that drink ANOTHER mammals milk...which is a little odd and gross if you think about it. I mean who was the first person to look at a cows utters and say, Man I really want to drink that! hahaha

Wouldn't it be more natural to just drink human breast milk all the time. (if you think drinking some one else breast milk is gross, then think about what cows milk is haha )


Sorry I'll stop being crazy vegan person now..I'll be good

 

[Mac in Wisco]

I gave mine milk just once. We had some leftover quiche or some sort of egg dish in the fridge that was was kind of rubbery after a day or so. I threw it in a blender with some milk and gave it to the birds. They all scarfed it down and had diahrrea for a day.

The point I was trying to make is that when you read in old texts about farmers feeding "old" milk to their birds, it is not the same as the old milk in your fridge. Raw milk will clabber after a day at room temperature producing a cultured milk that is edible by both people and chickens. The lactose is consumed by the bacteria in the clabbering process making it edible by people who are lactose intolerant and edible by the chickens. It is not the same as the spoiled milk in your refrigerator.

 

[patandchickens]

The whole 'they didn't evolve to drink milk' thing sounds perfectly reasonable, HOWEVER, farm wives have been feeding their flocks surplus milk and milk byproducts since forever, and I think if it had obvious major bad effects we'd know about it

Personally I would be much more reluctant to feed them old milk that had started to 'turn', since you have no good way of knowing exactly *which* bacteria may be culturing themselves up in there. I am sure you could get away with it a lot of the time, it's just the few other times that I'd worry about.


Pat, who hardly ever has any leftover milk *to* feed the chickens (the few times I have, I've soaked cornmeal or stale bred in it and fed the resulting mush) and I'm certainly not going to buy any specially for them at the price of milk these days

 

[Akane]

Even not being a vegan I find cow milk disgusting. You know majority of our milk in the US wouldn't even pass as drinkable in the UK... It's pretty nasty stuff when you really break it down. It's also not that healthy despite all the claims of the dairy industry. I use goat or soy milk. I've been debating getting myself some goats so I can avoid the commercially produced milk completely. About like comparing store bought eggs to fresh eggs from someone's true free range flock.

 

[Mac in Wisco]

Quote:
Being a mammal, I'm pretty much ok with it...

Actually Humans are the only Mammal that drink ANOTHER mammals milk...which is a little odd and gross if you think about it. I mean who was the first person to look at a cows utters and say, Man I really want to drink that! hahaha

Yes, I know, I've heard all the arguments. I was being facetious. Yet, after thoroughly pondering your comments... I'm still ok with it.

 

[hazelton farms]

Mac is right. You can clabber the milk and feed it to them. You can try lemon juice in your milk as well to hurry it along.

RAW milk is best when giving them something. It's wonderful for the birds. Mine get goats milk all the time, clabbered form of course, at least 5 gallons a week, free choice.

There's nothing wrong with drinking milk, but personally, I prefer the RAW milk, as it hasn't been tainted by pasturizing it, homoginizing it and using hormones to receive MORE of it from the animal.

Stacy

 

[Mac in Wisco]

Quote:
Once again, I was not talking about spoiled dairy products. Good milk or milk by-products will culture into a form edible by poultry. Clabbered milk is not spoiled milk. By your reasoning we should stay away from yogurt, buttermilk, sour cream, and cheese, because "you never know what's culturing up in there".