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How much you ferment will depend on how many birds you're feeding, how much of their diet you want to be fermented feed, and the size of your fermenting tub or bucket. Some of the hard-core fermented feed people use a small plastic trash can to do the fermenting. For my lot, I use a small plastic bucket with a plastic ice cream tub that fits down inside it with about an inch to spare on the sides. In this container, I ferment three or four double-handfuls of layer crumble at a go. This volume of dry fills the container to about 1/3-1/2 full. Then I add a lot of water. The crumble swells up like crazy as it absorbs the water. I stir it up, then put in the apple cider vinegar (again, make sure it's live culture vinegar, with the "mother") and stir again before setting it aside to ferment.
If I were feeding the fermented stuff exclusively, I would definitely go to a bigger container. However, I figure I will stick with the small batches for now. I prefer to ferment only as much as I'm going to feed in a day. I'm still experimenting with how many days a culture can be "stretched" before it starts to get funky. There haven't been spoilage problems yet, but come summer and warm weather I bet there will be more risk.
The fermented feed thread probably has some photos of setup. If not, there are other threads on BYC that discuss it, but the one I can think of off the top of my head is hundreds of pages long, and I can't recall where the photos are in it.
Thank you so much, your post was very helpful. I will most likely just ferment enough to give them a few times a week. I don't have a lot of space
to set up a big fermenting operation. Hopefully my birds will take to it. I will look up some threads on fermenting feed and see if there are any pics to
aid me in my new endeavor. Thanks Again.
