Why is fermented feed getting moldy?

[dirtychick]

You maybe right-but sense chickens have no stomach-and yeast makes gas and with sugar- alcohol which-- may make happy chickens -- I don't think I want my chickens on ferm. feed people have good and bad bacteria they say to help digest food must have both one works with other keeps them in check.-----looks like both are good sense have to have both. chickens have gizzards and crawls as main parts of digestion --I guess I don't understand what is / could be the benefit ? other than happy drunk chickens passing gas ? please reply or explane I'm missing something never was in to fads though. checking for worms is pretty quick and easy to do for someone knowing what they are doing -vet might have been right -did you worm them? just trying to help best wishes to you and your birds----happy birds with gas ha. laugh when you can.

 

[dirtychick]

It MIGHT MAYBE possible to use bleach to kill the mold .? thats your match if you want to play with it. /// might want to stay away from all that alcohol and gas though.

 

[chicknmania]

Actually today it looks great. Seems to be progressing just fine. Thanks.

 

[dirtychick]

Took the time to look do see alot on ferm.feed- ACV may keep it safe? good luck.

 

[chicknmania]

Took the time to look do see alot on ferm.feed- ACV may keep it safe? good luck.

yreah, I put a splash of organic ACV in it this time. Didn't the other two times. This time is the best yet...it's already got a head of foam on it like a keg of beer, hehe.

 

[CrazyTalk]

You maybe right-but sense chickens have no stomach-and yeast makes gas and with sugar- alcohol which-- may make happy chickens -- I don't think I want my chickens on ferm. feed people have good and bad bacteria they say to help digest food must have both one works with other keeps them in check.-----looks like both are good sense have to have both. chickens have gizzards and crawls as main parts of digestion --I guess I don't understand what is / could be the benefit ? other than happy drunk chickens passing gas ? please reply or explane I'm missing something never was in to fads though. checking for worms is pretty quick and easy to do for someone knowing what they are doing -vet might have been right -did you worm them? just trying to help best wishes to you and your birds----happy birds with gas ha. laugh when you can.

Couple of things here:

1. Chickens have stomachs. The gizzard IS a stomach - it's just a specialized on that's extremely muscular and also holds small stones for grinding things.

2. Most of what is going on in fermented feed isn't yeast converting sugar to alchohol - its things like pediococcus and lactobacillus converting sugar into lactic acid. What alchohol is produced by yeast is converted to acetic acid by things like brettanomyces, and acetobacter.

3. As to what benefit? Some of the bacterium are benficial to the stomach. Others are much more digestible than the things they eat - IE, it's a lot easier for a chicken to digest a bacterium that just at some cellulose than it is to digest the cellulose itself. Others produce vitamins/protiens/etc that aren't found in the food itself, some of which the chickens either would have to synthesize, or find in forage.

 

[chicknmania]

Thank you. And yes we dewormed them...more than once.

 

[MamaKitty913]

There is a whole Forum here on BYC about fermented feed some very knowledgeable people, and some not so much. One name to look for is Kuntrygirl she researches and shares what she's learned both online and on her own experiences using fermented feed. I tried it and my chickens loved it but keets and goose do not so I will do some later in the year for my meat birds. It saves about 1/3 of your feed costs (IMO). Isn't hard: water+feed screen it in a container, I added a bit of brewers yeast, 2 glugs of Braggs (unpaturised apple cider vinegar aka the mother). Wait 48 hours stir feed the chickens after the third day. You'll see bubbles when it's fermenting. To save money on your unpasturised apple cider vinegar some suggested adding the unpasturised to the regular dollar store apple cider vinegar and letting that sit. That's a short summary of what I've read here, like I said check out the fermented feed forum.

 

[chicknmania]

Yeah, mine came out fine this time, I used the organic ACV with the mother in it. they loved it! It (apparently the smell of it, or maybe the chickens excreted yeast) also seemed to attract the skunks, they were hanging around outside the barn after the dark sniffing the grass.

but ok, I'm only going to give them the FF once in a while, anyway. there's tons of info on it online as well.

 

[pdirt]

Fermenting like we are doing with chicken feed is known as "wild fermentation". It's a battle of various yeasts, molds and bacteria, some beneficial and some not. If the "good" guys win, you have healthy fermented feed, one that is acidic. Sometimes it goes bad. Some possible reasons it can go bad:

- Poor water...contaminated or chlorinated
- More "bad" microorganisms than the "good" guys can beat
- Inferior fermenting media, aka cheap chicken feed

For the cheap chicken feed, I don't mean to imply that inexpensive feed is always going to produce poor results. But when the feed is not "as nature intended" aka full of pesticides and other chemicals from industrial farming practices or has been poorly stored or processed before it became feed, then you have better chance of having a wild fermentation going wrong. If you got mold on your feed while fermenting it, it could very well be that the feed was moldy to begin with. It may have been dry, but had gotten moldy at one point in the process from farm to silo to bagged feed and was full of dry mold spores, just waiting for some moisture to come alive again. I believe I have heard that corn is particularly prone to mold.

One thing I do, at a minor added expense/effort, is to add a bit of blackstrap molasses to the water before mixing it with the feed. The molasses provides an instant easy source of food for the yeasts. The yeasts in turn then become food for the lactic acid bacteria. Plus the resulting yeasts/bacteria are even stronger because they are getting highly digestible minerals from the molasses. It's not essential to fermenting feed, but I like doing it knowing it is invariably providing extra minerals to the chickens, besides making for a moderately better ferment, IMO.

If you get white fuzzy stuff (very thin fuzz, not thick fuzz 1/4"-1/2"), then most likely it is yeast. Like someone else said, the yeast doesn't cause an alcohol problem, because other microorganisms will keep it in check. I don't brew any alcohol, but I'm sure alcohol producers go to great lengths to promote alcohol production over lactic acid production. I have had some of my lactic acid human brews go alcoholic on me and I never did figure out why.

If you do get mold, you have two options: 1) stir it in and wait a few days to allow the beneficial microbes to consume/neutralize the mold, or 2) scrape the mold off the top and any feed that doesn't look or smell right. I've done this with sauerkraut many times, in which the top moldy layer was nasty and underneath that was delicious, healthy kraut. In fact, before we as a society became such germo-phobes, this is how people use to make all sorts of fermented foods...they got a moldy top layer and it was just scraped away and discarded.

The opposite of wild fermentation is a lab project. Commercial yogurt is made this way. The (pasteurized) milk is inoculated with a pure strain of bacteria known to produce yogurt. Then the yogurt is sometimes pasteurized again to kill all bacteria and yeasts. The sour flavor and thick texture is still there. Then in order to be able to list the yogurt as having "live cultures", more pure strain (lab derived) lactic acid bacteria is stirred back in. People used to make their own yogurt (and many still do), using raw milk and backslopping with a bit of previously made yogurt as the starter culture. This is known as a wild fermentation or heirloom. The heirloom yogurt starters (just a bit of yogurt from a wild fermentation) have a very wide range of different yeasts and bacteria, which tends to allow for more robust results under a wider range of conditions and milk quality that can make very good yogurt. Look up "Heirloom Bulgarian yogurt" for an example.

Probably more info that you wanted, but I am passionate about fermented foods!

My last bit is that some folks feed their chickens exclusively fermented feed. I don't. *I* don't eat a diet of 100% fermented feed and why should my chickens? And they would never eat such a diet in the wild, but would likely come across all sorts of rotting, fermenting, molding foods along the way. My chickens love to sift through our various compost piles, which are full of mold, among other things and they are as healthy as can be.