Chickens Every Day
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Chickens Every Day
Fermenting Chicken Feed: The Ultimate Natural Health Boost
Are we ready, pawpaw? Hello friends and welcome to Chicken. Every Day, a podcast for you, the backyard chicken enthusiast, and mine. Your host is my Pawpaw, gary, Gary Valerie of Senla Backyard Chickens. Here we have fun while sharing ideas and learning how to care for our foul-feathered friends. Check out our videos at Senla that's C-E-N-L-A Backyard Chickens on YouTube, tiktok and Facebook. So, without further ado, let's start today's show. How was that?
Speaker 2:Well, hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Chickens. Every Day and right now we are in full spring and there are so many people out there that have got some young chicks or young chickens that they're getting ready to work with and looking forward to those first eggs, and I know it's a great time. So what we're going to talk about some here today is one of the best things that you can feed your birds and not cost you an extra cent whenever you do it, and what I'm talking about is fermenting and fermenting your chicken feed. And fermentation itself has been around for thousands of years as a way to preserve food, enhance its flavors. It's got some great intestinal health benefits.
Speaker 2:Many, many, many, many years ago, people would ferment their food and they noticed that when they ate this food they felt better. And so many times when they ate unfermented food they didn't feel as good. And back then, preserving food was not something that was well known. They didn't know the science behind fermentation and what this does. They just know that it worked and they knew that they felt better when they did ferment. And there's a lot of cheeses and breads, wine, sauerkraut, kimchi and more use fermentation. You can ferment practically any food you can imagine. You can ferment vegetables for you and your family, whatever you want to do. Now, before I go much further with this, I want to thank and give absolute full credit to the Natural Chicken Keeping website and blog for their great articles, including ones on fermentation, that just some of the best information you can find out there and much of what I'm saying today comes directly from those guys and I want to make sure that that, uh, that's understood, that you give credit where credit is due. Here on chickens everyday podcast, we're always learning and we're always looking and searching and doing doing more and research, and this is just one of the places that I found and I'm sure if you look them up, you will agree that they have just tons of really great information. But basically, fermentation uses naturally occurring bacteria that's already present on our food and in the air to partially break down the food, improving its enzyme content and increasing vitamin levels. I know that's a lot of science-y stuff in there, but it also boosts the usable protein level in the food, meaning that more of the protein in the feed actually finds its way into the bird's system and not excreted out the back, and we'll talk about that more in a little bit. Some of the other benefits overall generally healthier birds, lower food consumption, which results in fewer trips to the feed store, and we all like that more solid droppings from your chickens. So there's a lot, a lot of good stuff that can happen whenever you ferment your food.
Speaker 2:And if you ask yourself well, what is fermentation? It's a metabolic process where little bitty microorganisms like bacteria and yeast break down sugars and other organic molecules, and this is all done in the absence of free oxygen. There's no free oxygen, meaning this is not done in air, with an air environment. This is done underwater and it produces various byproducts, like alcohol is a byproduct acids or byproducts and different gases. The process is essential for food preservation and it creates these really unique flavors and textures.
Speaker 2:If you've ever eaten kimchi or any other fermented food food, you know what I'm talking about. It leads to the growth of probiotics, which are beneficial bacteria, and these are known to be linked to various health benefits, both in in you and I and in your in your chickens and your birds. Uh now, different types of fermentation bacteria that we're talking about right now yeast bacterias convert sugars into alcohol and while your chickens might enjoy this, it's not exactly what we're really trying to accomplish. You don't want to ferment using a yeast or allow yeast to become dominant in your fermentation, because that creates alcohol, and alcohol is not what we want. We want acids and lactobacillus streptococcus and how do you say this? I'm looking at the word right now leuconostoc. These are all dominant bacteria that are found in fermented foods, like yogurt and some cheeses, and sauerkraut and kimchi and what have you. These are the bacteria that we want to proliferate, as they convert the sugars and the carbs into lactic acid, not alcohol, and this is what helps preserve the food and has a tangier flavor, and this is what enhances the digestion, improves the nutrient absorption and boosts your chicken's immune system. There's other forms of bacteria and molds, some of which are used in certain foods and cheeses, but some bacteria and molds, as you guys are aware of, are harmful to both humans and animals, such as salmonella, e coli, listeria and others.
Speaker 2:So when we ferment our chicken feed, we want to create conditions for an environment that promotes the growth of lactic acid-producing bacteria. This is what we want. We do this by creating an anaerobic environment. We do this by creating an anaerobic environment. In other words, the feed is all submerged under the water instead of an aerobic environment where they have the free oxygen in the air that they can work with. This is where yeast really likes to take hold. But simply put, we simply put we fully immerse our feed in water so that no free oxygen exists and the likelihood of dangerous bacteria is minimized. Now, once the lactic acid producing bacteria are the dominant species in your fermentation, then they should overwhelm the unwanted bad bacteria. Furthermore, we keep the surface of the water free of debris, which can give non desirable bacterias an anchor point to attach. In other words, when you fermenting something, we keep a lid on it, but we don't want the lid to be tight at all. We won't, because the bacteria create gases. We want these gases to vent out, but we also don't want flies to get in or dust or dirt or anything that will float on the surface, because this is an anchor point for other bacteria that we don't want and start growing. So we want to keep the top of it clean.
Speaker 2:So an important question that you always want to ask yourself is why is it important to ferment your feed? And you need to start by understanding an important fact about those wonderful seeds and grains and legumes and other ingredients that go into making our chicken feed. They have a naturally occurring enzyme inhibitors as a protective measure which helps them survive conditions until those conditions are good for germination and sprouting into plants. We call these inhibitors anti-nutrients. You can look them up on the Internet all day long. They tell you all about them and while they're great for the seed survival, they're not so great for people and animals who can sue them. Unfortunately, the packaging process of commercial feeds can do little to nothing about controlling the anti-nutrients. This is one of the reasons they need to put additives into the feed to make sure that your birds get all the good nutrition that they can. Fermentation or even just soaking feed overnight reduces their anti-nutrient properties and makes it much more available for digestion and use in the body. Anti-nutrients what they do? They block absorption For some animals. It hinders the taste. It tastes bad and it helps the seed to germinate and grow and it's a defensive measure for them.
Speaker 2:There's a book out there called Real Food Fermentation written by Alex Lewin L-E-W-I-N Find it. I think I looked it up and found it on Amazon, and the author states beyond simply maintaining the vitamin content of raw foods, the process of fermentation can actually create new vitamins, specifically B vitamins and vitamin K, as well as some types of enzymes, unquote. For the truly deep dive into fermentation, you can purchase that book, and I think it's less than 20 bucks and, like I said, I found it on amazon amazon and you'll find it fascinating. And, by the way, fermented feed is great for chickens and chicks of any age. You can start your two-day-old chicks on fermented feed.
Speaker 2:I don't ferment my chick feed. Well, I'm sorry. I do ferment my chick feed, but I don't buy medicated chick feed and and I wouldn't suggest doing that because I have no idea how fermentation affects the medicine in medicated chick feed, but I don't feed that to my young chicks anyway. So does fermenting feed really save money by reducing the amount that chickens eat? Well, the short answer is yes, and if you've listened to some of my other podcasts, you've heard me talk about Mr Jeff Maddox more than once. Jeff is, I think, the president maybe the owner, but at least the president of the Fortrell Company, and these guys provide natural and innovative ways to achieve the best in animal nutrition. I've listened to hours, literally hours of his videos and podcasts and he is amazing with his wealth of knowledge about chicken behavior and their nutritional needs. One of the things I learned from him is that chickens will eat to what he calls their nutritional requirements and then quit. Then they'll go chill out somewhere.
Speaker 2:So if you feed them the highest quality and nutritionally packed feed, then less of that feed by volume is required for the chicken to meet its daily needs. It just kind of makes sense. The opposite holds true for lesser or bargain brand feeds, and I understand many of us buy those bargain brand feeds. But you can look at some of my videos and podcasts that I've talked about and it's not that it's wrong to give them that. Please don't think I'm saying that because finances do come into this. But you do get less production as far as your eggs, less growth out of them, things like that, just the way it is.
Speaker 2:But fermented feed releases and makes available for digestion more of the nutrition in your chicken's feed, resulting in the chicken needing and consuming less. Again, fermenting knocks down, breaks apart those anti-nutrients, that normal dry feed, and there's nothing we can do about that but the dry feed. They're going to get nutrition, but these anti-nutrients are going to block a lot of that nutrition from actually entering their system and the fermentation process releases that and it just makes it more available for their bodies to naturally absorb this good nutrition. They have studies out there that show that fermented feed was observed to improve feed conversion as compared to dry feed, increase egg weight, increase shell weight and stiffness, increase intestinal health by the acidification of the upper digestive tract how you like that for some big words. And this forms a natural barrier towards infection with acid-sensitive pathogens, in other words E coli, salmonella, campylobacter, stuff like that Just gives you a good barrier against those.
Speaker 2:And even simply wetting the food increases intake and growth rate. Wetting the food helps break down these anti-nutrients. I know a lot of times as a treat for my chickens I will take the regular chicken feed and if I don't feel like fermenting this day or something like that, I just take their chicken feed, put a little milk in it, put some yogurt in it and make kind of a really wet paste. The yogurt is great for me. This is just plain Greek yogurt, no additives, no flavors, no, nothing like that, just regular, everyday plain Greek yogurt. Mix that all up in there and they go absolutely berserk eating this stuff. It's the cheapest treat you can give them because of the feed you're already feeding them already. The milk that you have in your refrigerator and a 10-ounce jar of yogurt can last you literally a few months if you want it to.
Speaker 2:When it comes to chicks, early access to moist diets for day-old chicks. This is also that some of the stuff I've looked up online stimulates the gastrointestinal or the GI development, prevents dehydration during transport and hatchery. Rapid GI tract development after the hatch is essential for optimization of the digestive function and underpins efficient growth and development as well as full expression of the genetic potential for production traits. Again, that's off the website that I was talking about earlier. Again, the great benefits of fermenting your feed. The moistening capacity of the crop of a chick during the first few weeks of his life is also believed to be the limiting factor for the optimal functioning of the gut when standard solid diets are fed. In other words, if you have a moist feed inside that crop, it's a lot more efficient for that chick to be able to digest this, grind it in turn it into something useful, than it is for that dry feed. So what does all that mean? Of course, it just naturally means more bang for your food dollars you know that you spend and, overall, a healthier and happier chicken.
Speaker 2:So the big question how do I ferment feed? And remember, what you're after is lacto-fermentation, not alcohol fermentation. But I'll cover a little bit about both and we'll start off with the alcohol part, which is yeast, and they're single-celled organisms and that's the difference between the bacteria. Yeast are single-celled organisms that consume sugars, in other words carbohydrates, and produce alcohol. In high concentrations alcohol is toxic even to alcohol-producing yeast, which will eventually die off when the concentration of alcohol becomes high enough in the fermentation mixture. An example of that almost everyone has had a gallon of apple cider go hard over time. It happens as the various yeasts that are in there and present in that environment do their work and begin producing alcohol, and while they're enjoying and consuming the carbohydrates in the cider. But if you keep that hard cider long enough, it will eventually turn into vinegar. So what happened? Over time, that bacteria convert alcohol to acidic acid, which, by the way, is the main ingredient in vinegar.
Speaker 2:This process is aerobic, a-e-r-o-b-i-c, meaning open to the air, which is called the mother in unpasteurized vinegar. And you've seen apple cider vinegar with the mother on the label and you'll see that real cloudy layer at the bottom of it. I will put a tablespoon of that in water and drink it a few times a week, probably once a month, maybe once every six weeks. I mix a tablespoon per gallon, put it in my chicken's water. Now, I never give them just straight water with apple cider vinegar. I always have regular, fresh, clean water at their disposal as well, but they really seem to like the taste of it and will go after it. But I give them. They have a choice of both and you need to do that as well.
Speaker 2:So then we get to the lactic acid bacteria, what we're concerned with. They consume sugars and carbohydrates, starches or even alcohol, and produce acids. During this lacto-fermentation, various lactic acid bacteria, or they're called LABs, are used to digest the carbohydrates and produce lactic acid. This lactic acid is what produces that tangy or sour flavor you may find in yogurt, raw lacto-fermented pickles they have those out there and raw lacto-fermented sauerkraut. This is what gives it that little tangy or sour taste.
Speaker 2:High concentration of lactic acid bacteria are beneficial to the digestive tracts and immune system and even produce additional nutritive values in the form of B vitamins, vitamin K2, and enzymes. And what these do. Once you get all of these enzymes and all of these bacteria in your gut that are beneficial. They just don't leave room for the bad stuff to get in there. And lactic acid preserves the food and produces an environment that is unfriendly to those harmful bacterias, and it's been used for literally centuries. As the acid level raises in the food, ph lowers, acid goes up, ph goes down and it prevents this deadly bacteria from being able to grow. It also helps the fermented produce, fermented food to resist spoilage Again another benefit.
Speaker 2:So how we want to do it? First, you want to prepare your water, and that doesn't really make sense to a lot of people because they say water is water. But if you live in a city or if you live somewhere that has community water and they add chlorine to this community water, which bleach, you don't want to just use that for your water because the chlorine kills bacteria. That's what it's made to do. The good part about it if you take your water and you set it out for a few hours or even overnight, chlorine will gas off or evaporate and it's gone. So whenever I know I'm going to do that, I'll take a couple of gallons out and I'll just sit it out overnight, because we do live in a place that puts chlorine in our. We have community water and they put that in there.
Speaker 2:So we start with clean water. Then we start with a clean, non-metallic, because you don't want a metal container because the acid will start breaking down that metal. You want a clean, non-metallic food gray container jug or a bucket uh, ceramic or food gray plastic, something like that glass. It's also a great one to use. You want to fill this about a third full with the chicken feed and again, I use non-medicated feed. I have no idea what the medicine in there and how it reacts to the fermentation process.
Speaker 2:You want to add enough water to allow for expansion and this feed and depending on the brand you feed you get will expand a lot. You want it to be able to expand and have an extra inch of water on top. You don't want to allow the feed to swell up enough to get into the air and, like I said, some of them will swell a lot. So you want to make sure that you keep the feed under about an inch of water and it takes the better part of a day to swell up enough where you know it's not going to swell anymore. Stir it every day, okay, and if you have a small container that you're stirring, you know, just because it's small doesn't mean that you can grab that container, pick it up and shake it. And the reason you can't shake it is now you're going to put little bits and pieces of fermented feed all over the top and they're going to eventually start dripping down and that wet feed glue to the top and that's no longer underwater is going to be a place that bad bacteria, yeast and different things can grow. So we want to shake, we want to stir this feed up once a day.
Speaker 2:In two or three days you're going to notice the water starting to bubble or maybe getting a little foamy as the lactic acid bacteria begin putting off carbon dioxide. That's what creates the foaming and the bubbling and they start getting that wonderful little fermentation smell and I think it's just a pleasantly sour odor. You know, I kind of like it If it smells rotten or alcoholic. Something went wrong, throw it away. You don't want a chance giving that to your chickens. It something went wrong, throw it away. You don't want a chance giving that to your chickens. But as we do this you'll. You'll take about three to four days, depending. Now you want to keep this room temperature somewhere around there. If it's winter time, you don't want to set it on your back porch because the cold will will slow down and inhibit the growth. It's going to take longer for it to happen. You don't want to put this in the barn where it's terribly hot, because that is not good for it either. So room temperature is usually a good place if your family can put up with the smell that's in there, but mine doesn't seem to bother it very much. And once they start doing this it's going to boost their immune system and the beneficial bacteria actually increase by something like 80% in their guts. And now you're going to be spending less money on food.
Speaker 2:And some people feed fermented food 100% to their chickens. They just keep fermentation growing. And you could take a larger container like a five gallon bucket, have fermented feed in there. Dip you a colander in it every day, pull their feed out, slap that in a bucket immediately. Throw more feed in there. Dip you a colander in it every day, pull their feed out. Slap that in a bucket immediately, throw more feed in there and keep the process going. This can go on for months and months, and months at a time and you don't ever have to dump it out. You can have a constantly rotating fermentation process going.
Speaker 2:I can't do that because we still leave the house and I don't have anyone that I can trust to keep my fermented feed going. So I'll ferment their feed in batches about once a week. I like to give it to them. I know it's got to do them some good. I can't do it every day for them, so most of the time they do get their dry feed and their feed is done in one of the coop work silos and I put 50 pounds in there at a time and I know that that is going to last long enough between that and the waters that I have to give these chickens plenty of feed while we're on vacation.
Speaker 2:Something else that you can do and you can look up how to do that, and I've got a video about that is called sprouts. I take pea sprouts or lentils which are split peas, and I'll sprout those, and the chickens really love doing that and that's basically just soaking them in water, but not keeping them soaked in water. You want to like soak them overnight, then the next night drain the water out and just keep them wet for days at a time. Just get them wet, rinse it out. Get them wet, rinse it out, and over time they'll just start sprouting, and these sprouts are something that the chickens are going to really like. So, guys, I really hope you like this episode.
Speaker 2:Fermenting your feed is easy to do. Once you start doing it, you're going to go wow, this is really easy. And, yeah, I can definitely smell that yogurt-y, sour smell. This has got to be what Gary was talking about. This is my fermented feed. Remember, if it smells like alcohol, don't give it to them. Like I said, the chickens may dig it, but you're not going to like it. It's definitely not good for them and, especially if it smells rotten, definitely don't give it to them. But most of the time it's going to come out perfect, not hard to do at all. Guys, get out there and ferment the feed. Leave me some feedback. Let me know how you do on it Until the next time.
Speaker 2:This is Gary with Send La Backyard Chickens.
Speaker 2:Talk to you soon.
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Speaker 2:Or you could just simply go to chickenseverydaybuzzsproutcom that's chickens plural, everyday, all one word. Uzzsproutcom that's Chickens plural every day, all one word BuzzSproutcom. And it would be very helpful. Believe it or not, I have equipment that I need to upgrade. I pay a monthly fee for the podcast service. I pay a monthly fee for the editing software that I use. So, anyway, I thought I would bring this to your attention and if it's something that you would consider doing, I would be eternally grateful. Thank you, bye-bye.
Speaker 1:That's all we have time for today. I really hope you enjoyed listening to the podcast. Be sure to watch our videos. So, on behalf of my Papa, gary, and me, sylvie, thanks for listening.
