Absolutely ALL about Fermented Feed for chickens, plus extra fascinating facts about fermentation 

Thank you, thank you Vincent Darius. That is exactly why I make videos like this. (Well, that and the fact that I just find stuff so fascinating that I want to share it) 🙂 Best wishes to you and your "fluff-butts" 😀

Fluff-butts, LOL , brilliant 👍

Excellent video thanks

Thank you so much

Birds get better gut health with this method. Much nutrition and vitamins is unlocked from the grains to the Birds this way

Thank you for that

Thank YOU! It was such a long video I wondered whether anyone would actually bother to watch it all.

Thank you 🙂

What is the FINGER? Asking from Poland with a thank you!

@@Spark_Iskra_z_Polski You have 4 fingers and a thumb on each hand... There is an experiment you can do where you get two cups of chlorinated drinking water. Stick you finger in one for 30 seconds to a minute. Then add swimming pool chlorine testing solution to both cups. The one that you did not put your finger in will turn color to indicte the chlorine. The one you did stick your finger in, will not change color or will have a much weaker color change, indiicating that most of the chlorination was removed.

Glad this was asked. I did not know it was actually a real process.

Absolutely! Balance! I wish I had said that 🙂 Thank you!

That is a longer fermentation period. If u look at the amount of alcohol in kombucha you'll see the short fermentation period of feed is not presenting alcoholic food, unless perhaps your reusing a lot of starter and not adjusting your fermentation time. But even then it would more likely be negligible.

Thank you, I'm glad you found it interesting

Thank you for that. I did wonder whether this video might be just too long and involved. It's just that I find learning stuff is so fascinating that I want to squeeze everything in! I'm glad your chickens are doing well. They don't ask for much, do they, and they bring so much joy! (And eggs!!!) 😀

Thank you. It's great to hear that. I think that often our chickens know best 🐥 Have a great day!

My goodness, that sounds yummy! No wonder they like it 🙂

Excellent! I'm glad that was useful. I hope you and your chickens have a great day 😊

Thank you so much 🙂 I hope you check out some of my other videos

Exactly my conclusion! I enjoy a bit of culture (yoghurt, sauerkraut, etc) occasionally too. We are learning a lot about the importance of our relationship with the microbiota that live in our bodies.

"You need a deep understanding when you take full responsibility for the nutritional needs of your animals" - You put it so wonderfully! I wish I had said that! Thanks for watching. Have a great day 🙂

Thank you. I never know whether people might find it too difficult to watch a long science-heavy video, so I appreciate hearing that you liked it 🙂

Aww, shucks ☺

Thank you Smart Fella!

Thank you so much. Have a great day!

Thank you so much. I do tend to do a "deep dive" into any subject I want to learn about, and of course I then want to share it 🙂

Yes indeed - BPS and BPF are molecularly similar to BPA and likely to have similar actions in the body.

Aww, shucks, thanks 😊

Thank you. I'm glad to hear it 🙂

I think you're right - it's fine as a treat and possibly beneficial for them.

That's great to hear. Best wishes to you and your chickens 🙂

Greetings to you in Argentina. And thanks for the compliment 🙂

Thanks for that. I'm not aware of any specific research into fermented food and irritability but there have certainly been many studies lately linking our (human) gut microbiota with moods and mental health, like this one www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2665945X22000171

Thank you 🙂 And greetings to you in the UK. I hope the weather is not being too unkind to you and your chickens

Chickens are tip-top with your ventilation video. We are wearing plastic trousers to walk a dog, chickens are fine. Thank you for all your gentle wisdom based on evidence. :)

You're welcome. Thanks for watching 🙂

Thank you. Have a great day 🙂

Thank you. And thanks for watching 🙂

Thank you. And thanks for watching. Have a great day 🙂

Thank you so much 😊

That sounds great. I'm sure your chickens enjoy the lavish catering you serve them 🙂

Thanks for that, it's great to hear 🙂

I'd love to hear more about mixing your own feed. I've been looking into it lately and it seems to be very complicated to take account of the huge number of different nutrients that we know chickens need. Do you think it's that wide variety of grains, seeds, salads, scraps and foraging etc that helps balance their diet?

@@chickensinmygarden I started because I wanted my hens to have the best health possible which translates into great eggs. On their first year, 4 creole hens laid 1015 eggs... Yes, my daughtet and I keep track of every hen each year in an excel file. We now have 14 hens and 3 roosters in 3 coops. Since I can get oat groats, peas, barley, wheat, corn, quinoa, lentils, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, flax, sesame, etc., I made an excel for ingredients and play around the crude protein content according to age or time of year. I also found an old pdf book about chicken feed and nutritiinal content. They get salads every morning, forage in the afternoons and get treats available, whether its dried fish, fruits from the garden, worms, etc.

Ah, another chicken Excel fanatic like me 🙂 Do you try to keep track of the various amino acids, or just a couple of critical ones (like lysine and methionine) or just the crude protein? And do you control the calcium and phosphorus balance, or just keep the phosphorus levels up and offer free serve calcium?

And when you say "according to the time of year" is that about what the chickens need or varying availability of ingredients? And what breeds are your chickens now? All still Creole? (Or is that Crele? I don't think I know Creole chickens) And do your roosters eat the same as the hens? Oh I have so many questions! I just know it's complicated and about the only way to do it is how you do - with great records and careful observation of your flock over many years.

@@chickensinmygarden We are located in the Peruvian Andes at 3000masl. We only have 2 main seasons: dry and wet. Dry season goes from May to November with temperatures ranging from -3°C to 22°C. The frost months during this time go from May to August and temperatures go lower. Sun comes up behind our mountains at about 9am and goes down at 3pm. During the rainy season sun rises at 5am and sets after 6pm and tempos go from 5°C to over 25°C with very hot sensation. The awesome thing about the Andes is that if it is horrible hot out in the sun you sit in the shade and magically get cool. The wonder of the mountains! So yes, according to the time of year I play with their meals, adding extra fat or carbohydrates as well as protein. Also, if I can get organic soy from the Amazon Rainforest or dried fish from the lagoons, I will add that too. Seaweed from the highland lagoons are also a treat full of nutrients. I guess, if we need a colorful and varied diet, so do them. So if it is hot and I can get watermelon, that's it. And if it is cold, I will make boiled oat groats and add slices of bananas, cayenne pepper and Brazil nuts. I do keep more track of the protein content as well as fiber, fat (raw peanuts or sesame seeds) and basic vitamins for a healthy immune system. Phosphorus they get in meat, fish and soy. Lysine and Methionine I consider in their "grain feed" with pumpkin seeds, quinoa or amaranth, meat or lentils as well as eggs. The fermented feed comes to my aid there... Also, I give the homeopathic Schuessler cell sats. I know, I know. They love them. Herbs and vegetables are a must. Things like lovage, oregano, parsley, lavender, chamomile, echinacea and fennel or dill. They eat tagetes, oses, chysanthemums and sweet alyssum or mints when foraging. Whatever we can give them from the garden goes, such as berries, swiss chard, sunflowers, carrots, beets, etc. I give them calcium in the form of egg shells and oyster shell free of choice. Also add a vitamin cocktail now and then, specially of the B vitamins and D3/K2 and C if we have too many wet and dark days in a row. We call our "criollas" Creole. Mixed breeds basically to the point you can see traits of different breeds. We also have Araucanas, Ameraucanas, Silkies, Paduanas, Sebright, Bantam Cochin and some new F1 mix of Ameraucana and Bantam Cochins (gorgeous). The roosters eat the same thing as the hens, but if you keep an eye on them, they prefer seeds and greens and love foraging for their ladies. They do eat less. I studied for over a year before we had enough to build a coop and run and started in 2020. I use homeopathy and aromatherapy with them if something arises with their health. I also use non-traditional methods to care for them such as oregano oil, cupric sulfate, etc. I figured out by studying that if I wanted healthy hens and delicious eggs for my family, I needed to cook for them as well as I cook for everybody else and I think it works.

Thank you. That sounds like a great system. 🙂

Thanks for watching 🙂

That sounds delicious! I wouldn't mind some myself 😀

I'm glad you found it helpful 🙂

That white stuff is merely yeast. Just stir it in and feed it out.

Oh, thank you so much!

@@chickensinmygarden Greetings from Egypt 🌹 I'm Ahmed .. I am a Gynecologist and I love 🐔

Greetings from New Zealand 🙂

Excellent! Actually I didn't even know mealworm feed was a thing! I just use the powdery crumbs at the bottom of the chicken feed bag 😀

Thank you so much 🙂

I think you're right - delayed rather than stunted. And I do think that using fermented feed to introduce some healthy microbiota to the gut especially of young chicks reared in a "clean" environment is likely to be beneficial to their overall health. My overall concern is with the hype that encourages people to feed a diet entirely of fermented but possibly low quality feed (just feed anything as long as it's fermented) in the expectation that the feed quantity and cost will be much lower. I've never had chicks with pasty butt (possibly because I've never received shipped chicks) but I am beginning to understand how important it is to get a healthy microbiome established. Thank you, and have a great day 🙂

I second that. I give some adult quail mix that I make (soaked grains for pigeons, ab 12 or more grain types), fermented/sour preserved vegetables and fruit, etc. And I can see that my quail chick and Runner Ducks are way bigger than their parents.

Thanks for watching 🙂

You're welcome! I always want to know details 🙂

Thank you. Good to hear from you

Thank you! Have a great day 😊

It's probiotics rather than antibiotics, but anyway it does help fight the bad bugs and encourage the good bugs 🙂 Thanks for watching 🙂

@@chickensinmygarden ahhh yes thks for the correction 🤭🤭🤭

Good thought 🙂 I'm sure you never let your chickens get hangry!

@@chickensinmygarden True! haha. I bet you don't either. In fact I have had to put myself in time out a couple of times for feeding too many treats. :)

I bet they love those! 🙂

Thank you so much! And welcome 🙂🐥🐥🐥

Thank you. Thanks for watching 🙂

Thank you. Sprouting is another topic that I have yet to learn about. Good idea, thanks, I'll add it to my list. There are so many fascinating things about chickens that I will never run out of learning 🙂 Have a great day

@@chickensinmygarden I am wondering if you could address the topic of stress on chickens. I also heard that chickens have weak hearts. I had a hen live through a raccoon scare. She lost a handful of tail feathers but the skin was not broken. I postulate that this gave her a heart attack or somehow a weak heart. She died three months later, otherwise inexplicably. The last month she had fast respiration at times and her comb became very pale and gray. Otherwise her eating and behavior was normal. She was only 15 months old. How can chickens be as old as dinosaurs and fragile at the same time? ITS REALLY A TREAT ON THE DAYS YOU POST A NEW VIDEO.

Well if that hen was a human, we would certainly have been thinking she was having heart problems and then a heart attack. And sudden death from heart attack is well known in chickens. And a lot of chicken keepers have come across it, including myself. I should do a video about it. But I don't know whether that would have any relationship to a fright weeks earlier. Stress certainly has an effect on chickens (and humans) but most research is about long-term stress not a single incident.

Thank you for the reply, I guess it’s obvious I haven’t gotten over losing her. You are a real sweetheart 🎉

It feels so wrong when someone dies unexpectedly, not only sad but also unfair.

Wow! Thank you so much!

Try shops that sell supplies for brewing beer or making wine

Usually hens don't just stop, as long as they are healthy they will lay some eggs each year but fewer and fewer each year with more months of not laying each year. For example a young heritage breed hen might lay most days for 10 months and then take a winter break for a few weeks. Then next year she might lay 4 or 5 eggs a week for 9 months then take a break for 2 months. Then aged three she might lay 3 or 4 eggs a week for 9 months then take a 3 months break. In her fourth year she might lay 3 eggs a week. And so on. You might find this video helpful ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-pPUvDRfT71M.html The hen in this video laid 20 eggs in her whole last year, but then never started laying again in the spring and she died of old age in the summer. As to how I deal with them - I just appreciate them for their other talents - making chicken poop fertiliser for my garden, maybe as a broody hen, etc.

@@chickensinmygarden thank you very much for answer me it help a lot . So when breed how do you deal with the male chickens

Because I breed rare heritage breeds there is a demand for the males, so I can usually sell them or give them away. Otherwise I cull them. Some people will raise them to a good size and eat them but I don't eat chicken. But a 8-month-old cockerel will be good eating, however an old hen will not be good eating unless stewed for a long time.

Definitely do not feed fermented feed to day old chicks. Even at 2 weeks I think they are too young. For best health and eventual best laying of eggs when they grow up I think they should eat specific chick crumble and pullet-grower pellets until point of lay.

I'm not sure. Apart from anything else, chickens can't digest milk, although a little bit of milk doesn't hurt them.

Pumpkin seeds are very good for chickens.

I mentioned that in the video - some people say to stir and others say not to stir. So I investigated what stirring might achieve. Stirring would mix more air into the liquid. And since fermentation bacteria are anaerobic, they don't like oxygen, so stirring would be bad for them. But I couldn't find anyone who explained why they thought stirring would be a good idea. You say to stir, so please tell me why stirring would be good, please? 🙂

I'm not sure that molasses would make the fermentation quicker. It might start a little earlier because the sugars are already dissolved rather than being large starch molecules within the grains. But if you have added molasses to fermentation you probably know more about it than I do. Does it make it quicker? When making beer or wine, the rate of fermentation would be governed by the numbers of yeast organisms and the temperature, not the sugar concentration, until the sugar is all used up and fermentation stops. But this is not yeast fermentation, which produces alcohol, this is fermentation by lactic acid bacteria, which produce acids. There is quite a lot of literature about lactic acid fermentation using molasses but it all seems to be about making lactic acid or making feed for ruminants with a nutrient profile that minimises intestinal gases.

I can't buy such a big glassware, what can I do?

You could try several small containers instead of one big one. But why not just make a small batch? It's only for a treat, not a large part of their diet.

Do you mean this video about fermented feed? Here is a link ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-0494zRxTCR0.html Another way is to click on my channel name (Chickens in my Garden) and scroll through my videos or playlists until you find it, published about a year ago. I have over 100 videos so that might take a while, but who knows what other interesting stuff you might find 😊 I hope this does what you want. Otherwise let me know

@chickensinmygarden Yes, - this vid about Absolutely everything about fermented feeds. Thank you for your prompt reply. 👍🏻 And yes, - I noticed you've got lots of other interesting vids too 👍🏻. Thank you 😊

@TIGZ-NZ8563 Thank you for watching. Have a great day!

Yes that certainly sounds like mould, and no it shouldn't happen because the lactic acid should make the mix too acid for fungi. Certainly don't feed the fungus to your chickens - not all fungi are toxic but some are. I suggest throwing it all in the compost and starting again, making sure all your equipment is clean and you keep it covered.

Ok, thank you. I don't know what went wrong. I have been doing this since March of 2024, I have gone through 2 bags of chicken scratch and this is the 3rd one. Also it is the first use from this bag of food. Used same brand of scratch and always used filtered water. It may be I may not have cleaned the jar good enough... Anyway thanks again for your help.

such as... 🤔

balanced digestion, more bioavailability of minerals and vitamins...etc@@libertyisparamount1443

I wouldn't. As I mentioned, some studies have indicated that it stunts their growth.

@@chickensinmygarden Ok Thank You

You can feed it to day old chicks. Been doing it since 2012 and absolutely NO issues, no stunted growth, nothing. My "study" has been longer running and more tested than any other as I've been using it on all ages, on dual purpose and meat bird chicks and all lived, thrived, grew to their normal size just like any on any other feed.

@prayerangel1 That's really helpful. Thank you 👍

😀 I don't think that "wait" is a concept that chickens associate with food!

But I can tell you from my ladies, they love to drag any grain that ever fell into a dirty puddle of water or go on a hunt for old grain that is rotting on the neighbor‘s fields after harvest (they are not allowed from my side but they think otherwise 🥴, the neighbor doesn’t care though😅). Is that nutritious? I don’t know but it seems to be very delicious to them 😂

​@@chickensinmygardenI, in Poland, let the grains soak in water overnight, then I add vitamins, blackseed (czarnuszka) pellets, fermented liquud (beetroot, imbir, honey, pigva, apple, sometimes pellets from grains etc. But it is made like preserved cucumbers, ie covered in salty water and kept so for weeks). Sometimes I add carrots, chopped greens, fruit, oregano oil drops, garlic, onion, etc. Mixed is served 2x daily to my quail and Indian Runners. Theh also get so called pigeons teet a mix of grit, shells and whatnot. No diseases. Thank you for the video!

That sounds delicious enough for me to eat 🙂

That's the best 🙂

I was wondering why you would want to, but I see by your second comment that it's about speed. The speed of the reaction is mostly controlled by temperature and pH. The molasses can help keep the pH from getting super acid, so that might help.

I think it was mentioned it wont make them drunk. It is a different kind if fermentation.

🤪 alcoholic

You can hardly go go wrong with top quality feed 🙂

@Michelle Pemula....She's NOT trying to be a teacher. She's merely trying to educate others on what SHE'S read. YOU are not an expert in all subjects no matter what you've studied and YOU don't know everything. No, everyone doesn't know what BPA is, just like you don't know everything about nutrition, chemistry, biology, science, chickens or life in general.

Thank you Uplift 🙂

Thank you for watching and commenting. Have a great day 🙂

Thank you. I just have this burning curiosity to know and understand. And then I think it's so interesting I just want to share 🙂