Experimenting with a Free Fodder System

Sprouting grain is a great way to stretch your feed costs and improve nutrition for your farm animals.  We recently started sprouting grain for our laying hens and meat rabbits and have had some great results.  I've also learned a lot, and thankfully I didn't invest any money in the equipment setup while I was learning.  If you're considering starting a fodder system like this, I recommend the same approach: spend as little as possible and experience the daily rhythm for a month before buying a nice setup.  I started with 21 extra "1020" seed starting trays that I had, an adjustable shelf, 2 extra 5 gallon buckets, and an extra 20 gallon tub.  If you had to buy all of this brand new, it's still relatively inexpensive compared to fodder system kits.

I watched several videos on YouTube and found these two to be the most helpful:
Sarah Cuthill's DIY Fodder System
Paca Pride's Fodder System

I'm currently growing in 3 new trays every day, letting them grow to 7 days before feeding the sprouts to the animals.  At night before bed, I measure out 4 cups of wheat for each tray that I'm planning to sprout (12 cups total) and put that in a 5 gallon bucket, then soak that with water, bringing the water line to twice the height of the grain since the grain will absorb so much of the water.  I let it soak overnight, 8-9 hours. At the same time before bed, I water the rest of the trays that are already sprouting.  In the morning, I take the oldest/tallest 3 trays of sprouts and pull the sprouts (called a mat) out of the tray, upside down on a large cutting board.  I use a large serrated kitchen knife to cut two of the mats into 8 equal size pieces for the rabbits.  I also cut one tray in half for the laying hens.  After a couple of weeks, I had extra buckets that used to hold wheat so I put the cut pieces in those buckets to take out to the animals.  We currently have 8 rabbit does, 2 rabbit bucks, and 20 rabbit kits eating fodder, plus about 40 laying hens.  The adults each get 1 square of fodder, and the kits get 1 square for every 3-4 kits.

Early on, I always had a portion of the finished trays not sprout, and the mats fell apart.  This tended to occur in the end of the tray that was downhill, near the drain holes, and more in the trays that had the worst access to light. The water runoff also had a strong odor to it, and the portions of the trays that were downhill had a white slimy film in them after I emptied the tray and fed to the animals.  I was using unfiltered well water, which we knew had high levels of iron. I also noticed that one of the trays always produced superior fodder mats, it had drain slots all along the tray rather than just in one end.  I also had tried sprouting barley that never sprouted - it just fermented. To remediate these issues, we did the following:
- added an iron filter from cleanwater.com
- spread the trays out a bit more so they could get better light access
- put the oldest 4 days of trays on top with more vertical space between shelves
- added more drain holes in all the trays
- stopped using the "flood and drain" method, started watering all trays evenly with a gentle shower setting on the garden hose nozzle, using far less water with each watering.
- ceased using the barley and stuck with wheat.  Found out that "pearled" barley (which I was using) has the germ removed, so it won't sprout.  Whole grain barley should work just fine, just don't use pearled barley.

Also, many of the videos and blogs out there make some stellar claims about reducing your feed bill.  I've validated that, but in a slightly different way.  We switched from commercial non-organic rabbit feed to organic fodder and cut our costs in half.  Our meat rabbits would eat 1 cup (4oz) of commercial pellets per day when not nursing, 3 cups per day when nursing.  The bags were 50# and cost $20.  This meant we spent $0.10 per day per non-nursing adult rabbit, and $0.30 per day per nursing doe.  When we moved to fodder, we started using organic wheat that costs $18 for a 50# bag.  Each non-nursing rabbit's fodder started with 1/2 cup (2oz) wheat, which costs 4.5 cents per day.  Each nursing doe gets 3 times this, or 13.5 cents per day.  So, we cut our feed costs on rabbits by 55% while switching to organic.  Of course, this is not an apples-to-apples comparison.  I'm guessing that if we had switched to conventional wheat or barley instead of organic, we would have seen a reduction of 75% or more in out feed bill.  What is especially important about this, as I explained in a previous blog post, is that I can now produce rabbit meat raised on organic feed for $0.53 per pound.  With these kinds of costs, organic rabbit could easily compete on price with conventional chicken.

Another thing that I learned from my free fodder system is that my laying hens still prefer the un-sprouted seeds instead of the sprouted grass.  They still eat the grass, which is great for their health and for the eggs, but because of this preference for the seeds, I haven't taken them all the way to a fodder-only diet.  They still get organic layer mash, but half the portion they had been getting.  So I've only seen a reduction of 20% or so in my chicken feed bill.