Why You Need to Soak Chicken Feed
If you’re looking to stretch your chicken feed out longer, you can ferment or soak chicken feed. Let's talk about soaking chicken feed easily, and without adding too much time to your already busy days.
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Why You Need to Soak Chicken Feed
I just started doing this with my own chickens. For the next bag of feed, I buy I plan to pay more attention and see if it actually reduces our feed costs or not.
However, I will say that my Brahmas, both bantam and standards, really do seem to love it. They run out of their coops in the morning straight for the bowls of soaked feed. My daughter's silkie chickens however do not seem to care for it and while they will eat it, they would rather the dry feed.
I don't have the time or energy, or attention span to be completely honest to do fermented chicken feed. But soaking chicken feed for 24 hours is completely doable.
What do You Want to Soak Chicken Feed?
Pellets tend to disintegrate into the water during the soaking period. Because fermented and soaked feed is digested easier, your chickens will naturally eat less chicken feed than if you didn’t ferment or soak it.
The process of soaking chicken feed grains makes them easier to digest. In the most obvious way, the softened feed is more gentle on the stomach – or in a chicken's case, their crop and gizzard.
Soaking or fermenting feed makes it easier for chickens to utilize all the good nutrients they’re consuming. Just think how happy they'll lay eggs for you now.
What you need:
- chicken feed – lay pellets
- container to hold feed
- water
- spoon
How to Soak Chicken Feed
Measure out your chicken feed, how much they can eat in a day you want to do at a time. They say 1/2 cup of lay pellets for regular-sized chickens.
You want to cover this with water, I use cold, having about 3 inches above your feed. There might be a trial and error kind of thing for you and your birds to see how much they eat in a day. If there is feed left over at the end of the day you will want to do less the next time.
I use the same containers and bowls that they eat out of every day. On the weekend everything gets a good cleaning.
What Can You Soak for Chicken feed
I use our regular chicken lay pellets.
You can soak other feeds as well. Chick starter for instance. Though I didn't find the crumble of it absorbed the water as the lay pellets did. I have only tried it once for that reason, maybe I used too much water.
This works best with mash, whole grain, or chicken crumble feed.
