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Post by atash on Sept 12, 2012 13:56:34 GMT -5
No. You would not get a lot of food value compared to what you had to put into it. Corn is a "greedy" crop.
It's fed to mammalian livestock, but they can digest the leafy stuff too. Chickens can not.
Try Millet or Sorghum instead.
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Post by richardw on Sept 13, 2012 4:04:05 GMT -5
I once heard of a bloke who farmed maggots for his chocks,he had a fly proof hut where inside it was set up with heaps of shelves which held trays of sawdust,he owned a house cow which he milked and this milk was poured over the sawdust in which contained growing blow fly maggots,once they were big enough the whole tray saw dust and all would be thrown in to the chock pen.
He would pick out the largest maggots and grow these on till fly stage then would be used to lay eggs on a piece of meat to start the cycle over again.
This is something that one day i would like to set up because the costs of buy chock food is so high that its hardly worth while producing your own eggs.
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Post by olddog on Sept 13, 2012 21:10:09 GMT -5
It was kind of by accident, we emptyed the trash can, and in the bottom was a bit of gross liquid, from rotting chicken skin, bones, etc, and other meates, and a bunch of live, moving fly maggots, so we just poured it all out into the chicken yard. There are directions on the net for raising them, I believe. I was going for the termites mostly because I thought they would be easier to raise.
Love the bug zapper idea.
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Post by 12540dumont on Sept 13, 2012 21:30:13 GMT -5
Atash, your sorghum is blooming.
The other sorghum is from the chicken food we purchase and it's coming up a field away from yours.
Steven
Boil the Fagiolina in cold unsalted water for about 30 min, then add salt and 2 bay laurel leaves and cook for other 20 min.
When it’s ready, taste it with just olive oil. The taste is so excellent that no more spices are necessary, but you’re free to try.
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Post by 12540dumont on Sept 13, 2012 22:03:23 GMT -5
I think the Millet is ready. And the flax! Attachments:
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Post by oxbowfarm on Sept 14, 2012 5:20:16 GMT -5
Personally I think it would be easier to clabber milk and feed the curd than use it to raise maggots that you then feed to the chickens. It's basically the easiest thing in the world to capture a room temperature clabber culture and then maintain it. Let the milk set up and then pour off the whey, the chickens will devour the clabber curd. Feed the whey to the pigs.
Thats been our long-term goal, basically the market farming has shunted our homestead feed supply goals to the side as it is too much work milking. So we end up buying feed so that I can have Daisy on a "milk every other day" schedule. If we weren't so busy with the vegetables I would have time to milk twice a day and we would have enough to do the clabber thing.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 14, 2012 17:49:38 GMT -5
I know you already had some Sorghum, and I sent down two kinds I think. One of which is not appropriate for bird-food, being somewhat toxic. Which one? I have a mix of colors, and my first taste of molasses was mildly bitter. |
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Post by 12540dumont on Sept 15, 2012 18:26:46 GMT -5
Sorghum bicolor PI576327 Is the one you sent me Atash. I also got another envelope of it from GRIN, in order to get a good stand. This picture is from the 5th, it started blooming just a couple of days ago.  Attachments:
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Post by richardw on Sept 16, 2012 4:12:58 GMT -5
Personally I think it would be easier to clabber milk and feed the curd than use it to raise maggots that you then feed to the chickens. It's basically the easiest thing in the world to capture a room temperature clabber culture and then maintain it. Let the milk set up and then pour off the whey, the chickens will devour the clabber curd. Feed the whey to the pigs. Thats been our long-term goal, basically the market farming has shunted our homestead feed supply goals to the side as it is too much work milking. So we end up buying feed so that I can have Daisy on a "milk every other day" schedule. If we weren't so busy with the vegetables I would have time to milk twice a day and we would have enough to do the clabber thing. Yep,i can see that been a good way of doing it also,if only i had more time as well,ive got three dairy farms milking 3500 between them all within 3kms of me and that legally i can buy up to 20 litres per day directly,so really either feeding curds or maggot would be an easily achievable way of feeding our chocks. |
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Post by atash on Sept 16, 2012 13:10:01 GMT -5
Congrats on the millet. I want to grow some too. I could have, but just didn't have enough time. I'll try on a small scale, in my backyard where there are no deer to graze it, next year. I have a couple different kinds.
Nice thing about millet as chicken food is you don't have to thresh it. Just give them the whole heads. They don't mind pecking out the seeds themselves; if anything it satisfies their instinct to forage for themselves.
I think so. I don't have the package handy, but I looked it up on GRIN, and at the time I ordered it, that was the only one they had that had bird-resistance characteristics, and it was indeed from Arkansas. There are a number of varieties in existence that have anti-bird features. Some of them like this one contain toxic levels of cyanoglycocides (I wish I could spell that word...my best guess...a natural form of cyanide found in some plants including sorghum, which is why you need to know what you're doing to feed cattle the silage), and some of them are coated with bitter saponins, but not so much that they don't wear/wash off by the time its ripe--hopefully! The cyanoglycocide is probably the way to go for human feed, and the saponins that wear off probably the way to go for chicken feed.
Birds are obviously a problem with Sorgum--or for that matter Millet! Not that other grains don't get raided too, but those are just especially tempting. No awls and no sheath to protect the grain.
Glad to hear it's blooming. We need to cross it to something that blooms more precociously, then re-select for the bird resistance. I did get one single plant that did bloom several weeks ahead of the others, and produced all of 10 seeds as up here it was already too cool to pollinate by then. That's why I sent it down to you to grow in warm, sunny California. It's September now so I imagine nice full heads by October. Hopefully your autumn rains will hold out a little longer to dry it down. Usually Sorghum is fast--faster than corn--but this one is not particularly so.
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Post by 12540dumont on Sept 16, 2012 13:14:24 GMT -5
Sorghum Flowering. We've been feeding chickens brown rice this week. Got a whole sack of old rice very very cheap. Chickens don't care that it's stale. I'm par boiling it for them. We've also been feeding them split melons, pumpkins with soft spots and cooked potato peelings. John, We did plant extra corn. When I processed it for us (BBQ and then removed from the cob, and then dried), those chickens when nuts over the cobs and picked them clean. We also fed them the chicha corn after it was boiled. They sure loved that. They had purple beaks! Attachments:
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Post by johninfla on Sept 16, 2012 14:39:20 GMT -5
and purple poop no doubt! |
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Post by 12540dumont on Sept 16, 2012 16:22:51 GMT -5
Yeah and purple Poop. So here's the big heads of millet that I'll save for next season's planting. The rest are all small and I'm going to run the chickens on them. They can do their own picking! Today they've feed well on split melons...so no grain tonight. Attachments:
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Post by steev on Sept 16, 2012 22:41:54 GMT -5
My Tunisian sorghum is blooming and maturing; looks like very fat, loose cattails; the bees love it.
I must get a chicken flock going, having a plethora of split melons.
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Post by synergy on Oct 5, 2012 12:16:49 GMT -5
12540dumont, have you fed your chickens the grains you grew ? I was wondering if you had any thoughts on how much room you need to grow it ? I was wondering if alley cropping some small grains to feed livestock and family might be good between my fruit trees in a small orchard (1/2 acre).
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