Fermented Chicken Feed

I recently started fermenting our chickens feed. The benefits are the same as fermenting food for humans like breaking down phytic acid,  increasing nutrient content and increasing digestibility. Even soaking your chickens feed overnight will start to breakdown the grains and increase digestibility.

 Initially I had hoped to keep a bucket of fermented feed going, similar to having a sourdough starter, unfortunately no matter how hard I tried it continually went bad on me. I'm really not sure what the problem is, as in theory as long as the feed is covered in water (grains do not need an airlock to ferment) it should ferment with good bacteria and keep the bad bacteria at bay. What I am thinking is a possibility is that perhaps the grain may have a bit too much 'bad' yeasts, mold or bacteria that inevitably start taking over. Since I'm also working on collecting all the ingredients to mix our own organic feed, I will most definitely be trying my hand at fermenting that feed to see if I can keep a bucket going. For now I am soaking a serving a feed for one or two days and feeding that to the girls. They love it! I knew they would judging from their preference of old feed we threw around the yard as 'scratch', going back to it after days and days of sitting out in the yard on the ground and devouring it, to them it's gourmet.  

Our hens aren't huge feed eaters anyway, they honestly consume very little. I certainly can't blame them when they're able to free range for whatever they'd like to eat. When I say whatever they'd like to eat, I mostly mean bugs. Bugs are the staple of a hens diet. People really don't realize that chickens are far from vegetarians, you don't even want to know what all they would eat if able to. They eat all day long, taking short breaks to destroy my flower beds, dust bath and nap in the woods. I'll be remedying the flower bed destruction by moving them into their tractor for the summer months the moment we're done renovating it, stay tuned for pictures! 

The girls when we still had lots of snow, there's still some although not this much!