Hi Chris & Steph! I watched your video quite awhile back about your 3 day soaking chicken feed in buckets and it literally changed how I do our chickens here! We upscaled to a much larger flock and your bucket soaking system has helped us so much!! I use it for the pigs too 😃🐷 it was the best advice ever & I loved watching this little refresher tutorial! Much love to you guys, Anita & Cable 🌻🐝
That is fantastic we are so glad you were able to use this system! The part that always amazes us about it is how well the animals eat it once its sprouted. Which for the chickens is huge as we find there is almost no waste compared to dry grains and no fines (that they don't eat) with cracked grains. Sometimes its the simple things that make the most impact that is for sure! Thank you for the wonderful feedback!
So do you guys buy separate bags of grains and mix yourselves? Im looking to start something like this and was looking for a good recipe. Or what brand is it if it's premixed.
We buy most of the ingredients separately i,e,, wheat, barley and oats then mix them. For the chickens we do use a "birdseed" mix because of the price of millet on its own (has gone up substantially) so that does have some other stuff in it. Most of the animals get some ratio of oats, wheat and barley except for the chickens (they get sunflowers and some other things added). It works pretty well. I think we did a video last year on the chicken mix specifically to with a bit more details on it. There do seem to be benefits but it seems to vary pending on the species for sure.
Would it work to just stack the buckets four high? The bottom being the catch basin, then the newest seeds, then day two on top of that and day three on the top, then just pour water into the top bin and let it drain down through the next two into the bottom? You would only need one lid and take up less space. And less water.
It likely would, the only problem we would have is how the buckets nest inside each other. You might have to play around with the volume of grain and water to make sure you didn't flood it. If the grain fills more than the empty space at the bottom of the bucket though because of its weight there is the potential it won't expand as well as it could (i.e. the buckets do fit pretty tight inside each other and I'm just thinking of our experience with our worm towers). But if you could figure out a way to negate that then yes it would work well. It wouldent likely end up with less water though as we only soak the one day anyways.
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Hi Chris & Steph!
I watched your video quite awhile back about your 3 day soaking chicken feed in buckets and it literally changed how I do our chickens here! We upscaled to a much larger flock and your bucket soaking system has helped us so much!! I use it for the pigs too 😃🐷 it was the best advice ever & I loved watching this little refresher tutorial! Much love to you guys, Anita & Cable 🌻🐝
That is fantastic we are so glad you were able to use this system! The part that always amazes us about it is how well the animals eat it once its sprouted. Which for the chickens is huge as we find there is almost no waste compared to dry grains and no fines (that they don't eat) with cracked grains. Sometimes its the simple things that make the most impact that is for sure! Thank you for the wonderful feedback!
@@HickorycroftFarm my pleasure, but it’s me that needs to thank you 🙏 hahaha!! It’s been awesome!!!
Thank you for sharing!! You have sheep do you make ur own yarn from them?
I (Steph) do spin yarn from our sheep fleece. I am self taught and am always learning. The Icelandic fleece is wonderful to work with.
So do you guys buy separate bags of grains and mix yourselves? Im looking to start something like this and was looking for a good recipe. Or what brand is it if it's premixed.
We buy most of the ingredients separately i,e,, wheat, barley and oats then mix them. For the chickens we do use a "birdseed" mix because of the price of millet on its own (has gone up substantially) so that does have some other stuff in it. Most of the animals get some ratio of oats, wheat and barley except for the chickens (they get sunflowers and some other things added). It works pretty well. I think we did a video last year on the chicken mix specifically to with a bit more details on it. There do seem to be benefits but it seems to vary pending on the species for sure.
Would it work to just stack the buckets four high? The bottom being the catch basin, then the newest seeds, then day two on top of that and day three on the top, then just pour water into the top bin and let it drain down through the next two into the bottom? You would only need one lid and take up less space. And less water.
It likely would, the only problem we would have is how the buckets nest inside each other. You might have to play around with the volume of grain and water to make sure you didn't flood it. If the grain fills more than the empty space at the bottom of the bucket though because of its weight there is the potential it won't expand as well as it could (i.e. the buckets do fit pretty tight inside each other and I'm just thinking of our experience with our worm towers). But if you could figure out a way to negate that then yes it would work well. It wouldent likely end up with less water though as we only soak the one day anyways.