Fodder growing experiment

I've been working on an experiment with growing fodder the past few days, my normal routine is to soak my wheat seed in a bucket with water and bleach for 12hrs then put the seed in a bucket with drain holes for 48hrs, watering it every 12hrs then traying it at the end of the 48hrs for another 36 hrs before feeding it. In the pictures that is the first picture.The middle picture is wheat seed that was put straight into a stainless steel tray right from a 12hr soak. The ss tray has a flat bottom on it where the 1020 trays are ribbed to give them some extra stength. What I wanted to see was if I can get better germination rates with the flat bottom tray and if there was any benefit to traying the seed for the whole time and eliminating the 48hrs in the bucket. So far it looks promising as the last picture shows, the seed that skipped the bucket step is 12hrs behind the other but already has more roots and a lot more sprouts than the seed that came out of the bucket, the next 12-24 hrs should tell a lot. The one issue that I am having a little bit is just a tiny bit of white mold in the seed in the metal trays and at this point I'm not sure why but it is a managable problem so I'm going to keep forging ahead.

My $10 fodder system

Growing fodder to feed livestock isn't a new idea,they've used it in other parts of the world for quite some time but it's really caught on here over the past few years with people with a few animals or small sustainable farms. The concept involves taking a pound of grain and in about 5-6 days time sprouting and growing that grain into about 5+ times that amount of feed for your animals. I start 1lb of wheat everyday for 22 chickens, I use a system that uses 3 small buckets and 3 1020 greenhouse growing flats. I soak 1lb of wheat for 12hrs, next it goes into another bucket that I drilled the bottom full of 7/32" holes, the grain spends 48hrs in that bucket. Usually by the time it comes out of the bucket it has little short root hairs on it. From the bucket it goes into the 1020 trays, I put holes in either end of the tray so water will drain out after I water, that's the only thing special with the trays. My watering schedule is every 12hrs, I water at 7am and 7pm but I have already skipped 1 watering with no ill affects. When I water, whether in the buckets or the trays, I rake the seed around with my hand then pour in about a gallon of water that floods the seed and then I just wait about a minute for most if the water to drain off. That's about the extent of it, it's really simple, in the beginning I figured it added about 40-45minutes per day to my schedule but after I got going it didn't take long until it was an extra 15minutes each watering. Figuring what it has saved me in commercial feed it is well worth the little bit of time. I feed fodder at about a 2/3-1/3 ratio of fodder to commercial feed, my chickens really love it and they have been laying just fine.

Outback Farm

Outback Farm, even though it had no name back then was an idea I came up with back around 2007. I was in NY at the time working as an owner/operator with a tri-axle dump truck. Work was getting slow, fuel prices and everything else except rates was going up and I was looking for a way to make some extra money.My plan at the time was to rent an acre of ground from a neighbor that was downsizing her operation but a few other things came up and I figured that I'd be better off in Pa where I had access to more resources. Now before I go any farther, I'm not someone that is tired of the workaday world and wanted a change in scenery, I spent most of my first 40 years on a working farm and I'm the 9th generation to farm land in Nescopeck Twp so I know the life and knew what I was getting into but I also have a good idea of what I'm doing when it comes to farming. I do have to admit though that I have always been a fly by the seat of my pants kind of guy and really never had much of a plan until recently. I figured in the beginning that I could make an ok living on a couple acres of produce and a woodlot but in the past year I've really looked into sustainable farming and I'm pretty convinced that I can make more than a decent living off of the couple tillable acres that I have with time being the biggest investment. I mentioned Joel Salintin from Polyface farm, Will Allen from Growing Power and Geoff Lawton from the Permaculture Institute of Australia before but I'll tell you if your not familiar with their work do yourself a favor and check out some of the things they are doing, it's pretty amazing stuff. In their world anyone with as little as a half acre or or less can feed a family, if you have a couple acres, you can do that plus have a good business besides. So what does that mean for Outback Farm? Well you can already see that I'm into produce and chickens for eggs. Hopefully by this fall I can be raising chickens for fresh meat. Down the road a year or so I'm figuring a 20x50 high tunnel greenhouse that I can raise greens almost year round, tomatoes and peppers by early June and then raise turkeys for fresh meat until November/December. And looking even farther ahead I might even get into selling compost. That's the plan lets hope it works.

Starting chicks

I see a lot of people are getting chickens to raise  right now, I know TSC has had theirs in for a few weeks now and I see a lot of questions being asked about starting them. Chicks are really pretty easy to raise when it comes right down to it, they are one of the few animals that are born with the instinct to find their own food and unless your getting chicks at day 1 from a hatchery most have already gotten a pretty good start on feeding. All the little critters really need is a warm, dry place to sleep, food and water and they'll do fine. People worry a lot about keeping them warm enough but unless your keeping them in an unheated garage or something they should easy stay warm enough to survive, they do need some extra heat but the idea that they need it to be 95degrees is a little overrated. If you keep an eye on them for the first few days put your heatlamp in one corner of their enclosure and then see where they lay, if they're laying in a pile right under the lamp then the heat should probably be raised a little by putting the lamp closer to them but if they're spread out some they're fine. Really all you want is to keep them from sleeping on a pile and risking suffocation.

The pictures here are from 30 that I got last October, the second picture is from a few days ago, that was the first nice day that they could be out on their own free ranging. I still have 20 of them, I sold the rest, these guys are doing great and right now are giving me almost a dozen eggs per day. Stay tuned for more chicken adventures.

An overview of my $10 fodder system

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A lot of where I'm going to be headed here has to do with sustainable farming practices. It's pretty easy to find info and I usually listen carefully to guys like Joel Salitin, Will Allen and Geoff Lawton but at the same time some of what they do doesn't translate to other peoples operations. I know in my own experience I have to resize things to suit my own circumstances and abilities and that's the things that I can hopefully pass on here.

Back again, finally!

Wow it's been just short of 3 years since I did this last. In my defense, I considered getting back to it this time last year but..................  well anyway! A lot has happened in the past few years and there are new things coming up all the time that I'm figuring on commenting on. I'm starting to see some direction in my little farm and that's probably where this will go for the most part. So if your new here pull up a chair and, hopefully enjoy.