drying fermented chicken feed

Simple question.....can I dry out fermented chicken feed, like on a screen with a fan or in the sun, to preserve it? I can't find any info online about this, but to my uneducated mind, it seems like it would work? I've got a dozen cornish cross coming this afternoon, and I'd like to feed them fermented food, but I'm concerned about making too much/not enough at a time. I  know it's not a big deal, as it can be refrigerated or frozen, and if there's not enough I can just give them some extra regular dry feed.  But it seems like it would be convenient to have a good supply of fermented feed ready to go. I'm thinking I'll just try making a batch and seeing how it goes, unless anybody has experience to say otherwise.

Hi James,
It's an interesting idea. I would say definitely try it, but I do have a couple concerns that it might not be as beneficial if it was re-dried after being fermented.

One of the benefits of fermented food is the microbes that grow during the process. I imagine many of them would die off if it was re-dried.

Another benefit is the extra moisture to help hydrate. Naturally that would also be gone.

Still, the breaking down of the food for easier digestion should stay the same.

Fermented foods do not need refrigeration.

I read about a lady who keeps her fermented chicken feed right in the coop.

There needs to be enough liquid to cover the contents.

I have not done this so I hope folks that do will speak up.

Make a solar dehydrator.

Kyle Hayward wrote:Make a solar dehydrator.

Actually.....I'm going to be replacing all my storm windows here as soon as the weather warms up some more, so I'll have about 25 big windows and screens laying around that I'd like to keep out of the landfill. A solar dehydrator would be a good use for some of them.

If you ferment your chicken for the benefits of fermented foods you might lose those benefits by putting the ferment in the sun and drying them out.

To me, this is the same as just feeding grains without the benefit of fermentation.

I am no expert as this is just my opinion.

My (mostly uneducated) understanding is that fermenting helps to break down the feed, besides all the beneficial bacteria it builds. My thinking is that I ferment and dry it, even if the bacteria are greatly reduced by drying, the benefits of breaking down the feed will still be present. I think this is what I'll do......since fermented feed helps cornish cross have regular solid chicken poop instead of the greasy stinky diarrhea poop they're normally known for.....Ill ferment and dry one bag of chicken feed, and see what their poop looks like. If they produce normal chicken poop, I'll stick with it, especially since that alone is a big benefit for my situation (going to be running a chicken tractor in my front yard in a city). If they still have greasy stinky diarrhea turds, then I'll just feed them regular food.

And I'll be sure to report back here with progress/results.

I don't ferment, except in the sense that I soak my feed and it bubbles and forms a weak beer. It's how my flock seems to prefer it.
If you're properly fermenting the feed, it'll keep until you use it up. If you're doing more like I am, then it'll continue to bubble (ferment) until it gets too acidic, but you should have fed it to your birds before that.

I promise it's not something that requires a lot of precision. Each chicken will eat about 1/4 lb. a day(113 g), give or take, and you can make estimates and then fine-tune what you feed each day. I measure feed using an old plastic drink container that was roughly a quart and a 16oz plastic glass. It's not precise and that's okay.

If you're fermenting your feed, set up at least 4 containers and start them off roughly one day apart. Guesstimate how much feed for the first set, based on the age and approximate feed needs of the birds. Make sure each container has about 2 inches (5 cm) of water over the top of the feed. If you're using anything processed, you'll need to keep topping it off for a while until you get used to how much water it'll take to keep the cover instead of having it all soak in.

Drying the feed means you'll lose any of the benefits of having soaked the feed in the first place, and you'll lose all the good bacteria that you were encouraged to grow. The dried-out fermented feed will be easier for the birds to digest, but you'll be missing most of the whole point of doing it to begin with.

As long as you keep the water cover over the top and the feed is still bubbling, it's fine. You're safe to feed it to your birds.
I wouldn't feed anything fermented to chicks unless they already had a week or so of unfermented feed to start with. If you wouldn't feed a human baby kefir, I wouldn't do it to any other baby critter. Give them a chance to develop some gut biome before radically altering it. A week of straight high protein (~ 18% to 20%) chick feed is fine to start them out. I'd add in the fermented stuff in stages, but you can do what you think is best.

Still, no need to dry anything. If you see any bacteria floating, I'd scoop the bacteria out. That's it. As long as you keep a layer of water over the top of the ferment, it's fine.

The feed should smell like wort when you feed it - something like beer. If it smells like anything else, something's gone wrong, but a weak beer/sourdough smell means everything is fine.

The experiment begins.....1 40lb bag of meatbird feed, divided into 3 5 gallon buckets, filed with water to cover the feed by about 4".

Good luck! You're off to a good start.

I hope your birds enjoy it as much as mine do.

Well, it's done, but kind of a bust, I think. First of all, I couldn't really submerge it in water. It just became a thinner and thinner slurry the more water I added, and never really settled to the bottom so that it would be anything reassembling submerged. Maybe that's okay though. I'm sure different food would be better in that regard. Set my it was no big deal, and it broke into nice little chicken food cookies. The biggest issue though......it was full of little black bugs underneath, and they were making little burrows into the chicken food cookies. I'm sure it I fed it to the chickies now, it's be fine, they'd probably love the bugs. But it'll be another week before they get started on it, and I'm sure the bugs will continue to infest it to the point of ruining it between now and then.

Oh well, live and learn.

A open bag of chichen feed will invite black bugs and ants to it. Have you tried covering it with with an airtight lid, maybe with a bit of dry ice, to  get rid of the exisiting black bugs that are in it.

I make my fermented feed in 1 larger tub (half a barrel) and don't rotate it at all. The tub holds about 5 days worth of food. I take 1 days worth everyday and replace it with water and feed and give it a good stir. Sure some of it is old but it's always a fresh fermentation doing it this way.

It's kind of how you would treat a sourdough starter if you made a loaf of bread everyday.

Marc Dube wrote:I make my fermented feed in 1 larger tub (half a barrel) and don't rotate it at all. The tub holds about 5 days worth of food. I take 1 days worth everyday and replace it with water and feed and give it a good stir. Sure some of it is old but it's always a fresh fermentation doing it this way.

It's kind of how you would treat a sourdough starter if you made a loaf of bread everyday.

I love this setup.
How much of the starter is left over for the new stuff.

In my head I am thinking 1 protion of old stuff to 6 protion of new stuff? or maybe you do equal amounts? Obviously this would be an art not an exact science.  

In my head I am thinking 1 protion of old stuff to 6 protion of new stuff? or maybe you do equal amounts? Obviously this would be an art not an exact science.  


It's the other way around 6 parts stay in the bucket and 1 part gets taken out and replaced daily.

This is a fascinating thread. I think the continuous fermentation system described above is genius for many situations.

I'm into WAPF and Price/Pottenger information and have eaten that way for many years. Lots of fermented foods.  

I've read studies in the past that discovered that there are gut and nutritional benefits to dried fermented products.  Some were studying fermented food nutritional products, like nattokinase and probiotics. Dried probiotics do work, in my experience.

With food, the nutrients have been changed and many are still stable or are actually more stable.

But another wacky thing that I read about- a less intuitive thing- was that the gut biome can be changed by exposure to totally dead gut organisms. Like ones that are heated to the point of being cooked, and cannot revive.

So I believe that if you need to have your fermented food dehydrated for storage reasons, it will probably still work fine.  

Even if you accidentally overheat it, I think it would still have many good principles. I've certainly dehydrated food at a bit too high a temp, a bit too long and it still seemed vital and nutritious.

There are traditional fermented foods that are dehydrated, too. I have a big fat Sandor Katz book somewhere with descriptions that vaguely come to mind- one is a fermented brassica green that is then dried.  People's traditional diets have a lot off innate knowledge to them.

I have a really hard time finding rodent or bug safe storage. Even in my house.  I have to keep woolen garments in sealed plastic bags and throw them in the freezer periodically or they are wrecked.  So I get why dehydrating animal feed could be important to people.

Success....ish? I continued to dry this food, and we had a couple nights of freezing weather, and the bugs seem to be gone. It's remained in the form of chicken cookies that easily crumble. The chickies are 3.5 weeks today, they've been on this food for 5 days, and their poop has transitioned from greasy stanky diarrhea things that they had in the brooder eating chick starter, to normal looking chicken poops like my egg layers have. I've got to say though that the continuous fermentation thing kinda like sourdough starter sounds easier than this, and still solves the problem of knowing how much to make.

(These chickies are in a 6x8 tractor in my front yard, in town, btw).