Soaking (Fermenting) Chicken Feed

It is remarkable how certain smells can bring you back in time.  In THIS POST from almost two years ago:  I mentioned 24 of these smells.  Although not a good fragrance, the odor I’m going to talk about today certainly turns back the hands of time and brings me back.

When I was younger, we had a job that was a bad one on the rice farm.  We had a concrete-sided pit and we’d dump truckloads of harvested rice into the pit where an auger would carry the rice up and into storage bins.  The trouble with this scenario is that in Louisiana, the water table is very near the surface.  The pit would always seep water, filling the bottom with water which created smelly, fermented rice once coupled with the hot summer sun.

With a pocketknife and an antifreeze jug, we’d fashion a scoop with a handle and our job was to shimmy down into the pit with the scoop and a 5 gallon bucket and empty the pit of the water and fermented rice.  The smell would get on your hands and was so strong that soapy water would not remove the smell.  Sometimes there would be a big bullfrog or a snake or turtle in the bottom of the pit that would scare you.  Other times an animal would have fallen into the pit and drowned, making the contents of the pit an even more foul and vile and toxic concoction than it already was.

Today I’ll talk about that smell again.  We feed our chickens rice – either rough (un-milled) rice or milled, broken grain rice.  We augment this by adding some laying pellets for higher nutritional content.  Recently, we’ve begun to soak the rice in order to ferment it prior to feeding the chickens. 

Why would we do this?  Well, in researching this I’ve learned that fermenting the grain can increase the protein and nutrient content of the feed as the grain germinates.  It also helps aid in digestion as the fermented grain adds probiotics and that also will make the birds more healthy, their laying performance increase, helps prevent some diseases and will ‘stretch’ your feed cost by giving more weight gain off of the portions of feed.

So, how do we do it?  Easy enough – I’ll show you.  First we start out with our ration of mixed rough rice/milled rice that we feed in the morning. 

Rice

We pour this in a bucket and cover it with water.  It will soak in the heat in the feed room until the evening feeding.

Covering it with water

When we are ready to feed them in the evening, this is what we are greeted with after the rice has fermented for about 10-12 hours:

Fermented Rice - smells like a brewery

As you might be able to tell, the rice has expanded, absorbing the water.  There are bubbles on top of the water and this shows that the rice is fermenting.  Oh, if you could smell the picture above, you would know how bad it smells!  It is the same smell I remember from years ago and it brings me back to memories of sliding down in the pit to remove the rotting grain.

Yep, it’s gross, but not to a chicken.  They love it.  It doesn’t smell bad to them.  It smells like supper!

Now what I didn’t show you is that the bucket of soaking rice sits inside another bucket.  I’ve drilled numerous holes into the bucket with a drill to drain the fermented water.  We have a rope with a hook on it hanging in the feed room and right before we start milking the cows, we pull the bucket with rice out of the water and place it on the hook.  The water seeps out of the bucket and is captured in the bucket beneath it.  

Drip, drip, drip while we milk

By the time we’re finished milking the cows, the water is completely drained from the fermented rice and the swollen grain is ready to be fed to the chickens.

This smelly water is used as a base for the next batch of rice that will be fed for breakfast the next morning after soaking all night long.  We simply add more water to the bucket to completely cover the rice.  It is an on-going cycle, similar to a sour-dough culture starter.

Then we go out in the barnyard and scatter the smelly rice to the chickens who promptly gobble it up and ask for seconds.  We’ve actually seen an increase in egg production since we started this process.

Soaking rice (or other grains) for chicken feed might not smell great, but the dividends yielded in terms of animal health and nutrition definitely passes the smell test.