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:
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| 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.
