Well it's time! We've been slowly changing and perfecting our Fodder
(Fodder: food, especially dried hay or feed, for cattle and other livestock.) system. I wanted something that would water itself and Shane wanted something that would take up very little space. Well we did the best we could with an 18 tray vertical system with a water pump! To purchase a system equivalent to what Shane built us would be well over $400, we made our own in less than half that amount!
Now to answer the why: Why grow your own fodder?
We currently have a quantity of poultry in the 100+ range. These birds all eat…a lot! if we let them free range throughout our yard we would never have a garden, never have grass, and constantly be on the lookout for birds of prey, large neighborhood dogs and the like. Instead they free range in their safe and comfortable habitats. This means they need to eat store bought feed or we have to grow our own fodder.
Well, considering that one 50LB bag of store bought feed is $20 and 100+ birds go through 4-5 bags a week we decided it would be better to buy chicken from the store like everybody else. However, when you grow your own fodder and feed 100+ birds on one 50LB bag of barley seed ($13 at the IFA) every other week the choice is obvious. Fodder is all natural and VERY healthy. We just turned our Oldfield Family Farm into an Organic Farm, reaping even greater benefits for raising our own meat.
Now if you find me organic chicken breast in the grocery store for less than $0.32 per LB than I'll consider bagging the idea of raising my own. How much do you spend?
Why raise your own:
This is one small step for our family to become self reliant. I don't want to rely on what the grocer tells me about their products and I don't want to rely on truckers constantly getting to our small stores here in Cedar City. All it takes is one earthquake or other disaster to destroy the roads for our grocery store shelves to go empty and I live in the middle of no-where. I'm not living for dooms day-I'm not some kind of extreme prepper. I simply want to provide for my children and make sure we have good, healthy, reliable food. Also, I just love learning new skills.
Some pictures:
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| How I started. |
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| This is how it looked at first. |
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| Parker looking in the hatcher. |
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| Our first baby turkey! |
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| A few of the reasons we need fodder. |
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| It takes about 8 days to look like this. This is how we feed it to the Poultry. |
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| 18 tray vertical set up. |
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| You can see the daily progression! |
