Fodder, part 2
Wednesday, November 27, 2013 at 3:51PM
[Lisa Rae]

I've had good luck with our new barley fodder system.  I'm still kind of shocked at just how easy it is to grow this volume of fresh food for our livestock.  It took the goats a few days to decide if they liked it, but now they devour about 30 pounds per day.  I'm working to increase production to try to push that up to 45#, so I've been tweaking our system a bit.

First, I found that the 3/32# holes which drain our trays are too small.  I've redrilled them to 1/8# and we'll see how that works for awhile.  By keeping good track of soak times, day 3 germination rates and day 7 tray weights, I've been able to optimize our production.

It turns out that so far, a 2 hour soak time followed by two days in the bucket before spreading the grain onto the trays works best for us.  In addition, it seems that adding peas to the barley quickens both germination and maturation.  

So that's where things are at, for the moment.  I'm interested to see how things look at the end of the next week.  Right now our trays are weighing around 15# at maturity.  I'd like to see them weigh around 21# and plan to keep working on it.  Still loving this project...

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