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  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Oats
  • Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 07:39:27 EST



> >Carla Emery says that chickens have to eat hulled oats. I have no way
> to hull them, and no money to get the hull-less variety. Is there
> anything I can do without a grinder?

Most feed oats are not hulled, but rather crimped. As long as there is even
the slightest crack or breech in the hull, the groat can absorb water and
swell and split the hull. You still need the equivalent of a grist mill to
crimp
them, I at least can't think of another way of doing it. Set a Corona mill,
for example, to very coarse and run the oats through enough to crack or
dislocate the hull.

But this is mainly for horses. Horses don't chew their food very thoroughly
and so a lot of the oats escape being masticated and pass right on through
(where the chickens get them when they distribute the horse apples over the
pasture).

Although Carla Emory does say that, it isn't true. Almost nothing can stand
up to a gizzard. If you feed whole oats to chickens, you will find no whole
oats in the droppigs. Generally chickens wont eat what they can't grind up.
I
fed some sunflower seeds to the chickens and they ignored them. I roughly
cracked them and presented them a second time and they picked out the kernal
and
dropped the hulls.

The horse manure I get in on a regular basis is full of undigested whole oats
(oat seeds that escaped crimping and then escaped being chewed). So much so
that one of the main volunteer crops this spring was oats. When the truck is
parked full of this manure, before I'm ready to put it on the gardens and hay
fields, the chickens ransack though it eating the oats.

James




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