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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> >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