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[EarthNSky <erthnsky AT bellsouth.net>]

This is good to know.  Growing oats, even what I can't grind or hull,
will save me money.  Eventually, I should probably get a Corona.
I like Carla's book.  This is the first time information I needed has
been incorrect, at least according to both you and Rob.   Thanks guys.

B

Clansgian AT wmconnect.com wrote:
> > > 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.
>
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