During the spring and summer months, and even into the fall, it isn't all that hard to get fresh greens in your animal's diet, but during the winter it can seem impossible. This can result in high feed bills and unhealthy animals. Not a very desirable situation!
Growing fodder can solve both problems. You can save money on feed and provide your animals with fresh greens all throughout the winter!
Now, you may be wondering, is it really worth it to grow fodder for the winter, won't the animals be fine for a few months without fresh food? Well, they will probably survive, but can you imagine eating one or maybe two kinds of dry food for the entire winter?
And even if the animals didn't mind the lack of variety (which, I can't imagine they don't), dried food, whether it's grain or hay, has far less nutrients than the fresh version.
Microgreens - and that's what fodder is - are some of the most nutrient packed foods on earth. Some people say that the nutrient content of a sprouted seed can be as much as 100 times that of an unsprouted seed!
There does come a point where the nutrients start to go down (a full grow barley plant doesn't have millions of times the nutrients of a seed), which occurs about 6-7 days after sprouting.
Therefore, it is important not to let you fodder grow too long. This also means that you cannot just feed fodder as a replacement for pasture. The nutrient content of fodder is far higher than regular pasture.
You will still need to feed hay to your animals. But the good news is that eating fodder helps animals digest hay much better. So, they may end up eating less hay since they can get more nutrients from it.
Fodder is about 93% digestible which is very good compared to dried grains which are only about 75% digestible! If you think about it, that means for every 100lbs. of grain you buy for your animals 25lbs of it is essentially wasted!
Feeding fodder instead of dried grains to dairy animals helps improve milk production. It also increases the butter fat content of the milk, as well as almost completely eliminating the occurrence of mastitis.
Because fodder creates an alkaline environment in animals' bodies (as opposed to regular grain which is very acidic) it can help prevent issues such as hoof rot and Acidosis.
Another benefit of feeding fodder in the winter is that if you grow it out to grass you will have something green and growing to look at while everything outside is all brown or gray or white!
As far as saving money, fodder can cost as little as 1/6 or even less of the cost of regular grain!!! Our chicken feed is about $0.64 a pound, but if we grow the fodder out to four times its original weight it would only be about $0.12 a pound!
For animals that will eat all the grass it is possible to grow it out to six times its dry weight, so that would be about $0.08 a pound! This is an incredible saving!!
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