Tilhana
Songster
Hey y'all, I have a question about beans. I have always heard that chickens shouldn't eat raw beans because of the lectins, and every source I've looked at says to cook beans before adding them to your chickens' feed. I normally feed my birds a homemade mix of raw grains which I soak in water and allow to ferment. I've been doing it this way for years using just whole grains and peas and have never had a problem - at least none that I could trace back to their food.
We have a lot of old beans and grains that have been sitting in the shed in sealed buckets for years, just as an emergency deep pantry store. They're old enough that we want to get rid of those old stores and replace them with fresh batches, and it just makes sense to feed the old ones to the chickens. Not all at once but I've been adding one or two buckets of old grains at a time to their regular feed mix as I buy replacements. But we probably have at least 100 lbs of various types of dried beans that will need to be used up, and I don't have time to boil all those beans - especially given the challenge of storing them. We have very limited fridge space so I can't do a huge batch and then store it in the fridge for weeks. But boiling smaller batches every couple days would require significantly more time.
So my question is, does the soaking and fermentation accomplish the same thing as cooking them? Can I just add the dried beans to my dry feed and ferment them all together, and would that deactivate most of the lectins?
Thanks in advance!
We have a lot of old beans and grains that have been sitting in the shed in sealed buckets for years, just as an emergency deep pantry store. They're old enough that we want to get rid of those old stores and replace them with fresh batches, and it just makes sense to feed the old ones to the chickens. Not all at once but I've been adding one or two buckets of old grains at a time to their regular feed mix as I buy replacements. But we probably have at least 100 lbs of various types of dried beans that will need to be used up, and I don't have time to boil all those beans - especially given the challenge of storing them. We have very limited fridge space so I can't do a huge batch and then store it in the fridge for weeks. But boiling smaller batches every couple days would require significantly more time.
So my question is, does the soaking and fermentation accomplish the same thing as cooking them? Can I just add the dried beans to my dry feed and ferment them all together, and would that deactivate most of the lectins?
Thanks in advance!
