Our biggest customer for the wheat is a nursery that supplies Jamba Juice with their wheat grass. They find that our wheat germinates very well and buy it by the ton. If it is good for us why not our chickens? They do love it and we just had to find a way to consistently produce it.
Here's how we do it: the wheat is soaked in buckets filled with water for 5 hours. Then the bucket is emptied into a Rubbermaid tote that has holes drilled in the bottom. The water drains away and we put the tote with a lid on into our 'proofer'. I bought a bakery proofing cabinet on Craigslist. This keeps the germinating grains at 80F. We flush the grains with fresh water a couple of times and by the next morning the radicle has emerged. We then feed the sprouted grains to the chickens and the whole process starts again. The grains in the picture above have been in the proofing cabinet 2 days and the roots have grown long.
Are sprouted grains better? I I am led to beleive that they are more digestable, the protein level is increased and they can be a bigger part of the diet thus saving on bought in feed.
