This is a FodderKing 12-24 fodder system. It is advertised at producing 52 lbs of fodder in each channel and has 24 channels. This means if you soak overnight and can get growth in 6 days you can do 4 channels a day producing over 200 lbs of fresh fodder for livestock every day.
Barley is ideal to use but it is hard to get in my area and the shipping cost of ordering it doubles the cost of the seed so we are using oats and sunflower seeds. The sunflowers produce very top heavy greens but the root system is not as dense as the oats so we have been using a mixture of them both together which produces the most weight and fodder but the sunflower seeds leftover shells also produce mold that the oats on their own don't.
We are still working out the kinks of the system and how much water each tray gets from a wide open full flood and run tray to a drip all day type of setup. This system was set up in a shipping container but was not working since the container is very airtight and the extra moisture from the system was causing to much moisture to build up and mold so we had to empty out another building completely and then move the system into the new building and put it all back together again. The new building will work for now but I still need to get it insulated and temperature controlled a little better before the hot summer comes.
I have noticed a big growth difference in the top trays where the light hits the most and it is not only much greener and denser but also much taller then the other trays that are days older so we are also installing some 6500k grow lights. This should give even more growth in a shorter time and a better yield.
I made one change to the system from the way they had it setup and it has made things so much easier when I just twist off the joint and put a different one on attached to another hose so I can empty the reservoir and pump the water right out the door without needing a 2nd pump or a bunch of complicated steps. The water needs to be dumped about every 2 to 3 days so my next task is going to be building a few raised beds outside the building so I can run the pump hose to the beds and water them with the reservoir when the water needs to be changed.
Right now I get about 4 buckets of fodder from each channel and 7 channels out of a 50 lb bag of seeds. This turns out to be just $2 a channel and even better at $0.50 a bucket of fodder. Right now the cheapest feed we have is shelled corn we bulk buy but still runs right around $2.50 a bucket. Regular hog feed runs around $7.50 a bucket and when we were bulk buying pallets of organic hog feed it was still running us $11.25 a bucket. As you can see we can we can feed 4x as much and still come in 5 times cheaper than where we were. This is also great with the other animals since it is much more digestible at 80% compared to 40% dry grain and the goats, chickens, rabbits and cows all love it also. I am usually feeding close to 5 bales of hay a day to our 5 cows but by adding 3 buckets of fodder they have dropped back to 3 bales a day. That is $1.50 for the fodder compared to the $12 the two bales cost us. Big difference. We are moving to put the cows on rounds but don't have the equipment to handle the big ones and can't get my truck into the pens to drop it since the cows have created a mud hole right inside the gate area so we are going to be moving them to another area to fix this and start dropping rounds soon. Right now it is saving me about $15-$20 a day on feed cost but once we change over to rounds and get everyone adjusted to the fresh fodder it should save use $250-$300 a week on feed cost.
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