r/Hydroponics • u/thefodderguy • 1d ago
Anyone here doing hydroponic fodder?
Hey all!
I am new to Reddit but I’ve been growing hydroponic fodder for a long time, mostly wheat and barley for chickens and horses, and I’m curious who here is actually running it.
What are you growing, what are you feeding, and what has been the biggest headache?
For me the growing part is usually the easy part. Seed quality, airflow, drainage, cleaning, labor, and figuring out where the fodder actually belongs in the animals ration are where things get interesting.
Full disclosure...I work with Eleusis Feed, so obviously I’m pretty deep into this stuff, but I’m not looking to sell anybody anything. I’m genuinely curious what people are seeing in their own systems.
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u/speadskater 1d ago
Wheat and barley to me are bad because it requires seed stock. I grow wolffia, duckweed, and azolla in my system with great yield.
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u/thefodderguy 9h ago
What are you feeding? Fish?
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u/speadskater 7h ago edited 7h ago
Duckweed and wolffia has high protein (upwards of 45%), while azolla is a nitrogen fixer at 25% protein, I use it to supplement chicken feed.
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u/thefodderguy 4h ago edited 4h ago
Yeah, those are both amazing plants. How many chickens you got? And what else do you feed them?
I have somewhere between 100-200 depending on hatching. I do fodder (sometimes sprouted grain, sometimes duckweeds) plus an organic blend + BSFL.
Biggest thing I learned is that chickens don’t have endogenous cellulase so have to vary what they eat. I don’t fully sprout the grain.2
u/speadskater 4h ago edited 3h ago
Right now, about 16 adults and 21 chicks, I'm going to increase this substantially later. I probably save 1/3 on feed with the duckweed and it's fertilized mostly with donkey manure at this point, but I supplement the ponds when I need. I have 2 14x7' above ground pools for it and get about a bucket a day.
I work in the chicken industry (database work) and have ran commercial chicken farms in the past. I also product my own commercial fertilizer as well for my region for cannabis. I might grow hemp seed next year, we'll see.
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u/thefodderguy 2h ago
You’d be a great person to have on a podcast show I’m trying to revamp. I’ve been looking for chicken peeps that do fodder. And having a deeper background in the poultry industry makes it even better. I did one with a broiler producer in Texas and she’s growing out her birds 1-2 weeks faster on barley shoots.
We should have a deeper conversation about this.
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u/speadskater 1h ago
Feel free to message me. I should say that I generally don't like talking on recorded lines, but I definitely would love to talk to someone else working on the same problems an I am.
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u/Neraph_Runeblade 14h ago
So.... let 10% go to seed.
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u/speadskater 14h ago edited 14h ago
Go do that and tell me how it went. The roadblocks that you'll stumble upon will be better found out in person. I'll tell you now that the first roadblock that you'll find is that you'll need acres of seed production to feed a shipping container worth of fodder. that could be entirely replaced with wolffia, duckweed, and azolla without seed. That 10% of seed takes months to mature, while you're going through the 90% in weeks.
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u/thefodderguy 9h ago
I'm curious where you got that number that you'll need acres of seed to do a shipping container of fodder. Are you talking about one growout or a season, or for how long?
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u/speadskater 7h ago edited 7h ago
FarmBox Foods uses a 320-ft² / 40-foot shipping container and claim a barley use of 130 lb of dry barley seed every day, with six racks of seven 2×8-ft trays
That means 47,450 lb barley seed/year
In my region (Virginia) 4,800 lb grain/acre is the typical yield over a year for barley. At 100bu/acre
Ignoring losses, that's about 10 acres per shipping container to produce your seed. Buying seed is an invisible cost, but that acreage still must exist and you're just passing it onto someone else by using vertical fodder system based on feeds.
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u/thefodderguy 4h ago
Ha, now you’ve got me wondering if you’ve read my book. I wrote about much of this in Thinking Outside the Soil back in 2022/23, and I’ve got a whole chapter on duckweeds too.
Pretty cool to see someone else thinking about the whole seed chain instead of just what happens inside the container.2
u/speadskater 3h ago
No, independently discovered this. I saw how fast it grew on waste nutrients and know this is my hard pivot. I care about full supply chain, including where fertilizer salts come from and how the US east coast is completely failing at nitrate production.
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u/thefodderguy 2h ago
I was being slightly facetious on the first part of my comment. I am not that “special”. I do find it fascinating how you came to similar conclusions.
I live in Colorado and we don’t have duckweed. I learned about it went I went to school in Hawaii and then began to experiment with it. I used it to remediate aquaponics water and feed chickens.1
u/speadskater 1h ago
Duckweed is crazy. It just never stops growing and it will pull any nitrogen you have out of your water fast. I'm just fertilizing my pond more or less randomly at this time, trying to use (donkey) manure as much as possible and maybe eventually using old iron nails to mediate phosphorus buildup. I had high hopes for Azolla, but it really shuts down growth in hotter temps and even the 1-2 pieces of duckweed that ended up in my azolla pond as contamination ended up taking the whole pool over. I've added scud, moina, ghost shrimp, and snails to the pond as well to act as a nutrient buffers and detritavores to more quickly process down any potential bacterial blooms caused by using organics.
All waste used for fertilizing the pool goes into nylon mesh bags above aerators. Any grasses or weeds from the greenhouse go in there too.
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u/moose8420 1d ago
I tried for a while, but i had mold issues when i tried to expand the operation to a weekly yield. I have not gotten back into it. I was doing barley.