Interesting find, but I already designed my trusses around the light weight polycarbonate, I'll just have to use a shaded polycarb.
Fodder-
This isn't the most common method of producing animal feed, so I might as well give a little background on it here.
Here's a few pics of a large production facility nearby. He's producing right about 4,000lbs of sprouted barley each day and feeding about 700 mustangs. That's not enough fodder, but I don't know how much bailed hay he's also feeding, last I heard he wanted to double his fodder production in order to stop buying hay.
Hard to tell in this pic because the plastic is clean, but the end of the try is butted up against a clear plastic 'wall' that keeps the barley seed from washing off.
This is his recirculation pump for his water. I don't know why he recirculates it, in my experience unless you are really trying to conserve water it's not worth it. The water gets really funky really fast and spreads mold and fungi issues. If you keep it filtered, slightly chlorinated and only recirculate 75% each watering it isn't too bad, but that's a lot of effort and equipment for water that's usually pretty cheap here.
Flunkie loading the tray-
This is the best shot I've got of his finished product. And imo it's not nearly as good as it could be. You can see all the unsprouted seed on the bottom of the mat, showing that his germination rate stinks. Also, he should have a really tight and thick root mat that allows you to pick it up and it's hard to tear. His root mat is almost non-existant, I think it's because he either waters too often or doesn't have enough angle on the trays to get the water back off. Also, you can get almost high in the room due to the high oxygen content, so he really needs a better air transfer system than he's using.
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Another shot of the trays. He should have a 1-2" thick white layer of roots at the base of these if it was running better. You can see the poor sprouting rate in the trays to the left, they'll fill in but it takes a few days longer and his overall weight per pound of seed is a lot lower than it could be.
Another shot of one of the three banks of trays.
Here's a few shots of some stuff I have sprouted-
This shows the effect of having poor quality trays that let the water settle into the center and stunting the growth of the seeds. We also cut it into chunks because cows are retarded and didn't do well on the full biscuit. If we cut it into bite-sized pieces they did very well. Horses are smart enough to tear pieces off and they do well without cutting it.
Day 1 (after a 24hr pre-soak in water with just a touch of chlorine (tap water works best))
Day 2
Day 3
Some of the cotton mold issues we've had. Not sure why they start or why they quit, it seems random, but I do know that when the environment is perfect, water is kept up to proper temps and air is fresh, I seldom have any issue.
This is a batch of barley I got that has a lot of rye in it. I like it, the rye sprouts very fast and the cows love it. Straight barley shown for comparison.
Details-
I buy the barley for about $0.08/lb and if everything is perfect (never) you can theoretically get about 12-14lbs of fodder for each pound of dry seed. We can get up to 10 at times, but average more like 7-8lbs/lb.
Large animals eat more fodder than dry hay, per pound, because it's wet. Comparisons to dry hay are a little weird but I'll sum up by saying that when I fed my 1300lb steer nothing but 30lbs of fodder through the heart of the winter, he gained weight. That means I can put weight on a steer, in the winter, for less cost per month than feeding a small dog. That's pretty cheap.