Handling And Storage Of Animal Feeds

A farmer near Ogbomoso spends a whole afternoon weighing and mixing a perfectly balanced 20% crude-protein ration, exactly as the Pearson square recommends. She pours the finished mash into old fertiliser sacks and stacks them on the bare floor of a dark storeroom. Six weeks later the sacks are damp, the maize smells sour, and grey-green mould has crept through half the pile. The nutrients she calculated so carefully are gone, and so is the money spent buying the ingredients. Formulating the right ration is only half the job: handling it correctly from mixer to store, and storing it correctly afterward, decides whether that ration ever reaches the animal at all.

In this lesson you will learn the methods of handling feed correctly from weighing through to feeding out, the conditions and structures that keep stored feed safe, and the real cost of getting either wrong: mould, the toxin it can produce, pest damage, nutrient loss and money lost that a farmer can never recover.