New Era for Sprout Feeding - Glenn Innes NSW

An affordable feed mixing wagon which blends grain sprouts into a complete ration is set to revolutionise small scale intensive livestock feeding in Australia. Visit Glen Farm Website for more...

The Glen Farm mixer invented by northern NSW sheep and cattle producer Ray Kneipp made its public debut at the 2010 AgQuip field day at Gunnedah and AgShow in Toowoomba. Raymond and his wife Brenda will demonstrate the machine at the lamb feedlot on their Dundee district property north of Glen Innes.

“I wanted to build a machine that could mix a finishing diet for livestock based on grain sprouts. I’m confident there will be a big market for it to produce a very economical ration which delivers good liveweight gains. “The performance of the sprouts blended with other ingredients is much more effective than if they are fed separately as stock will eat selectively, ” Raymond said.“Using the mixer I can turn out a high quality feed for about $170 a tonne where any othercomplete ration would cost $350 to $400. This makes the mixer a very good investment at $18,000 plus GST.” He has been feeding barley sprouts to his sheep since 2007 when he took took delivery of his first unit from Toowoomba company Fodder Solutions in 2007.
It produces 240 kilos of sprouts every day which he has added to the diet of lambs and hoggets and for overwintering ewes. He is now in the process of installing a larger 500 kilo sprouting unit to use with the mixing wagon to feed about 250 lambs at a time. “It will also be used to fatten our cull wethers. If you can get the dressed weight up over 24 kilos you get the benefit of the weight gain as well as a higher price per kilo,” Raymond said.
The mixing wagon which drives off a tractor three point linkage, has separate chutes for feeding in sprout biscuits, each weighing about 8 kilos, and cheap roughage such as crop stubble. He blends a mix of about 260 kilos containing 150 kilos of sprouts, 90 kilos of barley, about 5 kilos of crop stubble and 15 kilos of cotton seed. A proprietary lamb finishing product is added at about 20 grams a head. “Sheep can be picky eaters, but if they just get the blended ration, I have found the intake by each animal goes up from about 1.5 kilos to around 2.5 kilos. That translates into higher weight grains and I’m hoping to get 2 kilos a week when I get our new feedlot into production using the mixing wagon.”
“We’ve generated a lot of interest in the new mixer to value-add sprout feeding at the field days and people can come and see the system working for themselves at Dundee,” Raymond said