Feed storage: moisture, mice, and the false economy of buying bulk

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Research. None of this has sat through a summer in our barn yet. What follows is how feed goes off in storage, what each container protects against, and how to size for a small place. When ours has been through a humid August, this page gets updated with the date.

The container is the cheap part of feed storage. What you are really deciding is how much feed you keep on hand.

Moisture is the problem. Rodents are the symptom.

Mice are visible, infuriating, and cost you less than damp does.

Grain and pelleted feed take up moisture out of the air. Warm and humid is the bad combination, and here it runs for months. Feed that has taken on water heats, clumps and molds, and molded feed gets thrown out. Whether anything short of obviously spoiled is fit to feed is a question for your vet.

A sealed container in a damp building is worse than a loose lid in a dry one. Seal warm humid air in with the feed and it stays there. A temperature swing in an uninsulated barn condenses it under the lid and it drips back onto the feed. Dry building first, sealed container second.

Concrete wicks. A can standing on a slab pulls moisture up through the bottom, rusts out from underneath, and spoils the last few inches of every fill. Put a pallet under it.

Cans, bins and totes

Galvanized steel cans. Mice and rats cannot chew galvanized steel, which is the one thing plastic cannot claim. A 30-gallon can holds roughly 100 to 125 pounds of pelleted feed depending on density. They rust at the bottom seam, and the lid needs a strap because a raccoon will have it off. Full, it is a two-person lift.

Poly bins and drums. No rust, lighter, usually a proper latching lid. A settled rodent population will chew polyethylene given time. It is not the barrier steel is. Good inside a building you have already sealed, weak as the last line.

IBC totes and bulk bins are sized for somebody buying by the ton. On a small place you would hold feed far longer than it stays fresh. This one does not scale down, whatever the price per pound says.

Keep the bag

Put the whole bag inside the container instead of tipping it in loose.

The bag carries the tag: the analysis panel, ingredients, mill or lot date, and feeding directions. Tip it in and you have thrown away the only document that says what is in there. If a question comes up, that tag is what a vet or a nutritionist will ask to see, and the directions on it are the instruction that counts.

It also keeps two feeds from becoming one. Some rations are formulated for one species and labeled not to be fed to another, and medicated feeds carry their own restrictions. Two open bins and one shared scoop is how that goes wrong.

Sizing for a small place

The right capacity is not the largest that fits in the corner. It is what you will get through before it goes off.

Work backwards. What your animals use in a week, times the weeks you want covered, plus the week the road is iced and you are not getting to town. That is the number.

Milled feed with added fat and vitamins is the perishable end, so the mill date is worth reading and freshness is worth more than a discount. Whole grain, salt and sealed mineral keep considerably longer. Bulk means different things for different products.

Several small containers beat one large one. They keep the feeds separate, they are light enough to tip out and dry, and they empty often enough that you actually clean them. A container that never runs empty never gets cleaned.

The bulk discount you cannot store

Buying by the ton is genuinely cheaper per pound. It assumes four things: dry covered space, containers to hold it, a way to move it, and enough animals to get through it before it turns.

Miss one and you paid less per pound for feed you threw away. On a handful of head, bagged feed bought more often from the nearest mill is often cheaper once waste is counted, and always fresher.

Where bulk earns its keep on a small place is the things that do not spoil. Salt, and mineral kept sealed and off the floor.

What we are putting in

The containers are not bought, and by the order this article sets out the building comes before them anyway. Two things decide the rest and we have neither. The first is what the animals here go through in a week, weighed rather than estimated, which sets how many containers and how big. The second is what the rodent pressure in that building turns out to be, because that is what decides whether poly is enough or whether the barrier has to be steel — damp is a building problem and no lid fixes it.

Buying updates this section with what was bought, how many, what type, what they cost, and the date. It does not touch the tag. Whether the feed came through clean, whether anything condensed under a lid, and what we changed when it did are things August answers. Research stays on this page until the feed has been through a humid August.

Before you buy

• Fix the building before you buy the container. Dry space first, seal second.
• Size on weekly use, not on the space available.
• A pallet under every container is a few dollars against a spoiled bin — the gate latch argument applied to feed.

— Chris D., McEwen, Tennessee