I’ve made wine and jelly with aronia berries. They lose all of the astringency when cooked for jelly or juice extraction.
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i feed my harvest to my flock of chickens, it vastly improves egg quality. the hens love them fresh and like them dried. i planted 5 more bushes this year.
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i did the same as i still have some frozen from last year. i read awhile back that they are good for deworming as well.
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i didn’t know about the deworming effects, good to know.
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ive only seen it mentioned once so take it with a grain of salt.
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dried aronia are fairly palatable, ive got a cup of them that was left in my truck for a month or two and they dried up like raisins, I still snack on them…
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Going to be a good wild harvest here this year, been snacking on them a bit…my 2 and 4 year old even grab a handful occasionally. Decent sugar content.
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what if i was to buy 500 lbs. from you, what would be your price per pound? my plan is to make chicken feed additive to sell to backyard chicken keepers. meaning i could buy less than prefect berries that you would not sell to someone planning for human consumption.
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those the Iroquois beauty dwaff ones? mine are 10 and 12ft tall.
They are just the wild type growing in my lightly managed meadow in and amongst the wild blueberries, willows, cranberries, winter berry and swamp roses. The meadow was bush hogged 5 or 6 years ago.
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Ive never seen them wild up here and neither has anyone else ive talked to. ive only seen 1 wild black elder here as well. plenty of wild red ones though.
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do you have a recipe or process instructions? Sounds like an interesting concept…
If you want to set something up next year, shoot me a price. Let me know if you are picking or me. 500 pounds is no problem. This year, you’re about a month late. If you want them all the price will be lower, but i wont know in advance the total yield.
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from what i was able to figure out 4% of Aronia added to the feed was the effective dose rate that will provide protection to ROS, ROS is Reactive Oxygen Species that utterly destroys the ovaries in hens, considering they produce 200 to 300 eggs a year their machinery need all the protection you can provide, You will need a freeze dryer to process them, a unit will cost about $4.5K from Harvest Right, considering one extra large Freeze Dryer unit can process 10,000 pounds a year at 4 runs a week 500 pounds will be no problem. So at 48 pounds a run it will take 18 days to process 500 lbs,
So for every 100 pounds of feed 4 pounds of Aronia will need to be added to provide the antioxidants they need, 7% added to feed showed no additional improvement, so 4% was the economical dose rate.
my recipe is 4% Aronia, 2% kelp, 5% crushed red pepper, 2% Oregano, and 3% proteins of your choice. remember the layer feed must have at minimum 16% protein, so adding the supplements reduces the protein in the feed, so it must be added to the amendments to bring the feed back up to 16% protein per serving.
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Thanks for the reply, I will let you know once i get everything figured out and buy the equipment i’ll need to process the raw berries. are you in Michigan? I was going to test the waters with a small batch of product for sale to feed stores to see how it works out next year, Dried Aronia is supper expensive and making a reasonable profit is not likely at those prices, so i must buy them direct from the farmer and process them myself.
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Sounds like a very interesting plan. Is there a specific study with aronia and chickens or was this just antioxidants in general?
note: fixed the spelling of aronia since my phone autocorrected it to another language… again.
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Why would they need to be freeze dried vs simply dehydrated?
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Animals | Free Full-Text | Feed Supplemented with Aronia melanocarpa (AM) Relieves the Oxidative Stress Caused by Ovulation in Peak Laying Hens and Increases the Content of Yolk Precursors this is the study done.
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you could buy a commercial dehydration machine, i guess it may not matter, but freeze drying protects 98% of the nutrients, the study used powdered Aronia that was probably dehydrated and it did provide protection to the reproductive systems of the hens. Antioxidants in general will protect the hens, so pomegranate could probably be used rather than Aronia is my guess, but no study was preformed with pomegranates.
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My guess is that finding a fine line between nutrition, cost of equipment, and cost of aronia is something worth putting a spreadsheet together and sorting out prior to spending 4.5k on a freeze dryer. It sounds like you are doing your best to provide the best conditions for your flock. That is very commendable. Thanks for sharing the study and your feed mix!