Hi Hubby's friend has begged me to take his rest . scraps after his first trash bill .The hogs will gladly eat all the plate scraps , no bones or trsh .How about potato peels? Should they be cooked ? Is there anything I should avoid feeding ? I have pigs,sheep,goats,cows,and chickens. Thanks

-- Patty {NY State} (fodfarms@slic.com), February 05, 2001

Answers

Patty:

I believe, technically, it is illegal to feed restaurant scraps to any animal which will be sold (put in the food chain off the homestead) unless they have been cooked first for a specific length of time at or above a specific temperature. For homegrown, I wouldn't have a problem with it. You can put on a lot of pounds from say a pizza shop's mistakes, salad bar trimmings and over-age produce. Really a shame to see them going to a landfill.

-- Ken S. in WC TN (scharabo@aol.com), February 05, 2001.

Be carful of tooth picks. I have a friend that lost some pigs because of them. They stuck holes in their intestines.

My pigs won't eat potato peelings unless they are cooked.

-- Rick (rjconstruction1@excite.com), February 05, 2001.

I recall reading in one of the farming magazines that govt regs require it to be pressure cooked down to a mash slurry at high temp to eliminate the "meat worms" from infecting the stock.

-- Jay Blair in N. AL (jayblair678@yahoo.com), February 05, 2001.

Eons ago, when I was a young 'un, my Mom taught at a small country school with a septic tank that handlesed their sewage needs. They gladly gave her the scraps from school lunches (two five gallon buckets, on most days) to feed our pig and HER litter. Lotsa good stuff in it, already cooked, and they were glad not to have to stress out their septic tank with the mess. It's illegal now, though. I do know our piggies loved the stuff!

-- Leann Banta (thelionandlamb@hotmail.com), February 05, 2001.

If pigs can get worms from cooked meat why cant we ? I am not looking for the legals {thanks already knew about them } is there any problem with giving potato peels to goats or sheep or cows ?

-- Patty {NY State} (fodfarms@slic.com), February 05, 2001.

My Mother has a small restraunt and we get their scraps for the chickens. They love them and do very well. I rarely have ill chickens. Her staff is careful to only put food items in the tubs. I use the animals as and egg and meat source for my family only.

-- Shau Marie (shau@centurytel.net), February 05, 2001.

Along with other suggestions, I'd be careful what you feed to any animals you are milking. We did this once, got salad bar leavings, and didn't realize how much cabbage-type stuff was in there. Whew! Bad milk for a few days! I wouldn't hesitate to give all this to chickens, though.

-- melina b. (goatgalmjb1@hotmail.com), February 05, 2001.

If you work in a city with a micro-brewery, check what they do with their spent malt. It is suppose to be excellent livestock feed for just about all critters.

-- Ken S. in WC TN (scharabo@aol.com), February 05, 2001.

Patty, A friend on another board lost a goat which she'd been feeding with "old" vegetables provided by a grocery store. She suspected it may have been sme chemicals. I would not use restaurant scraps for my animals.

-- Marsha (CaprisMaa@aol.com), February 05, 2001.

I'm not for sure but seems to me that hogs will not eat raw irish potatoes. Also know that you said you knew about the legal part and didn't care. The health department will care and will give you fits. All kinds of bad things can be transferred, probably would not be much of a problem if the stuff was just trimmings from food being prepared, but food from plates would cause me a big problem. Would be a risky idea for your family. My father got the scraps from the school cafeteria back in the 50's we fed hogs the food after we cooked it. Then they started having us cook it for so long at such and such a temperature that it was cheaper to buy hog feed than buy enough fuel to cook the scraps. I would not feed it to any animals I raise.

-- David (bluewaterfarm@mindspring.com), February 05, 2001.

Do you think they wash the grain before they mill it ? Or that they dont use chemicals when they grow it ? as for scraps very few diseases can be transmitted from animals to people .if the food is not let to sit and spoil i see no big problems .As for the health dept do you invite them to inspect your farm ? Thanks for the advise but what i was looking for is there any problem feeding raw potatoes to sheep ,goats, and cows .I would not feed them meat or grease .How many disease are spread from people sharing a glass or a fork ? same type thing .

-- Patty {NY State} (fodfarms@slic.com), February 05, 2001.

Hi,Patty, No you shouldn't have anything bad happen from feeding the potato peelings. Unfortunately, most animals won't eat raw potato peelings.Try it, and maybe if they will try them, you could add more as they get used to them. I always par boil any I have when I have pigs, but most of the time I run them through the blender for my worm bins, because I only raise pigs in the summer, and only cook them (the potato peels)when I make a huge potao salad or something, otherwise I don't have enough to bother cooking. On a lighter note, when I was a kid, every fall, my dad would build a fire under this huge cast iron cauldron he got somewhere (how I wish I had it!) He put in huge buckets of dinner scraps he got from the USMC base where he worked as a firefighter. (He was retired USMC).To that he added any frozen veggies from cleaning the freezer, any canned goods from the year before, and small potatoes from the garden harvest.(to this day, I still call small potatoes "pig potatoes".) This would simmer for about a month, as he added more and more scraps to it, and this was how he "finished" the pigs. Well, when us kids crested the hill walking home from the school bus, we could smell it, and it smelled so-o good!! Being kids, we were always starved coming home from school, and, of course,Daddy wouldn't let us touch it. After we did chores, we had to pick up at the wind-fall apples and toss them in, too. Gosh! you wouldn't believe how good it smelled then! My mother was an absolutely horrible cook, anyway, but going in to her insipid dinners after smelling that for a couple of hours was just about unbearable. Now, since Daddy was a fireman, that meant he worked 24 hours on, and 24 hours off. And the nights he was gone, it was my and my little brother's job to keep the fire stoked. (my mother actually woke us up every three hours to do it!) Well, you guessed it! The year I was eight, so my brother was six, we went out to stoke the fire and Matt brought a spoon out of his pocket. I told him not to, but he didn't listen, and dug in. Well, being the wiser older sister, I waited to see if he got sick. Then, of course, I had to go in to my mother's cooking...This is no lie, Daddy worked in the Fire Dept.for 5 years, and every other night for that whole time, us kids had fried Spam, fried boiled potatoes,and burned scrambled eggs for supper.Well, Matt didn't get sick, so I joined him in the nightly feast. Then my older sister joined us, then the one between me and my brother, then our "baby sisters". We were loving it, and not smart enough to figure out that Mom would notice we weren't eating our supper. So she sent out our oldest sister...a hard disciplitarian that used to pinch our cheeks mercilessly, knew exactly how to punch our arms without leaving a mark, and could pull our hair so hard we all should have been bald. She snuck up on us while we were all "pigging out" (pun intended) and caught us! We were all so scared, we froze, the youngest baby sister actually peed her pants. She stood there, towering over us, and in her harshest voice asked if any of us had gotten sick? "No," Patty, the second oldest whispered. And Linda, who was 16 years old, glared down at all of us, and while we shook in terror, suddenly whipped out not only a spoon, but her own bowl!! OH< GOSH! This is getting awful long, and I'm sorry, but I've got to finish the story...YEARS later, my Mom called me to tell me that My oldest sister and her family, and two of my other sisters and their families plus my brother, and Mom and Dad were all coming over to my house for dinner. My boys were only babies--11 months and 6 weeks, and I couldn't go to the grocery store, and I had about 6 hours...so I made a huge pot of my famous minestrone and homemade biscuits. When they all arrived, my brother announced, very loudly, that "Geez! It smells like somebody's been cooking pig slop in here!" I was appalled, and burst into tears, but, of course, he meant it as a total compliment. Later, after dinner, when Mama had fallen asleep on the couch (she was dying at the time, which was why everyone was home)we finally had a grown up discussion about eating the pig slop, and it turned out that DADDY ATE IT, TOO!! If you can imagine that many "grown ups" whispering together, making sure not to wake up the babies down the hall, or Grandma on the couch, and finally discussing something from almost 20 years before....I really am sorry this is so long, but it's a story I no longer have anyone to share it with....sometimes I just miss my big ol' family SO much! Kathie when I make like a huge potato salad or something, otherwise don't have enough at a time to bother with.

-- Kathie in Western Washington (twinrosefarm@worldnet.att.net), February 06, 2001.

If anyone else is considering this, they might want to restrict it to just non-ruminants (pigs and chickens). See following article:

February 5, 2001 Mad Cow Scare Lingers in S. Korea

---------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- A.P. INDEXES: TOP STORIES | NEWS | SPORTS | BUSINESS | TECHNOLOGY | ENTERTAINMENT ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 8:34 a.m. ET

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- Officials on Monday moved quickly to calm public fears about mad cow disease after announcing that 275 cattle were fed with leftover food that included animal meat and bones.

The government planned to test the cattle, but an official at the Agriculture and Forestry Ministry insisted there was no chance the animals had been infected, since the meat was from South Korea -- which has had no reported cases of mad cow disease.

``Our country has been free of the mad cow disease, so simply feeding leftover food does not cause the disease,'' said Lee Sang-joon.

Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is believed to spread by recycling meat and bone meal from infected animals back into cattle feed. Humans who eat infected meat are feared at risk of getting an equally fatal variant of the brain-wasting disease.

The ministry said 275 cattle had been fed leftover food from local restaurants which included meat and bones for more than a year starting in 1999.

Seoul's JoongAng Ilbo newspaper had reported in its Monday edition that around 300 cattle had been fed meat and it quoted experts saying such cattle should be quarantined or slaughtered as a preventive measure.

South Korea's government has obligated all traders importing animal feed and canned food stuffs to South Korea to attach a certificate guaranteeing that their product does not include any cow parts that came from European nations. South Korea currently bans importing cow- related products from 30 European nations, including the 15 European Union members.

South Koreans has been wary of mad cow disease after reports said last week that a 30-year-old man was suspected of suffering from the variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

Government doctors said that they found no evidence that the man suffered from it, but they said they must conduct further tests to be absolutely sure. The patient's family was refusing such tests, however.

Mad cow disease was first detected in Britain in the late 1980s. A growing number of cases have been reported in European nations.

Since the mid-1990s, about 80 Europeans, most of them Britons, have died of the variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, possibly after eating infected beef.

-- Ken S. in WC TN (scharabo@aol.com), February 06, 2001.

Katie i loved your story .Please feel free to share anytime and you can always email me to talk .Ken once again thanks for the wisdom .I already knew not to give meat to cows,goats, and sheep .Pigs and chickens only .But this is what this forum is for sharing and learning , maybe someone out there wasnt aware .

-- Patty {NY State} (fodfarms@slic.com), February 06, 2001.

Oh Kathie, I just loved it too. Just imagine the excitement of reliving it after all those years.

-- Lena(NC) (breezex4@go.com), February 06, 2001.

Instead of feeding it to your animals (in case you sell them, local laws reguarding such issues, etc..), with the exception of bones & meat scraps, you could just compost it. Lots of city dumps offer compost for free or only a minor fee, you need only shovel it yourself. Granted, it's probibly made mostly from leaves, grass clippings, yard waste (companies that clean up after a storm, or when they take down a tree, etc.), but you never know if they might be adding food scraps. If you can't use all the compost that it might make, you have something to sell to local gardeners.

animalfarms

-- animalfarms (jwlewis@indy.net), February 06, 2001.

Kathie, that was a great story! Please share another anytime! If you want to share my big family you just e-mail me anytime. One more is always welcome at my table! (most of my cookin is even edible! Well, except for one casserole, but I won't EVEVEVER do that one again!)

-- Nan (davidl41@ipa.net), February 08, 2001.

Up here the Ministry of Agriculture promotes dairy farmers to get free waste products from the large bakeries here (litterly tons every week) such as unsold or misbaked bread. My brother inlaw in Niagra Fall gets a free half ton truck a week of mispackaged boxed cereal from the Kellogs plant here to feed to pigs and family. He also gets free screenings from the local feed mill and about 40 gals of past expirey date chocolate milk per week from our local dairy. He figues he'd rather spend his time gathering free food for his couple dozen pigs, goats and chickens. He balances these with homegrown corn, wheat etc.

-- harald in ontario (stahl@bestnet.org), February 08, 2001.

I don;t know if pot bellys are different than meat pigs but my pot belly loves raw potatos and peelings. She's been eating them for 4 years now with no problems. She'll even eat orange peelings with great relish. I have found only one thing that she won't eat and it's hard to understand but she won't eat asparagus stalks. I would think that as long as you "sorted" through the garbage for who should eat what you shouldn't have any problems. My chickens have eaten almost every kind of left over I have put in front of them. They love any kind of cooked potatoes and any kind of cheese or macaroni product.

-- cindy palmer (jandcpalmer@sierratel.com), February 11, 2001.

Patty, I built an outside table and installed a garbage disposal in it for the purpose of grinding materials from the grocery store and cafe. Everything went into it.....bones, potatoes, ...everything. I fed hogs and chickens withit. I just put a bucket under the table and used a water hose to flush it.

Since I only fed hogs for meat and chickens there wasn't any problem with the types of food....however if you're feeding lactating animals you might note that onions and the onion family will taint the milk. Several years ago I lost a litter of rabbits because of this. Don't let it happen to you

-- Larry L. McWilliams (lmcwill@dellepro.com), February 11, 2001.

When you fill up your critters with other foods, they don't get their proper nutrition to grow and mature properly. And that stuff sure gives the meat and milk a different taste. No thanks, not to my liking.

And how long have those left-overs been out at room temperature? When you're looking to save a buck, think of the vet bill/critter replacement.

-- ~Rogo (rogo2020@yahoo.com), February 12, 2001.

For some reason this thread has gotten responses that surprised me .I didn't think you could but you did .First of all milk flavor would not be affected as they only get bread and veggies .As for the pigs and chickens they will eat anything .How do you all think these animals where fed before all that fancy food we just HAVE to buy from the feed store ? And do you know and understand all of what is in the commercial feed ? That pork you bought from the store did it come with a label as to what it was feed ? How about what hormones it was given ? Antibiotics ? I think not .The food is picked up and feed out every day .As far as taste its the best pork I have ever had , must be all that clean living , seeing sunlight and not being injected with every chemical known to man .To live the lifestyle i want for my family I need to make the most of every penny , this fits the bill .

-- Patty {NY State} (fodfarms@slic.com), February 12, 2001.