Wheatgrass For Your Pets

Kangaroos and Wallabies love wheatgrass too! (Program feeding injured/sick native animals wheatgrass)

Hi Richie,
Some months ago I purchased some of your seed trays and I ended up having a short discussion with one of your team about what we are doing with them.

We live on a rural property near Katherine in the Northern Territory and we have a small program that rehabilitates injured/orphaned wildlife - manly macropods (Kangaroos and Wallabies) and an even smaller program breeding and releasing some less common species.

Today we have in captivity 3 Nail-tail Wallabies, 3 Antilopine Kangaroos, 4 Agile Wallabies and 2 Ringtail possums (all of which will be released during the coming wet season). All were either orphaned or in some way injured - dog attack being a common theme.

During our dry season we receive almost no rain and conditions become very dry. We have been looking and trialing various feed supplements for our captive animals, these range from cracked corn, Lucerne hay, roo pellets from Laucke mills and other mixtures of grains. Whilst all these are very successful we still lacked a way to give the animals fresh green feed.

Some years ago I read a short article about growing fodder on a large scale to feed cattle during periods of drought - this got me to thinking about how this could be done on a smaller scale - i.e. with a capacity to produce about 2 - 4 kg a day.

Ironically one of the issues holding up our project was the lack of a good quality seed tray. We could get large trays suitable for large scale production and we could get cheap brittle plastic nursery trays but not a good quality (food grade) tray of an appropriate size. One day whilst hunting on the net for trays I came across the Sprout website and my tray problems were solved. Various small scale experiments have helped develop the concept to the point that we are now about to kick off into full production.

Our model is simple -
We soak 150 grams of seed in a very week nutrient mix for 4-8 hours (glass jar in a sunny location) This swollen mix is then places in a seed tray and placed in our "warm house"
Over the next 7 days the seed is watered every two hours - for one minute - during daylight - with a week nutrient mix. After 7 days the tray has increased in weight by between 5 to 8 times and is then rinsed under fresh water and fed to the locals. Each day we place several trays into the warm house thus the supply is perpetuated and volumes can be varied at relatively short notice.

The nutrient mix we use is an organic seaweed mix which is mixed with water into a 200ltr tank and applied via overhead misters controlled by a simple timer. The warm house is a frame, partially cover by clear plastic. As we live in a tropical environment we do not need to heat the growing facility as our southern farmers do - thus we save significantly on heating costs. The aim of the warm house is to slightly raise the humidity and to offer more protection than shade cloth could. Adequate ventilation is important so as to reduce the growth of mould and unwanted bugs.

We have been producing small batches of fodder whilst we fiddle with the nutrient mix and the spray pattern of the watering system - all is looking positive and we are now ready to scale up our production to provide regular a daily supplement to our animals.

The attached photos show a few early samples being sampled by some of our wild visitors (our property is all bush and we have numerous wild visitors) The animals feeding in these photos are all Agile Wallabies.

Thank you for your seed trays.
Cheers
David Marshall

David & Pauline Marshall have worked with wildlife rehabilitation for over 20 years and also work together with the Katherine Wildlife Rescue Service and Wild-care NT, Australia who take care of sick/injured native animals. For more info go to http://www.nt.gov.au/nreta/wildlife/animals/rescue.html