I had someone offer me some hemp biomass for free for my pigs. I am totally on board but wanted to make sure it wouldn’t hurt my pigs. I’d supplement about 1/4 of their feed. We feed them a ton of produce, some corn and Milo, and canna Lillie’s.
I know pig farmers use ethanol distilled grain byproducts to feed their pigs. This is the same concept, right?
She said we could wet it a few times to get a lot of the ethanol out.
by Immediate_Cake9151
9 Comments
The stems should be fine.
The ethanol and coconut oil is from tincture and edible production. No idea how they’ll react to high levels of cannabinoids like CBD. If they’re making D9 / THCA , your pigs will get high af. If it’s truly “hemp” test and see if they act high – piss themselves unnaturally, fall over, heavy breathing, wide eyes, vomit, etc.
Many many years ago they did a bizarre foods episode(I think) with hogs raised mainly on hemp, spent cannabis etc and sold for a premium. It’s a thing.
It doesn’t have great digestibility unless it’s been fermented by fungi beforehand.
Hemp stalks are extremely fibrous, and pigs lack that type of cellulolytic digestive system.
The ethanol would be my concern, with distillers grain it is either dried and the ethanol evaporated off or pressed and the majority of the ethanol is gone and the longer it sits the more evaporates off.
If you try to squeeze some and liquid comes out it’s probably got to much ethanol in it but if you really squeeze down on it and nothing comes it would probably be fine to feed it to them.
You could always spread it out outside somewhere for a couple days to let some of the ethanol evaporate off, I think that would be easier than soaking or rinsing to remove the ethanol.
When you start feeding it to the pigs start slow and keep a close eye on them for behavior changes and changes to bathroom habits, if they start to piss a lot or their stools become soft
Pigs dont have the fermentation based stomach for breaking down the stems.
The alcohol would be a bad move for the pigs.
The coconut oil would very likely effect their fat make up. I wouldn’t feed any high fat diet to pigs because of this.
Yeah I’d wanna know more information about processing. If it wasn’t heated, there wouldn’t be an intoxicating effect if pigs react similarly to humans. I don’t have pigs myself to have any wisdom about their tolerance for alcohol or coconut oil.
Double check that the ethanol saturated material was extracted using food grade ethanol and not denatured (which is usually denatured with heptane).
Most extraction labs in the hemp industry use denatured ethanol because drinking ethanol has like a 300% tax.
Source: organic hemp farmer and hemp processor
Stay away from the stuff that’s been ethanol saturated.
What you don’t feed to pigs compost the biomass on next years garden plots.