# Feeding Soybean Hulls



## seanmn (Jan 10, 2006)

Does anyone here have any experience with feeding soybean hulls/stems to goats....was thinking I could collect some after the combine harvests the soybeans. could it be used to reduce the amount of hay fed?


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## KSALguy (Feb 14, 2006)

i fed soybean hay to my goats one year and they did AWSOME on it, some of the does bred twice that year and all had twins or more, soybean is high in protien and roughage so goats do great on it,


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## Sweet Goats (Nov 30, 2005)

OK, I heard the goats should not have very much soybeans becasue it does something to them, I don't remember. Someone said it like affects their liver or kidneys. Has anyone else heard that? I have a 50 pound bag of soybean that I have been worried to give them.


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## KSALguy (Feb 14, 2006)

never heard that at all, in Kansas when the SoyBean crop doesnt produce due to lack of rain but is still nice and leafy they put it up as hay, there are soybean pods at differint stages of development and this gets fed to both cattle and Goats quite regularly. 
my Goats did great on the soybean hay, i have heard some people avoid soybean for Poultry but i dont know what their basis or proof of hazzard is on that eather.


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## Jcran (Jan 4, 2006)

I know cottonseed hulls are bad for pigs; no clue on soybean.


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## Guest (Oct 16, 2006)

KSALguy said:


> i have heard some people avoid soybean for Poultry but i dont know what their basis or proof of hazzard is on that eather.


All raw peas and beans contain an enzyme called trypsin, which damages the lining of poultry stomachs. Beans/peas must be roasted or boiled to break down the trypsin, so they can eat it. As far as I know, this is not an issue with ruminants.

http://www.lionsgrip.com/protein.html

Edit: Scratch that, they contain a trypsin inhibitor. Trypsin is a digestive enzyme that breaks down protein. So I have no idea if soy is bad for goats or not.


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## paperboy-7 (Feb 15, 2005)

hi all soybeans are ok in very sm amounts say a handfull aday i think werer talking about the hulls and stems called stubble around here in tn my goats love the stubble hay but as any rich food not to much say a flik for 2 goats aday as anything---watch their dropings if they get to wet or clump-- back off the amount as any feed change go slow..later p


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## seanmn (Jan 10, 2006)

Thank you all for your input...I was actually thinking I might take some temporary electric fences out in the field and let the goats collect it themselves but would still give them a little hay and bring them back up to the barn at night...


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## luvfarmin04 (Sep 28, 2006)

In my experience I would not use soybean, especially in pregnant goats. Soybeans cause thyroid problems in goats and the results can be terrible. My neighbor had a herd of boer goats who would graze the soybean field after harvest. That year they had baby goats who were born dead with HUGE goiters on their necks. Two of the nannys could not pass the head of their babies because the goiters were larger than the kid's head. Both mom and baby died. A few were hairless with underdeveloped hooves. It was the most horrible thing I have ever seen. A few of the kids that lives had lumps on their necks which took quite a while to recede. Next year the goats were banned from the soybean field and they had perfect kids ever since.


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## KSALguy (Feb 14, 2006)

fresh Soybean should not be fed to ANYTHING its too rich, but Soybean HAY is FINE, i fed soybean hay free choice for a year with no problems, it actually improved fertility and condition in my herd of Boer and %boers


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## Sweet Goats (Nov 30, 2005)

KSALguy said:


> fresh Soybean should not be fed to ANYTHING its too rich, but Soybean HAY is FINE, i fed soybean hay free choice for a year with no problems, it actually improved fertility and condition in my herd of Boer and %boers


 Ok if that is correct, why do they sell it? What do you mean by fresh? What I have is in a 50# bag and dry. I was told to give it to them in small amounts, like a handful, like paperboy7 said. But reading this, I am really even more confussed. I know it is my call. Thanks for all the advice.


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## Rockin'B (Jan 20, 2006)

We always have used Soybean as a supplement so it's mixed with corn and Milo, or corn and oats to create a finished feed. This was for cattle and pigs. The key point being, it's a supplement.

Where we lived in Nebraska it was common practice to put sheep and goats on harvested soybean fields to eat hulls and stalks.

Is there really much difference between deer and goats? I saw a handful of deer eating in the middle of a picked bean field on the way home from work last night. They seemed to enjoy it!


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## goathappy (Sep 1, 2006)

Here is an article I wrote for my blog about soybeans. Soy is not good for animals or humans. Never has, never will be. I will have to split the article into 2 parts, as it is to long to post here. You shouldn't have any problems grazing them on a harvested bean feild. You just have to watch nitrogen levels somtimes.
========================
As I write this article, I intend to inform everybody that reads it the negative effects of soy on animals and humans. The articles that I refer to in this one, refer to the negative effects of soy in humans, but after raising goats, I realize that animals are very much like humans in many ways. So therefore, you should apply this to your animals too. Please pass the article along, because the negative effects of soy is a subject that is hardly touched, since so many false studies have made the public think that soy is a good, healthy food. Do not blame it on the farmers though, it is not their fault.

When we first started with goats in April of â05, we didnât know as much as we do now about nutrition and feeding them. Therefore, we used a feed ration that was given to us by a natural feed company which we had dealt with before for chicken food ingredients. That ration was a mix of mostly roasted soybeans(raw soybeans contain urea which can kill your goats) and corn, with a little oats, plus some of the companyâs minerals mixed in. When we got the goats, they were sick anyway. They were very mineral deficient, had travel sickness, snotty noses, coughs, etc. It took them about a month to get rid of the travel sickness using homeopathic remedies. We could not get rid of the coughs or the snotty noses. We got the goats on good minerals, they started to improve with the rough coats, and got nice and shiny, but they still had coughs and snotty noses. 
When breeding season came(about August â05) it was taking the does a couple heats to settle(we had 10 Boer cross does and 1 Boer buck). Then they finally all settled. It was cold in November and December, warm in January and February, and then really cold again in March and April, when the goats kidded. We had probably 3-4 does that re-absorbed their fetuses when it got really cold. You could tell they did that because they would get really down and depressed, very sick, we had to bring one in our basement that almost died. After that, we took a step back and looked at the herd health. What was causing this? Soybeans. We switched the feed at a crucial point in pregnancy(less than 2 months before their due date)but, it was like a 360 degree turn around. Everybody seemed healthier, no more snotty noses, and no more coughs. When kidding finally came, the kids were a bit smaller, probably due to the feed change at that point in pregnancy.
Our goats are now fed a ration of barley, oats, black oil sunflower seeds, and wheat. I will post our feed recipe and the success weâve had with it on another blog post.
We have found that chickens can stand soy because they have gizzards. It is ruminants that it bothers the most. I have no experience with swine on the subject of feeding soy.

Here are some of the many articles I have found on the negative effects of soy. First up, an excerpt from the book The Makerâs Diet by Jordan S. Rubin. We have been going by his diet, even before we read the book.
_âIn Asia soy products are never used as a primary food! They are used as condiments or in traditionally fermented forms. Unfermented soybeans, and soy products are high in phytic acid, an antinutrient that carries minerals out of the body. Vegetarians are known for their frequent minerals deficiencies. The high phytate content of grain and legume-based diets is to blame. Processed soy products are rich in trypsin inhibitors, which inhibit protein digestion! Some recent research indicates that soy's phytoestrogens (or isoflavones) could be causative factors in breast cancer, penile birth defects, infantile leukemia, and depressed thyroid function. They have caused infertility in every animal species studied so far!â_

This article was found on www.realmilk.com Back in the 40s, before they figured out how to combine soybeans, the plant was used as a forage crop for livestock. They would bale it when it was green, before it was mature and did not have any bean pods on it.
_âSoy Meal for Cows
by Trauger Groh, 
Biodynamic Farmer, 
Author and Lecturer

I have followed for many years the sickening effect of soy on ruminants. Cows that formerly could easily reach the age of 15 years and have 12 calves have on average now less than three calves and reach hardly the age of six. One main reason is the high percentage of soy in the rations. It works into the buildup of ammonia in the rumen. This affects negatively the liver and then show up in mastitis and sterility. Off they go to the butcher. Only there can a vet identify the defective livers. The soybean, bringing about high milk yields in the first two lactations, is the curse of our cattle herds. And the milk achieved through it is not health promoting either. . . If awake consumers, environmentalists, nutritionists and farmers do not work concretely together in the future there will not be any healthy farms nor healthy foods.â_
(to be continued)


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## goathappy (Sep 1, 2006)

My third article comes from the famous website of Dr. Mercola. He has quite a bit of interesting info on his website: www.mercola.com
http://www.mercola.com/forms/whole_soy_story.htm

My fourth article was written in the March/April â05 issue of Countryside Magazine:

_âSoy and your heath: Can those little beans be good for you?

Before anyone gets too bent out of shape, I do not mean to imply that eating hormone implanted beef isnât safe. That said, Iâll get on with what I do mean to imply, and that is that eating soy is making people fat.
Hereâs my reasoning: millions of cattle in feed lots have been and are implanted with estrogen to make them gain more weight faster, getting them to market with less money spent. âSteers implanted with traditional estrogen (E)-containing products can be expected to gain 8-10% faster and consume more feed.â This has been happening ever since the 1970s. It is tried and true, with several companies selling dozens of implants. âGrowth promoting implants have been used extensively in beef production for over 30 years. Significant changes in implants and implanting strategies have occurred. Prior to 1987, available implants were estrogenic agents which metabolically enhanced nutrient use to enhance growth. These products improved feed efficiency 5-10 percent and daily gain from 5-15 percent.â
Here in America, where we have plenty of food and we eat often â and a lot â do we really need something that helps improve our feed efficiency? I donât believe so.
Now, Iâm not a scientist, and I donât have millions of dollars to fund my research, but there have been a great number of studies already done. They find that these phytoestrogens suppress the thyroid function. To those who are not familiar with what the thyroid does, it is a little gland that sits in the front of your throat above your voice box and in manufactures a hormone that regulates metabolism. In short, too much hormone and you burn fat like crazy, too little and you put weight on very easily and have a very hard time getting it off.
Could this be why the cattle get fat so easily? I donât know. If not, and itâs some other reason, then there are two reasons that soy can put on the pounds. With cattle, they are fed up to a certain weight and then shipped off to be processed into steaks, but you and I just keep getting our doses or soy. âSome research estimates that soya is presents in more than 70 percent of all supermarket products and widely used by most fast food chains.â We canât escape easily.
Soy was a very minor crop until WWII. Before then, it was used as animal feed and had some industrial uses. In the 1940s, soy began to be used as a meat substitute and for oils for human consumption. After that, there were more and more uses developed for the magic bean., Is it a coincidence that obesity rates began to rise?
âResearchers at the U.S. Toxicological Laboratory in Arkansas found that the thyroid-depressing substances are isoflavones, the estrogen-like compounds found plentifully in the soybean. In normal women consuming sufficient iodine, just 30g of roasted soybeans daily, containing 38mg isoflavones, were found to depress thyroid function.

Isoflavones in our food

âBread with added soy flour, 2 slices, 4 mg isoflavones
Soy hot dog, 15 mg isoflavones
Soymilk, 8-ounce glass, 20 mg isoflavones
Miso, 1/4 cup, 21 mg isoflavones
Tempeh, cooked, Â½ cup, 54 mg isoflavones
Mature soybeans, cooked, Â½ cup, 55 mg isoflavones
Dry roasted soybeans, Â½ cup, 128 mg isoflavones
Revival soy-based meal replacement, 1 serving, 160 mg isoflavones.â

Other points to consider:

In the United States, for example, the average age of a menarche was about 15 to 16 years of age in 1800. According to a study reported in the journal Pediatrics, one percent of all American girls now show signs of puberty, such as breast development of pubic hair, before the age of three; by the age eight, 14.7 percent of white girls and almost 50 percent of African-American girls had one or both of these characteristics.
Feeding babies soy formula gives the equivalent of five birth control pills every day.
Dr. Lon White reported on a study of Japanese Americans living in Hawaii. It showed a significant statistical relationship between two or more servings of tofu per week and âaccelerated brain aging.â Those participants who consumed tofu in mid life had lower cognitive function in late life and a greater incidence of Alzheimers and dementia. âWhatâs more,â said Dr. White, âthose who ate a lot of tofu, by the time they were 75 or 80, looked five years older.â White and his colleagues blamed the negative effects on isoflavones, a finding that supports an earlier study in which post-menopausal women with higher levels of circulating estrogen experienced greater cognitive decline.
Living in the middle of the upper midwest, where millions of bushels of soybeans are grown each year, I know it would have an economic impact on the farmers and multi-national companies if people slowed down their consumption of soy. However, isnât it worth it?â_


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## KSALguy (Feb 14, 2006)

Sweet Goats said:


> Ok if that is correct, why do they sell it? What do you mean by fresh? What I have is in a 50# bag and dry. I was told to give it to them in small amounts, like a handful, like paperboy7 said. But reading this, I am really even more confussed. I know it is my call. Thanks for all the advice.



ok i ment the fresh PLANT that was my fault for not being more clear, fresh green soybean plant would make an animals stomack turn worse than fresh green alfalfa, 

the grain should be fine, just like the hay is. once its dry it no longer should have the bad reactions that a fresh green plant would cause


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## Sweet Goats (Nov 30, 2005)

OK, sorry that I am a bit confussed. Is most everyone in agreement that the DRY little pellet type soybean IS safe for goats. 
Thanks


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## KSALguy (Feb 14, 2006)

i would mix it with something or give it in moderation due to its rich protien qualitys but it shouldnt cause in adverse problems, if you had some corn and/or some other type of whole grains to cut the soybeans with it would be a pretty good mix, other wise just give like a half cup or so per goat to start outwith and see how it goes. i really dont think it would be all that bad but its never a bad idea to use moderation especially in the beginning


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## Guest (Oct 18, 2006)

Sweet Goats said:


> OK, sorry that I am a bit confussed. Is most everyone in agreement that the DRY little pellet type soybean IS safe for goats.
> Thanks


 Are they roasted, or raw? I personally wouldn't feed raw soybeans to my animals. Worst case, you can always use it for organic(ish) fertilizer. The June/July '06 Mother Earth News had a good article about formulating your own fertilizer, and soybean meal(or other seed meal) played an important part in the mix.


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## PlowGirl (Nov 16, 2005)

seanm:

Are you referring to soy hull pellets or soy bean husks. Yes, the pellets are perfectly fine to feed to goats as a roughage replacer. They are extruded pellets made from what is left of the soybean after processing out the soymeal and soy oil. They don't have much flavor though, since all of the good stuff has been processed out of them, so your goats may take their time incorporating in into their diets. I occasionally mix some molasses and wet it down so that the pellets swell and that makes it a little more palatable. You can feed the soy pellets to horses too, though they must be watered heavily or you run the risk of esophageal choke.


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## goathappy (Sep 1, 2006)

I wouldn't feed soy period. We have had so many problems. I don't think it would matter if you fed it in moderation. Just the fact that it prevents minerals from being absorbed in the body turns me off.


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## Vicki McGaugh TX Nubians (May 6, 2002)

*"famous website of Dr. Mercola"*  Yeah right! Internet famous maybe...

Just another opinon......

The biggy here is everything in moderation and making all changes slowly. There isn't anything wrong with soy, it has been the staple of protien in nearly all animals feeds for years, also the same for humans. I couldn't have gotten through menopause without it, certainly heathier than HRT. What is the alternative to protein in the diet of animals? Pesticide and herbacide rich cottonseed? Blood and bone meal? With women, what other estrogen rich food can you use to control bone loss and symptoms of menopause? Yes it's a terrible formula for infant boys, men should be up in arms if their wives are using this on their sons.

In another 5 years the soybean will once again have it's songs praised...everything ebbs and flows, the internet just exsacerbates everthing to the edge of hysteria. It then has its ebb, a new sceintific study, and than viola` it's back in vogue.

I do think if you haven't done your homework on mineral, it could bind some minerals (but defficency would have been in the herd before) because of the estrogen in it, minerals that could explain the problems folks have with using it. Of course not one blood test or study is done on these herd wide problems...as much economic loss as it would entail you mean not one blood test was ran? Hormone level? Nope...same with Valbazen, Cydectin, it's all conjecture passed on and on, until it's sounds plausable and believeable.

So use the soybean hulls to replace the steep cost of hay right now, put vinegar in your water to have more doe kids, and keep your girls wormed! Soybean meal is actually the favorite food of infant sheep and goatlings (pipevet.com) and calf manna and it's knockoffs which is nothing but a soy/mineral/vitamin pellet, is used nationwide in ruminants. I would not use soy as my only protein or only roughage when my girls are in milk though, but if you freshen in the spring hay should be back and plentiful, as will be alfalfa (the perfect protein our dairy goats needs). Vicki


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## KSALguy (Feb 14, 2006)

thank you Vicki for another Voice of reason.


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## Sweet Goats (Nov 30, 2005)

Yes, thank you Vicki. I feel better. I ahve beed feeding it foe about a year off and on. I was afraid I was going to kill them. But what about the cotton seed? Did I understand you right, it is rich in pestacides and stuff?


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## Vicki McGaugh TX Nubians (May 6, 2002)

Yes sadly, because my goats love it, cottonseed hulls and meal are the byproduct of making cotton. And since cotton is first and foremost a crop for clothes and not food, the FDA regulations are alot more lax. I didn't find out any of this until my sons Boy Scout troop visited a cotton grower in West Texas. Not only do they use pesticides for weviels that you could not use on corn or other grain crops, but they also use a defoliant to get rid of all the leaves to make picking with the harvester cleaner. Boy was the guy not happy with all my questions...because not only do we feed our animals cottonseed hulls and meal in alot of goat and cattle rations in Texas, but Cottonseed oil is a human used product. By thetime I was so aghast at the list of normal practice type things they do to the cotton plant, he was mute when I asked him how if the seeds are used to make pressed oils for human use, are all these products able to be used on the cotton? He told me that roundup and defoliants are used in many side applications of many plants...well yes, but over the top of the plants with a crop duster? It actually killsthe whole crop, leaving nothing but brittle leaves and a stock that shatter at harvesting, (this was the state of the plant when we were visiting). Vicki


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## fishhead (Jul 19, 2006)

Vinegar in the water makes more doe kids? How much? When?


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## Sweet Goats (Nov 30, 2005)

fishhead said:


> Vinegar in the water makes more doe kids? How much? When?


 I believe that is a old wives tale. I had hear that but most people will tell you that is just a joke.


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## Sweet Goats (Nov 30, 2005)

Vicki McGaugh TX Nubians said:


> Yes sadly, because my goats love it, cottonseed hulls and meal are the byproduct of making cotton. And since cotton is first and foremost a crop for clothes and not food, the FDA regulations are alot more lax. I didn't find out any of this until my sons Boy Scout troop visited a cotton grower in West Texas. Not only do they use pesticides for weviels that you could not use on corn or other grain crops, but they also use a defoliant to get rid of all the leaves to make picking with the harvester cleaner. Boy was the guy not happy with all my questions...because not only do we feed our animals cottonseed hulls and meal in alot of goat and cattle rations in Texas, but Cottonseed oil is a human used product. By thetime I was so aghast at the list of normal practice type things they do to the cotton plant, he was mute when I asked him how if the seeds are used to make pressed oils for human use, are all these products able to be used on the cotton? He told me that roundup and defoliants are used in many side applications of many plants...well yes, but over the top of the plants with a crop duster? It actually killsthe whole crop, leaving nothing but brittle leaves and a stock that shatter at harvesting, (this was the state of the plant when we were visiting). Vicki


 Thank you for your information. I will throw it out when I get home or I should say when I can get to it. We just put 100 bales of hay in the shed and I believe it is barried in the back.


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