What You Need to Know About Storing Livestock Feed on Your Hobby Farm or Homestead

If you’ve recently purchased a hobby farm, or even if you’re simply tending to a flock of backyard chickens in your urban neighborhood, you’re right on trend. According to the LA Times, hobby farming and homesteading are on the rise.

Uncle Sam defines it as a small holding or small farm that people use for leisure and enjoyment, not as a primary source of income. When you add few horses, backyard chickens, goats, bees, or perhaps a garden that puts fresh veggies on your dinner table, suddenly, you’re a hobby farmer.

Homesteading takes hobby farming to a new level. It’s about self-sufficiency, through keeping animals like cows, goats, sheep and pigs, and growing your own food. It’s also about preserving your food by canning, drying or other methods. Combine the two and you’ve got the recipe for sustainability. Think of Little House on the Prairie or the much more recent Pioneer Woman and you’ve got the right idea.

Pioneers couldn’t get their groceries delivered from their local high-end grocery store. They had to grow much of what they put on their family’s table every night and be smart about preservation to get them through the winter months. That also extended into making clothes, candles and other stuff of survival for families eking out a living in that place in time. It’s about resurrecting lost arts like canning, preserving, sewing and candle making that were the foundations of survival in another era, but modern conveniences have all but eliminated.

Today, the homesteading lifestyle is experiencing a renaissance because of an unlikely cause: COVID-19. People stayed home, worked in their gardens, and cultivated a new lifestyle as the pandemic closed food plants nationwide.

If you’re slowly venturing into hobby farming or jumping into the deep end of homesteading, there’s a large breadth of information to learn about animals, or livestock, you choose to tend. Proper shelter and care of your animal menagerie is critical. A majority of the information necessary is related to feeding your animals. While goats, horses, and other livestock will graze outside all day long if you let them, grass isn’t a sufficient diet for their optimal nutrition.

Each species has grain-based feed, specific to particular nutritional needs. You can find all of the information you need about the proper feed for your animals at your local vet or tractor and farm supply store. Where Behrens can help is storage of that feed.

Storing your animals’ feed is key for their health, cleanliness and habitability of its enclosure, coop or barn. It also provides relief for your pocketbook. That’s why galvanized steel locking lid cans are a must. Food storage hygiene is a vital issue for your farm’s furry friends.

If you’re planning to store your animal feed in plastic containers, please think again. Study after study shows plastics can leach chemicals into the foods stored in them. Harvard University recently delved into the topic, and found that the chemicals in plastic storage containers, particularly phthalates and bisphenol A (BPA), have been linked to serious health problems These problems include metabolic disorders, obesity and infertility. When exposed to heat, the problem is exacerbated. If you’ve ever been in a barn on a hot summer day, you know that it can get quite humid. The safe food storage option is using galvanized steel locking lid cans. The galvanized steel does not leach any chemicals into the feed or seed, period.

There is nothing more durable than products made from galvanized steel. This metal will stand up to what Mother Nature can dish out, with no leaks. Behrens cans won’t rust, fade, crack, peel or tarnish, and will protect your feed, come what may. Plastic takes a beating from the elements and quickly becomes useable, on top of being detrimental to the environment.

When you see one mouse, you know 100s of its friends are lurking just out of sight. Make the mistake of leaving a bag of feed in your coop or barn, and you’ll see more rodents than you can imagine. The last thing you want is that kind of infestation in your enclosure. But plastic containers aren’t much better at protecting your feed. Rodents can and do chew through plastic. Galvanized steel is resistant to even the most determined vermin! Mice, rats and other rodents simply can’t penetrate our galvanized steel locking lid cans or get them open.

Many hobby farmers are environmentalists, and it’s important to them to use materials that are completely sustainable and recyclable. Metal recycles forever. You can melt it down and make it into something else with exactly the same grade and quality, time after time after time. But, since our galvanized steel locking lid cans will last forever, why would you need to?

The added bonus of storing feed in galvanized steel is that it’s good for your wallet. The feed won’t go bad, will not be contaminated by the chemicals in plastic, isn’t susceptible to rodent or insect infestation, will take a beating from the elements, and lasts for years.

Another bonus of galvanized steel: You can use it to store your animals’ water, too. That’s why galvanized steel is the go-to for any hobby farmer. Behrens collection of galvanized steel farm and agriculture products began in 1911, and continues to provide reliable, durable and wallet friendly solutions to issues faced by hobby farmers.

At Behrens, we’re proud to have offered galvanized steel products to the world from our headquarters in Winona, Minnesota, for more than 100 years. Our workhorse line of Metalware Classics have stood the test of time and performed, every time.

Our locking lid cans are great for using when you want to keep your animal feed safe. We also offer great products for other uses on your Hobby Farm, too. Check out our galvanized tubs, specialty pails for farming, and our top selling watering cans!