We peeled about 25 pounds of spuds for Thanksgiving, and have a good sized pile of peels. Can I feed these to the pigs or is there something bad about peels? Thank you in advance, and happy Thanksgiving! Daryl in Maine
You are not supposed to eat raw potatoes-humans or animals. BUT if you cook them, both hogs and chickens will eat'em up. I think there is somekind of acid in the potato.
I guess no one has heard about all the good stuff that is between the skin and the potatoe that gets thrown away. The hogs get the better end of that deal.
Potato skins are fine as animal feed. Potatoes are in the nightshade family and the skins can contain a small amount of toxin. You'd have to eat a boat load for there to be any effect. Raw potato starch is difficult to digest so cooking helps that. I just wouldn't make them a huge portion of their diet.
We blanch potato peels in boiling water before using them as feed. Today we made pasta, and after draining it we took the pot off the heat and added the saved peels (that we keep in a ziplock bag in the fridge) to the still-boiling-hot water. Few minutes later we drained the peels and added them to the pig food bowl.
Yes you can feed potato skins to the pigs. Ours are not fond of raw potatoes but after they freeze and thaw the pigs do like them. They also like them cooked but I rarely do that. Onions are the same.
Don't feed any places on the skin where the skin is green. Other than that, the pigs will digest the peelings a lot better if the peelings are cooked. The vitamins in potatoes are located in the skin, so that is the healthiest part of the potato.
You don't eat the peelings with the mashed taters? :frypan: Properly done, they're the tater version of "dirty rice"!
We fed ours potato peelings with no problem, although never in huge quantities. The are rooting animals by nature.
I've heard this many times. So two days ago we did an experiment. My wife cooked up a batch of very green potatoes. She, one of our sons and our daughter at the green potatoes (boiled). Our other son and I abstained. And the results? We all felt fine since. So apparently those very green potatoes were not a problem. Makes me wonder if this is more of a myth than anything else. There are a lot of things that are called poisonous that you have to eat in huge quantities to have any problem.
Green parts of potatoes DO CONTAIN SOLANINE- a known poison. Because you fed it to your kids and they didn't die only proves you're a little less than cautious, to say the least. I'd never feed my young anything that even MIGHT be bad for them.
That is my thinking too, that the cooking may help. I know it contains Solanine. The question is how much and how toxic along with what is your tolerance. We eat lots of toxic things. Hot peppers are an example. Eat too much of them and it will do bad things to you. My point was that the small amount we normally eat is not a worry. And you DO feed your kids things that might be bad for them. And you let them breath polluted air, drink water that is less than pure, etc. That's the reality of life. By the way, no I didn't feed them the green potatoes. They had already eaten them by the time the potatoes go around to me and I noticed that they were green. My wife, who had cooked them was not concerned and she was proven right. Relax.
I have NEVER fed my pigs green potato peelings...Brown ones, plaenty of of times, uncooked! They loved them!
