What can I use to crush peas

Question

I own a few fowls (around 50) and started mixing cereals, corn and dry legumes a few weeks ago.

Although I was able to get hold of a good load of peas, it is unfortunately uncrushed: I was told that raw peas may be dangerous, and that I should seriously consider crusing them before feeding them to my fowls.

Thus, I tried to look a way to crush it, but most crushers I read about are not designed for such hard things as peas. They are ok with (soft) cereals, but may rapidly break if used with peas.

Thus, I don't know what I should buy, -or use- to crush a great load (200-300 kgs) of peas, corn, cereals, etc. altogether.
Or is there a harmless way to feed them to my fowl*?

Answer 1

From my chickens, I know that chickens themselves can gulp down pretty big things, but maybe not on the order of peas. If you're worried about the chickens getting hurt from trying to eat the peas and you can't find a crusher that works with them, then I would recommend a feed bag / hammer.

Just take an empty feed bag (pretty durable plastic), put as many peas in as you want, close the bag (if it's resealable) or tape it closed (if it's not). Then proceed to whack the peas with a hammer; keep going until you can't hit any lumps (peas). This should leave you with a lot of crushed peas.

However, I haven't tried this on a scale of a "great load"

(200-300 kgs)

so this method may not work for you. My feed bags hold around 25 kilograms, so that would take around a dozen iterations of this method. If you have bigger feed bags, that might improve the speed. However, I still think that it might take a while, so maybe pick up a hen and sit with her while hammering the peas.

Answer 2

If you have a friend who happens to be a geologist or for whatever reason has some equipment, you could try crushing them in their jaw rock crusher, maybe pre-mixed with small sized, dense, sharp rocks to help grinding, avians are swallowing rocks anyways. I don't know if it would even work, but it wouldn't hurt trying because these machines are heavy-duty and pea is no match for them, at worst you will just waste some time. Also you might try throwing these peas mixed with small sized, dense, sharp rocks to an old concrete mixer for a few hours if you don't mind the horrible banging noise and some minor damage to the mixer. It might sound bogus and honestly it is, I'm trying to help with wild imagination but of course the best way would be just using a specialized industrial food-grade heavy-duty grinder which if you owned you wouldn't be asking this question. And by the way maybe crushing them all at once isn't the best way to go, because they will hold their nutritional value much longer if left as a whole. I think bagging them and crushing with hammer as mentioned in the other answer would be the best way to do it.