Does anyone have suggestions for storing grain in Florida? Grain is on sale right now- $22 instead of $36 a bag. My only concern is storage, as I don’t want it molding before I can use it.
Has anyone tried silica packs or something like damp rid? And would that be enough to prevent mold in hot humid Florida? I use metal trash cans for storage.
Diatomaceous earth is a natural desiccant. I use it on everything in my barn in the summer because of the humidity, including the feed to prevent mites.
spare bedroom?
Most of our house has horse stuff stuck somewhere
I’ve seen damp rid used successfully to keep mold off leather tack in non climate controlled tack rooms in FL. We had wood lockers and the damp rid was clearly effective in our little experiment.
Where are your trash cans located? If in a feed room a dehumidifier might do the trick.
How long are you wanting to store it? I wouldn’t think twice about storing grain for say a month with no additional precautions but longer than that would give me pause.
Spare bedroom is a good option too.
I store feed In a dead chest freezer in my uninsulated tack room. Four bags of TCC last me a month without issue.
It depends on the quality of bags used for your feed- some bags don’t prevent humidity from entering the bags. The Triple Crown bags here are pretty good for keeping out mold but after 4-6 wks, I wouldn’t trust them in a non a/c space.
Yes, inside an a/c room would help. Since our daily rains have started the humidity is outrageous.
Maybe check with your feed store and see what they say. Just check the dates on the ‘on sale’
bags to make sure they’re not just moving the older bags they have.
Is this Tribute Essential K? Just curious - Chewy has (had?) it on massive sale just this week. Tribute has reformulated their line to remove added iron, and “improved” the GA (not sure what that means yet) and it seems some of the feeds are being “dumped”.
Anyway, the main point is - is this grain pelleted? That can store for fairly long, but it still needs to be pretty climate-controlled, so no, not in an un-AC’d barn in metal cans. A bag doesn’t take up a big footprint and you can stack them, so if you want 6 months’ worth, keep the bags in your house.
If it’s a textured feed you for SURE don’t want it in metal cans in FL in Summer for more than a month or so.
very good point, last month we got some Triple Crown (not on sale) that had been bagged in May 2020… there was mold in the contents so we returned the product.
Clanter, call Triple Crown and let them know. Feed dealers for TC have strict guidelines for how often they have to replace older bags. It happened to me and I just called them to let them know of the problem. It was a fairly new feed store and they weren’t selling enough product to keep it fresh on their shelves.
They sent me a coupon for free TC in appreciation.
thanks, this was just one of those logistics nightmares, Triple Crown was not at fault …our feed store was very apologetic as the other people who were buying this feed stopped or never bought therefor their inventory became dated. The store was wanting to accommodate the customers (which they bend-over backwards continually to prove)
We have an alternative source where we got a few bags. In the future we will give the feed store a two week lead time so they an order in as needed for us. We just have one horse on this feed (the Great Wonder Horse who is allergic to most all stuff) so it is not a big issue, and the Purina Mill that is processing this for Triple Crown is only five miles from our house.
I have found that at least around here the feed stores are doing a good job, the current supplier is not local (it is in Denton about 35 miles away) but is willing to jump through flaming hoops to make sure my daughter is happy. (yesterday she ordered bedding for wonder horse and ton of teff hay…ordered at 1PM delivered at 3:30PM… which I am amazed t since the traffic coming here is not easy at all)
I haven’t tried any of the dehumidifiers. That’s a great idea. I usually just buy one or two bags at a time and switch to pellets instead of sweet for the livestock. The senior horse feeds are usually okay for about a month.
If you have an enclosed feed room and stick a dehumidifier in there, it will make the room feel less like the sauna of death that the outdoors likes to resemble. So bonus for the people too!
Ditto on the Dead Chest Freezer. I’m in humid Georgia and have used a DCF for years with never a mold or ick issue. Worth checking your Free section on Craig’s List or FB Marketplace for them.
Dead chest freezer? For the love of puppies, why is it called that? Please tell me this isn’t a ‘hide the bodies’ thing? 
Dead as in Non-Functioning…tis no more, ceased to be. It’s beref of coolant, shuffled off it’s mortal freon and the motor has gone to meet its maker.
Instead of sending said DCF to the great landfill in lower Slobovia, we re-purpose it… giving it a second chance at a functioning life, if you will. Thereby keeping rodents, wee humans, insects and a whole sphere of microscopic creatures out of our horses’ grain stores 
Excellent! Thanks for the Monty Python explanation. 
I wonder, do dead chest freezers pine for the fjords?
(dead) (chest freezer) as opposed to (dead chest) (freezer) 
Oh thank God you got it! Bwahahaha…
When we moved to our Florida farm, the first thing we did was put a window AC unit in the feed room. That summer we scored an entire pallet of half price feed that had been over stocked. We were able to store it a long time. It was good to the last bag in the AC.
Later we installed a mini split AC system and we’ve been happily mold free.
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