Throw feed on the ground

Daily tasks are a lot of work, and its probably not 100% consumed. Built a feeder that will hold a bag of feed that lasts over a week. There is very little spillage and the chickens clean up most of it. Less work and less of a feed bill.

I don't know if it is the best method but it works fine for me. I use pellets and feed in a packed dirt area with no waste. Thats how all the framers feed their ckickens when I was growing up in the fifties.

I feed pellets and use a 5gal bucket with a trigger for the birds to get food to drop out of the bucket onto a tray below the feeder.

From the moment I fill the bucket till the point where the food is low enough that it no longer falls out when they activate the trigger, I have a layer of fines sitting on the feeder tray. As long as more pellets keep dropping they leave the fines alone on the tray, but as soon as the bucket stops dropping pellets on demand they suck up all the fines. That is how I tell when the buckets needs to be refilled, as long as there is pellet dust on the tray there's still food dropping out. If I see that the pellet dust has disappeared from the tray, then I know its time to refill the bucket with fresh pellets.

Short story long, if I did not have this feeder tray and the food just dropped onto the ground then all that dust that they eat at the end would go to waste. Plus the fact that I can go 2weeks on a bucket fill.

yyz0yyz0 said:

I feed pellets and use a 5gal bucket with a trigger for the birds to get food to drop out of the bucket onto a tray below the feeder.

From the moment I fill the bucket till the point where the food is low enough that it no longer falls out when they activate the trigger, I have a layer of fines sitting on the feeder tray. As long as more pellets keep dropping they leave the fines alone on the tray, but as soon as the bucket stops dropping pellets on demand they suck up all the fines. That is how I tell when the buckets needs to be refilled, as long as there is pellet dust on the tray there's still food dropping out. If I see that the pellet dust has disappeared from the tray, then I know its time to refill the bucket with fresh pellets.

Short story long, if I did not have this feeder tray and the food just dropped onto the ground then all that dust that they eat at the end would go to waste. Plus the fact that I can go 2weeks on a bucket fill.

Click to expand...

Can you give more detains on your feeding system, maybe a picture. Did you purchase it or make it yourself,

below is a copy of a post I made on another thread. I tried the website today and it was loading really really slow for me so I just found this post and copied it. Basically the "trigger" you order is jsut something that hangs through a hole in the bottom of the bucket, when the birds tap the hanging part the part still in the bucket disturbs the dry food which causes some of it to fall through the hole. A spoon would probably work just fine. You just have to experiment with the hole size for the type of feed you use. I've thought of a possible solution for the coning of the food toward the end of the bucket. I'm thinking that if I put the hole near the side of the bucket(far enough away so the trigger doesn't touch the side) and then hang the bucket at a slight angle then there will be less coning of the leftover food. But I'd also have to redo the hanging tray if I did that. I can go two weeks right now without needing to add so there's not a lot of motivation to make mods to something that is working great for me. My hens all took to it quickly, but last fall I got a new rooster and it took him weeks to figure it out. It was so funny watching him clean the tray then stand there waiting for one of the hens to work the trigger and then he would clean up after them. One poster put peanut butter on the trigger to entice them to start pecking at it. Heck, even the pesky starlings figured out how to work the trigger(I have to take it down during their migration)



I built one of these out of a 5 gal pail. I can go two weeks without needing to fill it for 8 birds.


www.triggerhappychickens.co.uk

I originally had the tray on the ground as shown in the video but they kept pooping in it and tracking dirt and other stuff into the tray with the food. so I cut the bottom off another 5 gal pail and used some wire to suspend it below the feed bucket. Now they can't step in it, they just reach in and tap the trigger and eat what they want. I can tell when the feed is almost gone as the tray will be totally clean, if there's lots of food falling each time then they only eat the pellets but when it starts to get low they eat the dust as well. It works with all types of feed, just need to make the correct size hole for whatever feed you use.
My only complaint is that as the bucket gets low the food tends to form a reverse cone, so there will still be quite a bit of food in the feeder but it won't fall out unless I tap the bucket to level it out again. Besides that I love the feeder, with the tray being off the ground it really reduced the rodent problems as well.

I don't matter if your neighbor throws it on the ground or serves it to them on a silver platter. Me, I don't throw my $$ on the ground.
If I dumped 10 lbs of layer crumbles on the ground instead of putting it in the feeder my 30 hens would scratch & churn most of it into the dirt.