Feeders and waterers

[Al Gerhart]

Sounds like a good plan until the rats find the feed. And if you are in the desert they might not ever find the bucket style port feeder. Its working, its cheap, sounds like a solid solution for now.

 

[Kelster65]

Here's the deal and what I have learned after dealing with large flocks, small flocks, auto feeders - auto waters, nearly everything under the sun....

The best feeder is the one you make yourself. These are $23 from the zon. It comes with a hole saw, so all you need is a drill and a $5 bucket and about 5 mins of time. I wouldn't go any bigger than a 5 gallon bucket. Smaller actually if you had a smaller flock. Any bit of moisture gets in there and the whole container is ruined with mold.

YANZI No Waste Chicken Feeder with Rat Stopper Caps,6 Ports and Hole Saw,DIY Poultry Feeder Port Gravity Automatic Fed Kit for Buckets,Barrels,Bins,Troughs https://a.co/d/j9r2PUF

I have almost 80 chickens in here, of various sizes. I made this (pictured) to accommodate all the different sized chickens. There are 20 total ports, 4 chickens per, which is perfect. A bucket holds almost exactly 25lbs of food as well.

For the water, I just use two standard waters. One plastic (for ACV) and one galvanized. I ran a water hose to the coop and dump and fill every morning (5 minutes). I have tried nipples waters and auto cups, but live in a climate where it freezes at night 6mo out or the year, so those always froze and failed. Filling water everyday keeps it fresh and prevents algae from growing in the warmer months. I built up a little gravel platform which keeps the standing water down on the ground from filling spills and the water clean as a whistle. (You can see it in the back of the picture)

Spending $$ isn't the reason for the DIY, but because every flock and set up is different. This goes the same for building. When you make something, anticipate adding more chickens eventually and therefore being able to add onto your creation.

Anyway - long winded but hopefully useful.

I have had the no spill feeders for a year now and my birds have lately been spilling it everywhere. I've been filling the buckets up more than usual which may be the issue but it's a freaking mess. I have chickens and ducks which use these, the waterers and I have a greenhouse topper that surrounds the water/ food stations to keep rain out of the ports. It works most of the time unless we get pelted with sideways rain. I'm feeding the same Naturewise pellets as I have but they're making a bigger mess. With all this rain it turns into a mushy goo. What do I need to change? Am I filling the buckets too full?

 

[Al Gerhart]

If this is a recent development it sounds like they don't like having to stick their head inside a confined space to eat. Chickens are prey animals, eyes on the side, not the front, a much wider field of vision to survive against predators. That means they have a very narrow field in front where one might think they have true binocular vision, meaning both eyes catch the reflected light and their brain forms one unified picture from the two inputs.

But the reality is that chickens have monocular vision, each eye delivers its own picture to the brain. One is far sighted, once is near sighted. Watch a chicken sometimes when you have nothing better to do and you will see their left eyes tend to focus on things at a distance and the right eye tends to focus on close up things. Their vision also delivers "frames" or images to the brain around five times faster than humans. A TV set would be flickering like mad to a chicken, not smooth like in human eyes. This gives them a faster reaction time to dangers or a scurrying bug for that matter.

Now, evolution has delivered this fantastic vision system to enable the chickens to survive predator attacks, including UV vision and rapid head movements to scan for danger, and someone thinks it is a good idea to have them stick their heads in a confined space to eat? And one would believe that having to reach down with a small head and neck means the shoulders of the bird will fill the elbow/port leaving the poor things nearly blind while eating. No prey animal is going to like that so it is little wonder that some learn to rake the feed out and the others understand it is a good idea to do so.

Port feeders might work if the port was rectangular and of at least two to three times wider than a chicken's head so they could see a bit behind them with that left eye while the right eye picked out the feed to eat. That would still leave one side blinded, something they normally compensate for by quick and constant head movements. It would certainly help to add some sort of projection on the front of the elbow, a flange sticking into the opening at least a half inch wide to prevent a hen from raking the feed out. What you end up with is a standard gravity feed hopper design, a wide opening, inner lip to prevent feed raking with most birds, this is the most common feature in both my feeders and in the Chinese made feeders like the Grandpa feeder, the Rent a Coop along with the other clones of that type. There is a reason why this feed trough design tends to be universal; it works.

By trade I am a cabinetmaker, and one of the occupational hazards is people coming into the showroom waving their arms to describe what they want and they always have a folder of kitchen p**n. What is that? A bunch of pictures clipped out of magazines or printed off the internet, all sorts of outlandish and impractical features. That tip out tray on the sink front that people stash their dish cloth or sponge in, rarely wrung out, dripping soap and water over the drawer front on the way in and sitting there humidifying the inside of the drawer front while it evaporates. Seven or eight years later, after warning people not to use these things, you get a call that the wonderfully tough pre cat lacquer or post cat varnish is failing. Or the highly customized storage spaces that sound like a good idea until people realize that storing spices in a spice pullout by the stove means the spices are constantly heated and cooled instead of being stored in a cool dry location. Or the gorgeous granite countertop with the undermount sink that has the sink rail split down the center due to rust jacking because the granite fabricator used steel instead of fiberglass flat bar stock for sink rail reinforcement or it was omitted entirely and the sink rail cracked and broke off. Or the oversold quartz tops that have seams failing, get scratched and stained, and finding out the warranty doesn't cover any of it. The stuff is cool, very sexy, exotic, unusual, none of the neighbors have it, and for good reason. Kind of like dating a stripper. It doesn't last, you ain't living with that, not taking it home to meet mama, might brag about it to dad, but you know this thing is going to cost you one way or the other. Short term excitement, long term financial damage, and it blinds you to the good choices out there be it dating or building a kitchen or setting up a functional and efficient chicken coop.

The flip side is the contractor that comes in after customers complaining about his cabinets in the houses he is selling. He realizes he needs something better but he ain't paying for it. You quote quality MDF carcasses, he asks for a particle board quote saying a few hundred bucks per house sold in a year is real money in his pocket. He complains about the amount of sheet goods needed to build box cabinets instead of stick built cabinets that have few bulkheads to carry the heavy granite countertop that is going on the cabinets. Why his Hispanic guy can make those cabinets with ten sheets of material... and a cat can run in one end and out the other on a U shaped kitchen. Don't need no stinking cabinet backs..., let the drywall get chewed up and nasty over the years. This guy has no illusions, price is all important. His customers are telling him he needs to up his game but greed kicks in and he expects a 10,000 square foot shop filled with thousands of dollars of machines to compete with a guy with no drivers license hauling a cheap table saw and chop saw that shows up at his construction site and ties up the house for three weeks while he cobbles together some cabinets. You can't sell this kind of guy good cabinets.

Making feeders is not that different than making cabinets. The markets are split between those with no money, those that have money but ain't spending it, those that think they can build the same thing for a lot less, and then then there are those that appreciate quality, understand that the cheapest product is the one that last the longest, cuts wastage, and delivers what the customer needs. And what God awful times we are living in. Inflation has savaged the retired folks, the working class, and the middle class or what is left of them. It is the lucky few that can afford $120 to $140 to buy and ship a feeder half way across the U.S. one that will pay for itself in a few months. Heck, a lot of us drive older vehicles because that is what we can afford, me included in that one. Knowing that a new car will save us money in gas and repair bills is of no use when the interest is sky high, loans are tight, and new cars are selling for what I paid for my first house. Thinking like this, an inexpensive bucket feeder might be the best some can do for now so there will always be place for "good enough" solutions.

 

[Baileybunchx5]

Here's the deal and what I have learned after dealing with large flocks, small flocks, auto feeders - auto waters, nearly everything under the sun....

The best feeder is the one you make yourself. These are $23 from the zon. It comes with a hole saw, so all you need is a drill and a $5 bucket and about 5 mins of time. I wouldn't go any bigger than a 5 gallon bucket. Smaller actually if you had a smaller flock. Any bit of moisture gets in there and the whole container is ruined with mold.

YANZI No Waste Chicken Feeder with Rat Stopper Caps,6 Ports and Hole Saw,DIY Poultry Feeder Port Gravity Automatic Fed Kit for Buckets,Barrels,Bins,Troughs https://a.co/d/j9r2PUF

I have almost 80 chickens in here, of various sizes. I made this (pictured) to accommodate all the different sized chickens. There are 20 total ports, 4 chickens per, which is perfect. A bucket holds almost exactly 25lbs of food as well.

For the water, I just use two standard waters. One plastic (for ACV) and one galvanized. I ran a water hose to the coop and dump and fill every morning (5 minutes). I have tried nipples waters and auto cups, but live in a climate where it freezes at night 6mo out or the year, so those always froze and failed. Filling water everyday keeps it fresh and prevents algae from growing in the warmer months. I built up a little gravel platform which keeps the standing water down on the ground from filling spills and the water clean as a whistle. (You can see it in the back of the picture)

Spending $$ isn't the reason for the DIY, but because every flock and set up is different. This goes the same for building. When you make something, anticipate adding more chickens eventually and therefore being able to add onto your creation.

Anyway - long winded but hopefully useful.

If I have 10 hens how many ports should I have? Do I need one available for every hen or is one bucket with 4 enough?

 

[Auntiejessi3]

If I have 10 hens how many ports should I have? Do I need one available for every hen or is one bucket with 4 enough?

One bucket with 4 should be enough, though I like to have multiple waters

 

[Baker1181]

I personally use a 5 gallon bucket feeder, 3 ports. It is suspended in the air maybe 7-8 or so inches. I use layer crumbles. Sure there is some spillage but very little. I fill the whole bucket at every fill. My feed is stored in buckets too. I use a separate 5 gallon bucket to mix in red pepper flakes and a little bit of cayenne pepper with a part of the bag of feed then dump in to storage bucket with lid. That way everything is mixed in nicely. Then when feeder is empty I dump the bag of already mixed feed into feeder. I only buy one bag at a time for freshness and I pass the feed store to and from work so it’s convenient.

My birds have zero issues with the peppers, gobble their food down like crazy and i don’t know if my peppers mixed in or the suspended feeder has anything to do with worms and no sign of rodents but it works for me and my birds.

I first decided to suspend my feeder when I was cleaning in there one day and moved the feeder and found a bunch of mold underneath the feeder.

 

[knurse1]

If I have 10 hens how many ports should I have? Do I need one available for every hen or is one bucket with 4 enough?

We. Have 4 4" PVC for feed and have separate container for calciumt that also hangs up. We also use a continuous water system with multiple watering spickets an have pump to keep the water continuously running

 

[knurse1]

We. Have 4 4" PVC for feed and have separate container for calciumt that also hangs up. We also use a continuous water system with multiple watering spickets an have pump to keep the water continuously running

Lawson we have 10 golden comets

 

[knurse1]

Lawson we have 10 golden comets

Omit Lawson