Food inside at night

[RachelmossSD]

We have 4 week old chicks that we recently moved to an outside chicken tractor. We keep a heat lamp on at night, and feed and water inside, but they muck up both the feeder and water at night and they seem to not have enough room either. We plan to build another coop soon, so they'll have enough room, but for now we want to keep them together. My question is do we NEED to have food in the coop at night if we have the light on? They have access to all the food they want during the day, but I want to give them more room at night.

 

[nicolets]

Somewhere (probably My Pet Chicken) I heard that in the winter, some people take in the water during the night to keep it from freezing if they don't have a water heater. They should be fine without them. They'll probably (unless they have already) need to learn that they're supposed to be sleeping at night, anyway - so you might not even need the light. Depends on your temps of course.