I have been fed up for some time now with the amount of food that is wasted by chicks in the brooder. Also, I use pine shavings in my brooder and the chicks always fill the feeders full of shavings as they are scratching around. So I’ve been watching YouTube videos and looking at other designs of feeders to try to find one that would actually work as a no spill feeder for a chick. This is the design I came up with.
Cost of the feeder is: FREE!
I used an icing bucket that grocery stores give away and an empty protein powder container that i had not thrown away yet. The powder container has a lip under the lid so I was able to cut a hole in the icing bucket lid so the powder container would snap into the icing lid and hang.
I then cut the bottom out of the powder container so when I filled it with feed the feed has about a 1/2” space to spill out the bottom. I then cut four holes in the side of the icing bucket so the chicks could get to the feed. I have room for a total of eight holes but four appears to be plenty for the twelve chicks I have now.
Here is the finished feeder with the lids on ready to go to the brooder. (I’m wishing at this point I had not thrown away the handle that was attached to the icing bucket
).
When I put it in the brooder I jostled the interior feed container around until I filled the feed all the way to the bottom of the four cut outs so the chicks could see the feed. It took about 30 seconds before one of my White Leghorns figured it out (I love white leghorns). I’m sure they billed out some feed until the level came down some. I could not tell how much because the pine shavings were already full of spilled feed from a store bought feeder that was previously in there.
This morning I let the chicks out to the run for the first time and moved their new feeder out with them. The feeder is sitting on dirt so I can monitor how much feed is wasted. At the end of the day I discovered that I actually made a working No Spill feeder for FREE.
Cost of the feeder is: FREE!
I used an icing bucket that grocery stores give away and an empty protein powder container that i had not thrown away yet. The powder container has a lip under the lid so I was able to cut a hole in the icing bucket lid so the powder container would snap into the icing lid and hang.
I then cut the bottom out of the powder container so when I filled it with feed the feed has about a 1/2” space to spill out the bottom. I then cut four holes in the side of the icing bucket so the chicks could get to the feed. I have room for a total of eight holes but four appears to be plenty for the twelve chicks I have now.
Here is the finished feeder with the lids on ready to go to the brooder. (I’m wishing at this point I had not thrown away the handle that was attached to the icing bucket
).When I put it in the brooder I jostled the interior feed container around until I filled the feed all the way to the bottom of the four cut outs so the chicks could see the feed. It took about 30 seconds before one of my White Leghorns figured it out (I love white leghorns). I’m sure they billed out some feed until the level came down some. I could not tell how much because the pine shavings were already full of spilled feed from a store bought feeder that was previously in there.
This morning I let the chicks out to the run for the first time and moved their new feeder out with them. The feeder is sitting on dirt so I can monitor how much feed is wasted. At the end of the day I discovered that I actually made a working No Spill feeder for FREE.
