We switched from the big galvanized store-bought feeders to home-made PVC feeders ... 4" pipe, "long" right angle connector, shorter length of 4" pipe with a pattern of large holes drilled into the top-side half. Sand the holes smooth (trust me on this). Cap the bottom end, leave the top open for filling (or use a drainage pipe cap which doesn't fit as tight so it can be removed with ease), attach to the wall of the coop with chimney brackets or metal plumbers tape up kind of high so the birds have to reach over the top to just get their little heads into the holes, tilted forward to encourage gravity to work for you in distributing the food the full length of the trough.
These feeders are awesome for eliminating the beaking out issue but, they are pretty crap for re-filling themselves and I find myself scooching food into the eating area with my fingers several times per day so my birds don't starve. I need a monkey to perform this duty for me, or I need to tweak my physics. One thing we thought of was switching to pellets as theoretically those should slide down into the trough better than the crumbles we are currently feeding. Whole grains would work on this same theory. In theory. One can hope.
Another issue with the crumbles is the whole end of the new trough feeders are filling up with the dust from the food, so we have to remove the end caps and remove the dust pretty often. I toss it in the run, and they do peck at it. But still.
If one were feeding fewer birds, one could eliminate the corner and then "cap" the upright hopper at the bottom with a clever arrangement of round-to-square pipe converter and a square vinyl fence post cap screwed upside-down to the bottom of that converter as a little dish (the caps are the cheaper "pyramid caps" one finds in the fencing aisle of Lowes and such ... the people at my local Home Depot don't do fencing, so were not useful with this info, but a quick online search will provide a good visual), maybe a little notch in the bottom of the eating side of the converter piece, too (so pellets and grains can move through). Pipes, converters and caps all come in 5", 4" or 3" options. One or two birds can eat from this style of feeder at a time and the feeders are inexpensive and easy to make ... especially if someone from the store does the sawing of the pipe for you. I'm thinking it would also work really well in a broody pen ... our broodies REALLY like to show the chicks how to scratch by dumping out as much food as possible and burying it in the bedding.
These feeders are SO much less expensive than the store-bought feeders. We have several up around the coop. I think this helps with pecking-order issues. Now if we can just get the feed to slide from the hopper to the full length of the trough I will be kissing the sky in gratitude. I could maybe even leave my house for more than a few hours. Like maybe even over night! Imagine that ...
But anyway ... back to the topic of the quoted post ... I think you are right about the chickens playing favorites with the whole grains. Is grinding them the only way to discourage this behavior? Hard to say! I can't go into the coop to find the whole feeder full of peas while all the corn has vanished. I want my chickens to have a well-balanced diet.
I never had kids, but I'm beginning to understand how difficult children must be.
I called around about protein sources in feeds. So far I've only found the soy and canola options available in commercial chicken feeds. Because I'm pretty anti canola and soy for myself, I've thought a lot about fish-meal protein for the flock. I think I read a hint about how/why fish-meal protein wasn't working very well for Joel Salatin in the online preview of his Pastured Poultry Profits book, but I'd have to get the book and read the whole thing to get the entire story on that. I gather there are concerns with using meat protein meals for chicken feeds, but as chickens are omnivores I'm very curious to explore it. I do know that we don't feed our flock any meat products and one of our customers did a taste-test of the Farm Fresh Eggs in the area and declared ours tasted the best. She said all of the other eggs she tested left a funny after-taste, so even though she could get some of those for free, she prefers to buy from us. That made me smile, but it also makes me a little cautious about messing with their feed too much.
Our Easter Eggers lay nice green eggs. The one adorable little hen who gave us more blue eggs passed away (that's the only mature bird we've had die of unknown causes).
I gather there is a new-ish-to-here English breed that also lays sky blue eggs ... I forget the name ... I might have to look into hatching some of those. I'm definitely into this chicken thing for the pretty eggs, so will be ordering colorful hatching eggs from other BYCs in the spring to put under a broody.
We currently get white, green, and many shades of brown eggs ... some of the light brown ones are really pink to my eye, and some of the darker brown ones are purple. I am really craving chocolate brown eggs so have Cockoo Marans maturing now (though unluckily all but one is a rooster!). If those work out, I can maybe make an olive egger cross.
I bet if you make a separate post here stating you want proven but young blue egg layers someone local could hook you up fast.
Can you tell I'm procrastinating something today? Type, type, type ...
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