Small Chicken feed hopper

[aart]

obviously the DE won't be eaten by the chickens and so it will be spread across the ground and kill everything in the garden from bees to ladybugs. bonus. I'll go with the candle in the jar.

Actually they probably do ingest it along with the feed......the thought that it can pass thru them without change and become part of the environment is an interesting concept.

 

[TalkALittle]

Watch out for that candle. Paraffin releases carcinogenic fumes. The soot created from the burning wicks can contain lead. They can permeate food and settle on surfaces.

Use a natural 100% soy or beeswax candle with an untreated, natural fiber wick.

 

[GodofPecking]

I meant to say couple hundred pounds. Its cheaper to buy bulk and then I can rotate stock as well. I used to have two freezers so food never went stale but out here there's less room

Do you mean that you can't have freezers anywhere, or that you can't have them in the coop ? A freezer or a fridge that is not plugged in is a very smart and popular way to store food so that rodents cannot get to it.

Storing grain and pellets in a freezer is an excellent idea because you can switch the freezer on for one day per month to nuke all of the bugs that might get in. It would have no effect on the health of the grain or who eats it.

Soy is a Frankenstein food, it's put into all supermarket bread except ALDI bread, if you are lucky enough to have an ALDI. It's awesome for the cancer industry. You cannot ever find a book at the library that has a recipe for bread with soy as an ingredient, so why is it there ? (rhetorical)

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cancer+industry

I use beeswax because it's free from the beehive. Bees take care of themselves pretty much.

 

[21hens-incharge]

Use in agriculture

Natural freshwater diatomaceous earth is used in agriculture for grain storage as an anticaking agent, as well as an insecticide.[16] It is approved by the United States Department of Agriculture as a feed supplement to prevent caking.[17]
Some believe it may be used as a natural anthelmintic (dewormer), although studies have not shown it to be effective.[9][10] Some farmers add it to their livestock and poultry feed to prevent the caking of feed.[17] "Food Grade Diatomaceous Earth" is widely available in agricultural feed supply stores.

Pulled from wikipedia regarding Diatomaceous Earth's use in agriculture. Thought it would perhaps be found useful by someone.

 

[chicklover 1998]

Wikipedia is not a very good source any one can make a page, to prove it one of the teachers at our local high school decided to teach her students a lesson and made a page about a nonexistent species of giraffe it had purple round spots on its coat, needless to say wiki. didn't kick it off for about three years.

 

[GodofPecking]

Wikipedia is not a very good source any one can make a page, to prove it one of the teachers at our local high school decided to teach her students a lesson and made a page about a nonexistent species of giraffe it had purple round spots on its coat, needless to say wiki. didn't kick it off for about three years.

+1000

I ignore the site entirely, and google's re-spamming of it. It's worse than garbage it will suck the remaining braincells right out of your head. I always block out of my mind anything that people says comes from there and skip all results. This is the best way to assist the better alternatives as well as get to the accurate information.

Someone quotes me wikipedia and they immediately are written off in my mind as a person who hasn't a clue. The fool who quotes a fool without knowing that person is a fool, is a fool themselves.

Frmerbrowne, do you have any pictures of that airducting you'd like to use ? I'd love to help design a hopper for you.

 

[aart]

Wikipedia is not a very good source any one can make a page, to prove it one of the teachers at our local high school decided to teach her students a lesson and made a page about a nonexistent species of giraffe it had purple round spots on its coat, needless to say wiki. didn't kick it off for about three years.

Kinda like BYC 'articles'.

 

[Cheep N Peep]

Food grade diatomaceous earth is frequently added to flour to kill bugs that might get into it, and to prevent eggs from hatching. Although we like to think processed food is perfect and completly free of insects (among other things) it still has to be grown somewhere where bugs can get to it and be ground up with it. DE helps lower the percentage of live insects and spoiled food. It is also a safe insectiside, and is used in houses to help control bed bugs and in coops to control ticks and lice. I add a small dusting of DE to the corners of the coop before I add clean litter. Dustbathing a hen afflicted with lice is an effective treatment if both the coop and the hens are dusted several times untill the lice are gone.

The reason DE is so good at killing insects is because of what it is- ground diatom fossils. The remains/fossils of the diatoms is a form of silica, the main ingrediant of sand. It is crumbly even before being pulverised for commercial use, and it cannot harm us unless breathed in large quantities. It will only irratate our lungs (unless breathed constantly inlarge quantities) and does not hurt our stomach orintestines at all, but its effect on bugs is much more harmfull. Although you cannot see it, on amicroscopic level DE grains are very sharp. When an insect walks over it, the DE works its way through the slits in the exoskeleton plates, aided by the by the bugs own movemant. Once inside the insect, the DE rubs against the organs and scratches them. The bug becomes dehydrated because it cannot keep water from evaporating out it's wounds and dies. It is a painful death for the bug.

DE is only effective if it is dry. Water causes DE to clump and harden into crumbly lumps, and insects wont be harmed by it. In a garden setting, the DE eventually sinks into the ground and spreads out among the plants, harmless. Worms and slugs will not be injured by the buried DE, as it is in such a small percentage, spread throughout the soil, that it is inefective. It also wil not harm the plants.

In fact, there seem to be many health benefits attributed to DE. Many people eat it as a supplement because the cylinder shape DE has on a microscopic scale supposedly "has a very strong negative charge. As these millions of cylinders move through the stomach and digestive tract, they may attract and absorb fungi, protozoa, viruses, endotoxins, pesticides, drug residues, E.coli, and heavy metals.
These are trapped inside the cylinder and passed out of the body. In addition, any larger parasites that happen to be in the stomach or digestive tract are "cut up" and killed by the sharp edges of the Diatomaceous Earth." It also "is quite hard. On the hardness scale where diamonds are a 9, Diatomaceous Earth is a 7.
This is very important because as those millions of tiny hard and sharp Diatomaceous Earth cylinders pass through the small and large intestines, they "scrub" the walls.
After only a few months of taking Diatomaceous Earth, the intestine wall is no longer coated with mucus and molds but CLEAN!! The advantages of this are several:
-Maintains regular bowel movements
-Promotes a ealthier colon. This is especially important as we get older. A clean healthy colon keeps away polyps and ulcers. Today, many are spending thousands of dollars to get colonics when Diatomaceous Earth may do the same.
-Many users report increased energy and needing less sleep. This is a result of all the food and nutrients that are taken in being better absorbed into the blood stream. With a coated colon--many nutrients never get absorbed."

*Closes DE websites, stretches fingers* Ok, students, put your textbooks away, we need to stop following this rabbit trail. What was the origional topic? A feed hopper? Yes, yes, I beleive that was it...


What type of air ducting would you be talking about? The aluminum kind?

 

[GodofPecking]

WOAH, companies put DE into flour to water it down. That's an outrage. DE is basically DIRT, it comes out of the ground in specific places around the globe where it is mined, just dug up. And they have found an excuse to make a 1kg or 2lb bag of 'flour' actually a lot less flour and a lot more DIRT. Some people would say either keep the bugs out in the first place or just freeze the flour to kill them rather than pad out the weight of the flour by adding DIRT. WOW.

Either way, it's useless in chook food. You can use it as a substitute for a dustbath, but what's wrong with a dustbath ? if mites are a problem, look at the coop and the roosts. something is wrong if mites are getting the upper hand and you have to supplement the chickens own natural defenses.

From the food it falls onto the ground and gets all over the yard, as I said from the beginning. It cannot work if it is wet or stuck to the food, and unless the lice are magical lice that live inside the chicken rather than outside the chicken, it's going in the wrong place and STILL wouldn't work because it is wet inside the chook. What it WILL do is get all over the yard, all over the ground, all over all the insects in your yard including BEES and kill the lot. Bad, USELESS idea. But good for the shopkeeper if you sell the stuff.

 

[Cheep N Peep]

It really sounds like you are not getting the idea.

WOAH, companies put DE into flour to water it down. They put DE in flour to kill bugs. Really, they only put in a tiny ammount of DE. It is good for you. It kills bugs that eat flour. And 90%+ of flour in a bag of flour, is FLOUR.

That's an outrage. DE is basically DIRT, it comes out of the ground in specific places around the globe where it is mined, just dug up. I think I said that already.

Some people would say either keep the bugs out in the first place or just freeze the flour to kill them rather than pad out the weight of the flour by adding DIRT. WOW.Freezing the flour would take a lot of energy and work for nothing. Companies won't pay money to freeze something if freezing it does nothing. After the flour is thawed (so it cn be sold) new insects can continue to eat the flour and grains very happily. DE prevents this.

Either way, it's useless in chook food. Did you read my post at all? DE kills insects in grain-based products that would eat and otherwise ruin the feed.

You can use it as a substitute for a dustbath, but what's wrong with a dustbath  ? if mites are a problem, look at the coop and the roosts. something is wrong if mites are getting the upper hand and you have to supplement the chickens own natural defenses. It is not a substitute for a dustbath. It can be an additive to a dust bath, and a treatment for lice. A regular dust bath will not control lice. It only helps prevent lice. DE takes care of the lice.

From the food it falls onto the ground and gets all over the yard, as I said from the beginning.There really is not that much DE in the food. If the food is all over the ground, it is wasted anyway, so the trace of DE in the feed can't do anything helpful for wet, wasted feed.

It cannot work if it is wet or stuck to the food, Is the food wet? If not, than the DE works.

What it WILL do is get all over the yard, all over the ground, all over all the insects in your yard including BEES and kill the lot. Bad, USELESS idea. But good for the shopkeeper if you sell the stuff.I think I already said that it would not kill the bees if it is in the garden. In the garden, it spreads out into the soil, where it is moist and useless. Sand does not kill bees either, and it is silica too. DE does not kill bees unless it is dry, and the bees are walking through it.

@GodofPecking, DE isn't bad. It is a natural prt of the earth that is benefical and we can use to help us. Either way it is not the origional topic of this thead.