DIY chicken feeders are easy to make and assemble. They are a great way to customize your chicken feeder for your specific coop and flock needs.
How to build a chicken feeder? You can build a chicken feeder pretty quickly. First, you need to analyze the needs of your flock, your care preferences, and your climate. You can make PVC feeders, treadle feeders, and no-waste feeders as well.
Read on for more information about all the different ways of making a chicken feeder.
How Do Chicken Feeders Work?
Chicken feeders make sure chickens have a constant supply of food that they need to survive. These should be available to your chickens at all times. Your chickens should be able to get into their food at any moment.
When making a chicken feeder, keep the following points in mind:
- They should be often made with buckets to hold a lot of feed at any given time.
- Feeders should be modified so that only your chickens can access them and so that they can get food at any time and prevent other animals from getting into them.
- Consider a design that can grow and be modified as your chickens’ needs change. For example, as your chickens grow, you can adjust the height. A good rule of thumb is to ensure the feeder is the same height as your chickens’ backs. Any higher or lower could make it difficult for them to eat.
- Think about how easy it is to clean the design. Even if your feed hasn’t been exposed to water or any other weather, you should clean the feeder on a semi-regular basis.
- Your feeder needs to be made of a material you can easily clean.
Related: Chicken Feed: All You Need to Know!
How to Build a Wooden Chicken Feeder?
Wooden chicken feeders are great for indoor feeding and areas where they can be protected from the elements.
To build a wooden chicken feeder, verify if the planks are flush and will hold the feed without dropping it. Sand the wood down to blunt sharp edges, and carefully seal the exterior to weatherproof it. Be sure to choose the wood that hasn’t been treated with chemicals to keep chickens healthy.
If you consider all these factors, you’ll have a charming wooden chicken feeder. It will last a long time and serve your chickens well. However, the con of wooden feeders is that they are almost impossible to fully sanitize.
How to Make a Bucket Chicken Feeder?
You can make simple or complicated bucket chicken feeders. They can range from holes you’ve cut in a bucket or even buckets lopped off to be a bowl feeder.
To make a bucket chicken feeder, cut holes in a bucket and fill it with feed. If you want to hold more food, set it up with a tray. Because the buckets are easy to move around, it makes it even easier to take care of your chickens. You can quickly move the feeder around and easily clean them.
If they are made of plastic, you can rinse them out and scrub them.
How to Make a No Waste Chicken Feeder?
No waste can mean a couple of different things. It could mean one of the following, each of which requires a different type of construction:
1. No Wasted Food
To make a no-waste chicken feeder that focuses on the prevention of wasted food, make a feeder that rotates the feed to make it easier to access. This will help to ensure all the feed is consumed.
2. No Waste in the Construction Process
If you’re making a no-waste construction feeder, you need to conserve as many parts as possible. You should make minimal cuts and reuse parts that may otherwise be trashed.
3. No Waste From the Bottom of the Container
A no-waste chicken feeder that eliminates waste from the bottom of the container needs feeds holes at the bottom. These should be larger or connected to some pipe or larger hole that your chickens can get into.
By putting the holes at the bottom, your chickens will pull from the lower feed first, and new feed will fall and be eaten.
How to Build an Automatic Chicken Feeder?
You can build two common types of automatic chicken feeders: Treadle feeders and PVC pipe feeders. These ensure that only chickens can open and access their feed at any time. It can be challenging to train your chickens, but this is ideal for flocks cohabitating with other species, like goats or sheep.
Treadle feeders can be difficult for your chickens to learn and have safety concerns but are the most secure. PVC pipe feeders are stationary and hard to clean, but they are a great way to keep other animals out of the feed.
How to Build a Treadle Chicken Feeder?
Build a treadle chicken feeder so that it opens when the chicken steps on the pressure plate. The weight pulls a string or rope and opens a hatch. You can rig up a treadle feeder with a plate and a string. Make sure that the string has the proper length to pull the hatch open when the plate moves.
Your chickens can access the food whenever they need it and need to walk over to it. These are also great if you want your chickens to get food during the night and outside of regular feeding hours.
With older chickens, you’ll have to train them on how to use the treadles. On the other hand, younger chickens should get used to them a lot faster.
If you lead your chickens onto the plate and show them where the food is, they should start to pick it up. As long as you keep rewarding them and consistently training them, your chickens will learn how to use their new feeder.
This is not a good option if your chickens are housed with animals that can trigger the plate or who will try to get into the food.
How to Build a PVC Chicken Feeder?
You can make a PVC chicken feeder by constructing PVC pipes with slits cut in them. These are easy vertical feeders that other animals can’t get into. They also take up less space than other feeders.
There are quite a few perks of using a PVC chicken feeder:
- Larger animals can’t get into the feeder easily.
- It is easy to assemble and fill.
- They’re adjustable as your chickens age.
These perks are great, but PVC feeders are hard to clean. They are pipes attached to a wall or fence. This makes it hard to get into them and move them around.
These are going to change how you feed your chickens completely. It will make your life even more accessible.
How to Make a Goat-Proof Chicken Feeder?
Except for treadle feeders, you can easily goat-proof many of the designs already described above. Just be sure to anchor them down and verify that the chickens can only access the bins.
Treadle feeders are not a good choice for goat-proofing because a goat could step on the treadle and access the food. You need to get creative and think about how a chicken can get into something that a goat couldn’t.
To make a goat-proof chicken feeder, make the feed holes smaller than the goats’ snouts. This way, goats won’t be able to get their snouts in at all. Chicken beaks are much smaller, and you can give them a fraction of the space a goat would need to get at them.
You can also feed the chickens in a spot where the goats won’t go. This can be their coop, a secure location in their pen, or anything without goats in it.
Related: How to Make a Chicken Waterer? | A Complete Guide
