A
week ago, Mark and I went to visit Missy and Everett from Living a Simple Life.
They kindly took us on a tour of their new homestead, and we snapped a
lot
of photos of their automatic chicken feeder.
Their turkey and
chickens run free most of the time, but now and then
Everett and Missy like to leave home and shut the flock in to protect
them from predators. They installed two of our chicken bucket
waterers to keep the
poultry hydrated, then constructed their own
automatic chicken feeder so the birds will never go hungry.
The feeder is simply a
collection of sections of PVC pipe and elbows
that allows chicken feed to fall by gravity into a trough at the
bottom. If you fill up the entire pipe with feed, you can go out
of town for several days without worrying about your flock.
In the turkey pen,
Everett has a slightly different setup — he placed
an elbow on the bottom of the vertical pipe so that the turkey can
stick in her long neck and peck up the feed. However, when Mama
Turkey hatched out a chicken baby, the new chick just wasn’t big enough
to poke its head in the elbow and find the food. Instead, Everett
turned the elbow downwards. So that side of the coop no longer
has an automatic feeder, but it does have a handy shoot through which
Everett can drop cups of feed without having to walk into the turkey’s
pen.
Homemade automatic chicken feeder
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About The Author
Anna & Mark
Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton are a pair of back-to-the-landers who have been homesteading for over a decade.
This is over a year old now, how does the feeder work? Any complaints or redesign work gone into it?
This isn’t actually our feeder, but it seems to work well for our friend. I’ve seen several similar feeders online, and might make one for our coops to keep the flock’s food handy during trips. (For day to day, I’m a huge believer in giving chickens just what they need once or twice a day rather than offering them free choice food. That way, they have an incentive to forage for food and don’t overeat on the storebought stuff.)