Chicken Feeder

Remember that Ace Hardware bucket I used for making coffee dirt?! Well I told you that I usually use Home Depot buckets, despite the aesthetic disadvantage because of their price...and here's proof!

For 13 chickens, you need a viable dispensary that all those beaks can peck at once! This is our cheep, cheep, CHEAP solution! ^_^

To make the feeder, all you need is a 5 gallon bucket and lid, a plastic dish/tray, a hole saw and drill, and a handful of screws. The whole idea was Brandan's, and it was quite the ingenious invention!

Available at Home Depot, or any local hardware store, is the 5 gallon bucket; in the neighborhood of $2.78, the lid is an extra dollar. Also at the hardware store is the screws, for less than $3, and all you need is 5--we chose black wood screws for strength and rust resistance. Keep looking here for a hole saw, depending on your drill and brand preference, the bit should be around $10. This is the one we got, on Amazon:

Now drill trilateral holes at the bottom of the bucket, so that when feed and grain is poured into the top, it will spill out the holes.

The plastic feeding dish was purchased at a feed store for a little over $15, and I'm sure you could hunt around to find something that works for a more economic price, but the rescue chickens all came on fast, so we needed something now! Attach the dish to the bottom of the feeder bucket, so as to create a trough of grains!

And you're finished! Just mix up your grains, pour, and lid the entire bucket. While the lid is water-tight, the trough is not, so you will still need to stick it in a semi-dry area.

We purchased multiple buckets and order all of our grains from Azure Standard. I use The Elliott Homestead's Chicken Feed Recipe, since it is Organic, Non-GMO, and Soy Free! It is cheaper than buying organic (or even non-organic!) bagged feed from the feed store, and cheaper than premixed organic feed from Azure. It is smart to constantly check for what they term "chicken wheat" because it is almost half the cost of the regular wheat berries, just because it is the remnants from cleaning the mill and not fit for human consumption! 

I also recommend buying the 50# bag of kelp granules, because they won't go bad and are SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper per pound. I adapted the Elliot Homestead recipe to suit my hens, as they are free range for the majority of the year and do not care for oats (I believe this is because they get their protein from other buggy sources) and will pick them out instead of eating them! 

Not this little guy! He only lasts one and a half feedings!

I used to fill each bucket up with a different grain, but now to save time, when I get the order home, I mix up all of the feed (sans the oil and kelp called for in the feed recipe) into each bucket. One bucket lasts me one month, so I can mix up 6 months worth, store it under our deck with the watertight lids, and keep the small excess of kelp and various seed remnants in their bags, stashed away. This way it takes up far less time, and does not take up a ton of room to store 6-8 buckets. It all depends on where your storage is.

It is awesome to have little helping hands do your work for you too! You can be working on one bucket, while they do another!  

Mixing all of the food into individual buckets also helped me sort out the price. One order of feed stuffs (minus the excess kelp) was $210. I mixed up 7 months of feed, making it $30 a month to feed my hens. Throw in one bale of ultra-compact straw for $10, and that makes $40 a month, or $10 a week. I get about 4 dozen eggs per week, which means I need to sell them for about $2 a dozen to break even. Sometimes I get 6 dozen, which turns a profit, or pays for a little heat lamp when the average temperature is 18 degrees (wait, Seattle, say what?!), or upsizing the coop! 

We do not "Date Stamp" our eggs anymore, because they are purchased up so quickly, and one buyer pointed out that not only do eggs last a significantly long time (longer if left unwashed), as in 6 weeks, but also our stamp ink is probably not organic! You could buy organic ink...we have some for other purposes...but if your turnover is high, the stamping is insignificant!