Rusty feeders are impossible to clean, look terrible and make you look like a bad poultry keeper, so don’t bother buying steel. Retail galvanized steel is not the same as the old commercial grade galvanized steel, and these feeders will rust sooner rather than later. Even if your local shop still sells steel feeders for backyard chickens, I don’t suggest them.
Retail locations will sell you anything you want, for the most part. From a hygiene point of view, they’re still better than our old rusty feeders, but most plastics used in retail products are of lesser quality and thickness compared to commercial equipment. The problem we as consumers see more often now is that these cheap fixtures are not as durable because, well, they’re cheap in every sense of the word. Cheaper products offer better profit margins, and cheap prices make consumers buy more, one way or another. It’s far cheaper to produce thousands of injection-molded feeders and much cheaper to ship plastic feeders that weigh a fraction of the old sheet steel designs. The retail poultry sector finally changed over to plastic construction simply because it’s cheap. Plastic offers a cost-effective material that resists caustic solutions, can be as durable as its sheet metal predecessors, and offers better longevity since they never rust. In addition, with the advent of modern disinfectants, the new acidic cleaning agents proved to be far too corrosive for old galvanized sheet metal.
GRAVITY FEEDER FOR CHICKENS PROFESSIONAL
Professional farmers adopted plastic and stainless steel devices because of their non-porous characteristics, which deny bacteria and viruses a place to hide and entrench themselves. Plastics have become the new standard for poultry equipment, both in the commercial sector and retail stores, but for different reasons. The commercial poultry sector had long since scrapped its metal feeder and water equipment in favor of non-porous, non-rusting, chemical-resistant plastics, but the retail world of poultry supplies took a while to catch up. I remember a time when all you could find on the local feed store shelves was metal equipment, with the exception of those terrible little screw base water founts. I’ve noticed a trend in the poultry equipment retail market it lags the commercial sector by about 10 years.
GRAVITY FEEDER FOR CHICKENS TRIAL
Hopefully, my years of expensive trial and error can help you pick the right chicken feeders and waterers for your flock. Over the years, I’ve used all sorts of off-the-shelf, commercial-grade, and even some home brew systems, all with mixed results. There are many different styles of chicken feeders and waterers available today some perform well, some fail quickly, and more still just don’t deliver the value we think they will. You know what can chickens eat, but when the chicken feeders and waterers we buy fail to live up to expectations, it complicates things. Or: run a long carriage bolt through the base cap (or plug), letting the end stick out and hit the ground, like the spike that sticks out of the bottom of a stand-up bass or cello.Feeding backyard chickens should hypothetically be a simple thing to do. Easy to fix: just mount the feeder higher. Most of the plugs I see out there would work, but you'd be back to the height problem (if you're concerned about chicken ergonomics). Of course, it's best to use plastic or something else that can be thoroughly cleaned. It will take you more than 3 minutes to assemble, but it would be more efficient.
Another way to go (and in response to some reader comments): if you add some kind of plug right at the bottom of the Y, the birds would be able to reach all the food. At first the bottom part connected to the "Y" was only three inches long and the birds didn't like that much, so we set it up on a brick and the chickens seemed to like the altitude better, so the final version uses a six-inch length of pipe to place the food where the chickens can easily reach it. We considered quite a few other variations, but they all had drawbacks mostly related to spillage and security. But I haven't seen the extra three-inch piece added to the Y connector: without that small extension the chickens managed to spill quite a lot of food, but that three-inch piece cut spillage to almost zero! We tried a 180-degree elbow with the edge cut off: the birds were able to eat just fine but they spilled quite a lot, and closing the pipe for waterproofing and rodent-proofing would have required additional engineering.
There are lots of PVC chicken feeders out there, and several folks have gone with a design very similar to this one.
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