Chicken Coop Designs: Feeding your Chickens

You may have figured out by now, that chickens do not eat people food. As a matter of fact, they eat grain. This is grain that you can purchase from some pet stores, though most likely you’ll want to go to a feed and tack store. These stores an aid you in finding the right feed for your chicken, since younger chickens would need starter feed, and older chickens eat regular feed. These generally come in sacks and cost between $7 and $14. However, the cost of the feed is not quite as important as the way you get the feed to them.

In your chicken coop designs, you will need to think of a way to feed your chickens en masse, because most likely you won’t want to spend your time feeding them all individually. At most pet stores, you can purchase a chicken feeder that is shaped like a trough and is capable of serving multiple chickens at once. Normally this type of a trough will have a grille on top of it, and will be A shaped. You may thing this is to keep other animals from eating the chicken’s food, and while that might be true to an extent, this is actually to keep chickens from perching atop it and doing their business in the food. Chickens do not set out to do such things, but they aren’t really aware of where they poop, and will do it just about anywhere. The one exception to this, is their nesting boxes. Chickens will poop in these, but not quite as often, the reason for this is unknown, but it is just something that happens.

You can simply set up one of those trough devices and feed the chickens daily, because believe it or not they will eat all of the food in the trough, and somehow manage to poop in it too. Your other option is to set up an automatic feeder. These may be bought of course in some stores; however you could also build one yourself. Gravity is your best friend when it comes to building an automatic chicken feeder. To do this, you can use a large pie pan, and an open container. You can fill the container with food, and set it up so that gravity guides it down, dropping food into the pan. As the chickens eat, more food will be freed, and it will be delivered to the chickens. Using this method, you can store as much food as you want in your automatic feeder, and this is one of the greatest chicken coop designs that you can possibly integrate into the coop.

Automatic delivery of feed is a great way to go about it, and it will save you lots of time. If you put the feeder a little bit off the ground, you’ll find that the chickens don’t poop in the food as often, though with chickens, you’re certain to run into the one exception. You won’t know how it happened, or what kind of circumstances could have triggered it, but it will happen. When this does happen, it’s best not to question it.

Chicken coop designs can be simple, or they can be extremely intricate, and it all depends on how much time, effort and money you really want to put into the project.