Chicken Feeder

I built an automatic chicken feeder for the chickens my roommate and I have.

December 2011

My roommate and I decided to have some chickens in the backyard. We liked the idea of creating a bit of food self-sufficiency. A problem was that while we could eat the eggs the chickens produce, they had to eat something to produce eggs. Thus putting us in a similar situation as we were pre-chicken (ie. having to by food). Nonetheless, we soldiered on enamored with the idea having our own fresh eggs. It turns out that lots of critters, besides chickens, like to eat chicken feed too. Since these other critters weren't producing food for us, we weren't very excited about them eating our feed. So, how the feed the chickens, and only the chickens, when they want to eat without also losing feed to the other critters?

Fortunately, we weren't the only ones who had this problem. And a quick search on the web produced all kinds of chicken feeder designs.

Here are links to some of the designs I found:

http://www.communitychickens.com/2010/12/automatic-chicken-feeder.html#.Ux0fsIWbPP0

http://www.homegardendesignplan.com/2012/10/cf100-automatic-chicken-feeders-plans.html

http://www.backyardchickens.com/a/automatic-wood-chicken-feeder

Below are pictures of the design my roommate and I ended up building and the chickens using it. This was a collaborative project with me drawing the lines of where to cut the wood and setting up the lifting device to raise the lid and my roommate doing the cutting, putting the feed container together and painting it. We ended up putting a modified plastic pet carrier over the feeder to keep the chickens from standing on the wooden feeder and pooping on it.