How do I feed my chickens?

How do I feed my chickens?There are a few methods of feeding chickens. How you feed your chickens depend on how many chickens you have to feed.

If you have a chicken coop with 10 chickens then it is best to use a tube feeder for the food and  4 liter fonts for the water. They are easy to maintain and have no moving parts. If you have 500 birds then you may want a chicken feeding system that makes your life a bit easier. For this many birds you would give your chickens water with bell drinkers attached to a pipe which takes water from a tank on your roof (header tank) and you would suspend tube feeders from the roof. These you can adjust up and down as your chickens grow. If you have 3000 chickens upwards I would go for an automatic feeding system and an automatic drinking system.

Automatic Drinking systems

The best automatic drinking system is a nipple drinking system. This system delivers water through plastic pipes that are suspended from the ceiling or roof of your chicken house. In the plastic pipes are a series of “nipples”.

The chickens peck at the nipple and a drop of water is delivered to the bird. This system require little maintenance except for occasional flushing of the system. Your litter will stay dry and the chickens drink water as they need. It is fairly pricey … but it beats carrying buckets of water around every day.

Automatic feeding systems

There are two types of automatic feeding systems – pan feedings systems and chain feeding systems.

Pan feeders are probably the more effective than chain feeders – like the watering systems these are suspended from the ceiling. They both get food from an external source like a silo. The feed is moved from the silo through a pipe with an auger. The pan feeders attach directly to a galvanised pipe and like a tube feeder, they deliver feed as it is required. A chain feeding system is more complex. You will need hoppers and dummy hoppers where the feed from the silo will be deposited. The feed is then delivered into a galvanised trough which has a chain running through the bottom. A powerful motor called a power head drags the chain around the troughs and with it the food. This system is only used really in huge poultry houses – 30 000 birds. It requires daily maintenance, is noisy and can go very wrong in a novices hands.

With both of these systems you will need batch weighers with counters – these are to enable you to accurately measure out food batches for the chickens. For answers to all you questions about chicken farming – What is an auger?, What is a nipple drinker? How do I feed my chickens? Who makes chicken equipment? – Have a look at Chicken houses – web site with lots of poultry informations and tips on chicken farming.