#METAL CHICKEN WATER FEEDER TRIAL#

I’ve never found these trough-style feeders to be effective or useful. You need a special chick feeder, a special chick water fount, that handy little thermometer meant especially for raising chicks, and oh, don’t forget our super-duper plastic draft guard thing, you definitely need that! Right, I have a bridge to sell you too. Your $12 chick purchase quickly becomes $50 or $60 bucks before you can bat an eye. Most first-time chicken buyers will purchase chicks at a retail location that wants to sell you a whole bunch of chick-specific equipment. You don’t need half the stuff they’re trying to sell you for your backyard chickens! Chick-growing equipment is the biggest offender in my eyes. Products You Don’t NeedĪt the risk of sounding like a ranting snob, I’d like to air my biggest gripe with the retail poultry world. Nipple drinker systems are far superior to water founts of any design, so if you haven’t done so already, consider building a nipple bucket to make your life easier. I always suggest buying plastic now, since the new galvanized double wall founts rust quickly and break at the welds, causing a vacuum leak and consequently a big water leak. Back in the day, they were your only option for a heated chicken waterer, but now they offer heated plastic water founts. This goes double for today’s metal double-wall water founts. 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. 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.

#METAL CHICKEN WATER FEEDER 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. Feeding backyard chickens should hypothetically be a simple thing to do.

Metal chicken water feeder