In some of my previous posts (Chicken Coop Automation 1 and Chicken Coop Automation Part 2 ), I mentioned preemptive laziness and how it relates to my chicken habit. After reading those posts, my wife coined a new word: precrastination. I liked the term, and I defined it to mean doing a task ahead of time to allow more free time in the future. It turns out precrastination is a real psychological term, and its real definition is performing a task before it is beneficial or optimal to do so. I just can’t win. I guess I need to procrastinate my precrastination to reach an optimal state of crastination.

Regardless, I think I crastinated this chicken feeder just right. The idea actually came from the internet of googles, but it works very well so I thought I’d pass it on.

Originally I had a traditional chicken feeder that fed the ground better than it fed the chickens. I would fill it up with a couple pounds of feed, and most of it would end up on the ground the next day. This didn’t align with my laissez faire chicken policy.

Some research provided some exotic and elaborate feeding systems that had been created: from electronic rationing systems to screw drive feeders with an auger. While I am a firm believer in over engineering and Rube Goldberg devices, I didn’t want to deal with the calibration, sensors, programming, and expense for this particular project. I did some more research and discovered that I could make a very simple feeder with some advanced engineering materials: hot glue, a bucket, and some PVC… pretty much all of the good stuff minus duct tape and zip ties.

The feeder is pretty basic and shouldn’t require much explanation.

• Get bucket.
• Get PVC elbow
• Get hot glue gun
• Cut hole in bucket
• Trim one end of PVC elbow
• Hot glue PVC elbow in hole

Right now, I have one of these made from a square bucket and two made from round buckets. Rather than putting feed in a couple pounds at a time and having it trampled into the ground, I fill up all three about once a month with 50# of pellet feed and have virtually no waste.

The only variable I’ve played with is the height of the internal mouth of the PVC above the floor of the bucket:

• 1/2″: too low, and the feed does not feed very well
• 1″: the feed feeds fairly freely
• 1 1/2″: (.125 feet) feed feeds forth flawlessly forming a fully functional first-rate fowl feeder

I would also like to note the importance of using feed pellets rather than crumbles. Crumbles muck up the whole works.

The neat thing about this project is that more time is spent driving to the store and buying the components than actually building the feeder!