No-Waste Bulk Chicken Feeder

Fill up your chicken feeders less often with a bulk feeder!

I have made a few of these, and it’s fairly simple. This go round, I am using a 32 gallon trash can, but any plastic storage container with a lid will work. So, if you don’t need something quite so big, feel free to adapt this for smaller use. The last one I made from a 66 quart storage container held an entire 50 pound bag of pellets just fine. This one will hold closer to 3 bags, or 150 pounds of feed.

Materials needed:

32 gallon trash can with lid

tube of caulk, gorilla glue or liquid nails

6 two inch PVC elbow pieces

2 1/4” circle cut drill bit attachment

drill

I traced the places to cut about 5 1/2” from the bottom.* I just eyeballed the spacing between the holes so that they were evenly spaced around the circumference of the container.

Drill out the holes.

Place the PVC elbows so they are aimed down inside the container.

Caulk the mess out of it! Everything I caulk is a mess…at least the chickens don’t care what it looks like as long as it isn’t empty. I caulked both the inside and the outside.

Fill ‘er up! Bonus- it is rain proof, but I always keep my feeder inside the coop since I store extra feed bags in there and it’s more convenient. Since they can only access it with their heads, there is very little waste.

I placed it in a small kiddie pool from Walmart that we had lying around to catch anything that drops out to make it truly no-waste since my feeder sits on the open metal grate of the chicken tractor floor. I don’t want to lose any food through the bottom or attract scavengers to dropped food at night.

While our chickens have access to true free-range forage, I find that keeping feed in the coop anchors them a little closer to home and they tend to wander less. We feed high quality, whole grain “Funky Chicken” made at our local Julian Milling Company, and the ladies love it!

Happy Chicken Keeping, y’all!