THESE Make Raising Chickens EASY!!!

hi everybody welcome to the homestead well I know a lot of you are thinking now about how you can raise more and more of your own food so that you can become more and more sustainable well chickens are a fantastic thing to start raising to become more sustainable and to grow and raise more of your own food for eggs and for meat chickens really are the gateway animal they're the ones that really everybody starts with and really everybody should start with because they're very easy to keep they don't take up a lot of room they don't make a lot of mess and they are great for your family we have chickens on the homestead right now for both eggs and for meat we're in the middle of raising up a batch of broiler chickens which are meat chickens which will provide meat for our family for a year today just happens to be the day that we're taking the meat chickens from their brooder into their chicken tractors and we need to make an automatic waterer and an automatic feeder to go in one of those chicken tractors right we've been using the same design of feeder and water in our tractors from the past I don't know 6 or 7 years at least so I know that these work really well and I like this design they're very easy to make they're made with items that you probably already have you don't even need to go to the store which is important right now and they're like I said just simple to make but they do the job they do it well and they hold a lot of food and a lot of water which is important especially with the broiler chickens but really for any chicken you know these will be a perfect design if you're getting just a few chickens for laying eggs this will work out well for you as well I think one of the things that a lot of people get caught up with when they first start raising animals that you have to have all of this you know I have to have a specific water or made for chickens or and you know you really don't the chickens don't care where their food and water is get coming from whether it's a homemade item that costs you next to nothing or you went out and spent a thousand dollars chickens don't really care so we're gonna die on the side of building something simple and inexpensive because it works and the chickens will use it so the first thing that we're going to make is the automatic feeder now this will hold about 25 pounds of feed which is perfect for us because we use two chicken tractors well one of these in each one we can split a bag of feed between the two so again this is a very easy design we're gonna have some type of pan in this case this is one we've had around the farm for a long time already but it's a little dirty but it's still just fine I cleaned it out the best I could this morning but this is as good as it's gonna get then we're also going to use just a five-gallon bucket you probably have a lot of those laying around too and again it's a little dirty but it's gonna work just fine so we're gonna start by drilling some holes in the bucket I'm gonna use a 2-inch hole soft and we're gonna drill I don't know four or five holes around the bottom of the bucket and you want to get them as close to the very bottom as you can so that all the feet can come out so we're just gonna eyeball it and we're going to drill a hole now we're gonna drill several more of these or all all the way around it and then we'll be ready to connect it to the pan all right so I put four holes in the bucket and you can see that there is just a lot of little pieces of plastic that kind of cling to the bucket try to get as much of that off as you can because otherwise it'll just get in the feed and your chickens will eat it so I'll try to get as much of that off as we can and even around the edges of the hole a lot of times what I'll do is take my knife and just kind of scrape some of that off so that the chickens aren't eating plastic we'll just get as much of that off as we can and then we'll be ready to attach this to the pan all right now that we've got that all cleaned up we're going to go ahead and put it inside of our pan and you can see there's plenty of room around the pan that's the only thing that really matters it doesn't matter if you have one of these rubber pans or just whatever you have around but it has to be bigger than the bottom of the bucket I think the first set of these that I ever made I actually just used it was some type of like pan for underneath like a big planter and they work just fine use them for years the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to screw this piece of 2x4 into the bottom of the bucket so that it'll just stay in place it'll make the rest of everything easier so I'm gonna just line that up in here I'm actually gonna have Sarah hold that in place while I put a screw in through the bottom of the bucket this is easiest if you have a set a person to help you there now that piece of 2x4 is just secured till the bottom of the bucket which makes it easy to work with because not constantly falling out so now from here we'll just flip the bucket upside down we'll take our pan and we'll put that on make sure it's pretty well centered doesn't have to be perfect but close as you can get it makes it look nicer and then we will take our screws with our washers on and we're just going to drill those through the bottom of the pan and into the 2x4 and there's two and that's all you need now when we flip this over we've got a nice feeder all made for the chickens you know just put a cover on so they can't get up and poop inside of it and this will be perfect alright so now it's time to make the automatic water this is even easier than the feeder again all we're going to use is one of these rubber pans a five-gallon bucket and a lid and these again are super easy to make so we're gonna start we'll put the lid on we're gonna flip this upside down inside of the pan now we need to decide where we want the water level in our pan obviously you don't want the water level to be higher than the pan because the water will run out so what I like to do is I take my drill bit and I kind of go straight across and that gives me a visual of where the top of the pan is on the bucket and then I like to go about an inch or so down from there and we'll drill a hole through the side of the bucket this is where the water will come out and fill up the pan now my case we're going to want the water light the water level right where this Ridge is on the bucket so I'm going to actually drill a hole right through the ridge of the bucket and we'll actually drill two holes one on each side of the bucket and that's all we have to do now I'm gonna drill a half inch hole does it really matter if you use a smaller hole I wouldn't go much bigger than that but if you use a smaller one it'll still work it'll just come out slower and that's all there is to making this super simple automatic waterer let's go fill this bucket up with water and I'll show you exactly how to use it [Applause] all right so I filled the bucket up with water right to the bottom of the holes that we drilled and now we'll just flip it upside down now you do not want to make sure you have a lid that fits pretty tight but it doesn't have to be one of those with like the rubber gasket and all of that those are too hard to get on and off and you're gonna have to do this you know pretty often to fill this up so we're just going to flip it upside down into the rubber pan now the water is just going to run out of the bucket to fill up the pan and when it gets to the level of where we drilled the hole it'll stop coming out so there you go you can see that it stops flowing when the water gets to the level that we drilled the holes I know there's some super-smart science behind all how all of that works but all I know is that it does work and I've been using the system for a long time and it works great I always like to have this about a half inch to an inch below the top of the pan and if it's down much lower than that it just seems like sometimes the animals especially the young animals like the chicks that we're about to give this to don't see it real well down there so by having it close to the top of the pan they can definitely see that there's water in there all right let me go grab some feed and we'll fill up that feeder to put some green in here we're using a non-gmo broiler feed we'll just fill this bucket up we'll just put our lid on here as well and you can see the grain coming out nicely through the halls and now as the chickens start to eat it'll kind of fill in the rest of the pan and they'll have perfect access to all of their feed so this is a simple way to make a feeder and a water out of things that you probably already have or that you can get creative with well you could use like a Tupperware don't keep don't think that it has to necessarily be round like the bucket could be one of those Tupperware totes one of those storage bins anything that you have you can make a set like this and use it right now to start raising some of your own food now that we've got these done we're gonna start moving the broiler chickens out of the brooder and into their chicken tractors all right hey this one isn't for you you see what's going on here they're gonna try to steal the feed from the broiler chicken actually just a minute ago well had the waterer set up over there and the Ducks were drinking out of it so all right we're gonna put the feeder I always put the feeder on the end mostly covered we're gonna set that in and then I always put the water or down on the end that's more open because obviously it doesn't matter if it gets wet so that's all we're gonna put into our chicken tractors we're gonna get ready to put the chickens in now these tractors are five feet wide by eight feet long if you want to know how to build these I did a series on how to build these about a month or so ago go back and check that out but these are how we're gonna raise our broiler chickens this year we've used chicken tractors for quite a few years now but this is the first year that we've made this new design and I think this is gonna work out really well all right let's start bringing the chicks out we're gonna put 25 in each tractor we're raising a batch of 50 right now and so 25 in each tractor so the broiler chickens are four weeks old right now normally we move them out to the tractors at 3 weeks old but because we started them over a month early this year it's colder and wetter than it would be normally when we're raising them so we left them in the brooder barn for an extra week [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all nice and safe well all the broilers are safe in their tractors now and this is where they'll stay until the day that it's ready to send them off to freezer camp every day we'll move these tractors so that they have fresh grass and a nice clean environment to live in and these feeders and waterers are gonna play a vital role we're so glad you joined us today to learn how to make an automatic feeder and an automatic water and to see our meat chickens go from the brooder to their chicken tractors if you're enjoying our channel make sure that you hit the subscribe button below and the best way that you guys can help us is to share our videos until next time thank you so much for stopping by the homestead take care and God bless god bless

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Views: 376,287

Rating: 4.9598413 out of 5

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing, raising chickens, chicken feeder, chicken waterer, automatic chicken feeder, chicken tractors, chicken supplies, homestead projects

Id: Osg_iFnftN4

Length: 14min 54sec (894 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 31 2020