Best Chicken Feeder (What Shows Up at Night)

Someone asked a city forum whether backyard chickens would bring rats. The most useful answer opened with seven words that should be printed on every feeder box: "TL/DR it will attract rats about as much as a bird feeder and you need to take similar precautions."

Photo: Kolforn ( Kolforn ) / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Not the chickens. The feed. And the person who learns that late learns it the expensive way. One keeper who did wrote the sentence you do not want in your own story: they gave up and used poison after "the rats killed 40 chicks in one night".

So this page is not organised around hopper size and price. It is organised around one question that almost no buying guide asks: how much of your feed ends up somewhere other than inside a chicken? Everything that lands on the ground is not waste. It is an invitation, and something reads it every night.

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The chain nobody draws for beginners

Here it is in one line, and once you have seen it you cannot unsee it.

Open feed brings rats. Rats carry mites into the coop on their bodies. Mites feed on your hens all night while they sleep on the roost, draining them slowly until the birds go anemic. And rats themselves will kill chicks, and in numbers, adult birds.

Every link in that chain is ordinary. None of it looks like an emergency while it is happening. Keepers lose birds to mites while still feeling like things are under control, because the damage happens in the dark, on a schedule nobody is watching.

Break the first link and the rest of it collapses. That is the whole job of a feeder, and it is why the cheapest open pan is not a bargain. If you want the full version of what happens after the rats arrive, we laid it out in the guide to why dusting the birds never fixes an infestation on its own, and the rat side of it is in what actually brings rodents to a backyard flock.

What "best" means once you know that

Three things decide it. Everything else on the box is decoration.

One: does the feed stay off the ground. Chickens bill feed sideways when they eat. A shallow open pan turns that habit into a scattered ring of grain around the feeder, refreshed daily, in the open, in the dark. Port-style and gravity feeders that make a bird put its head in to eat cut that scatter down hard, and that single property is worth more than any other feature you will be sold.

Two: can it be closed when you are not there. Feed left out overnight is not a housekeeping detail. It is the invitation itself. A treadle feeder only opens under the weight of a bird standing on it, so the food is shut every hour you are not in the yard. One keeper's report on what that changed is the plainest endorsement in our notes: it "greatly reduced their presence in the coop during the day".

Three: how many days of feed you are actually buying. Not how many pounds. Days. We come back to that below, because it is the number people get wrong.

The half of the feeder that is not the feeder

Your feed spends most of its life in the bag, not in the hopper. That bag is the biggest open invitation on the property, and almost nobody counts it as part of the purchase.

Store feed in a metal container with a fitted lid. Not the paper sack it came in. And not a plastic bin either, because rats chew straight through plastic. One keeper dealing with squirrels and chipmunks put it in five words: "I keep our food in a metal can". A galvanized can with a tight lid ends the traffic your open sack has been paying for, and it costs less than replacing one hen.

While you are closing gaps, close the actual gaps. Half inch hardware cloth is what stops predators, and it stops rats on the same trip. That work is laid out in order in the guide to closing the holes something will find while you are asleep.

How many days you are buying

Here is the arithmetic that turns pounds into a real answer. Ten hens eat about two and a half pounds of feed a day, so a fifty pound bag lasts them roughly twenty days. Scale that to your flock and you know what your feeder has to hold before you are back out there with a scoop.

Real life confirms the shape of it. One keeper with nine birds reported "I got a Grampas feeder and refill it about every two weeks". That is a feeder chosen for days, not for litres, and it is why they stopped thinking about it.

That same keeper also paid the tuition most of us pay. "I did spend $200 on the Grampas feeder after trying all sorts of other methods", and their advice afterwards was blunt: they "wish I had just bit that bullet to start and not messed around with all the DIY ideas". Buying the cheap one first is not saving money. It is paying for the cheap one and then paying again. The honest accounting of where the money in this hobby really goes is in what a backyard flock actually costs.

What goes in it matters as much as what it is

A perfect feeder full of the wrong feed is still the wrong setup, and the ages are not interchangeable.

Chicks get starter at eighteen to twenty percent protein for roughly the first six to seven weeks. Growers move to fifteen or sixteen percent from about six to eighteen weeks. Layers get sixteen to eighteen percent protein with three and a half to four percent calcium, starting at eighteen weeks or at the first egg, whichever comes first.

And here is the one that quietly costs birds: do not put layer feed in front of chickens younger than sixteen weeks. The calcium level that a laying hen needs is the calcium level that damages a young bird's kidneys, permanently. It is not a small mistake and it does not announce itself.

If your flock is mixed, with a rooster or birds too young to lay, feed an all flock ration instead and put the calcium somewhere the hens can choose it. A small separate container of oyster shell lets each hen take exactly what her own shells need, without forcing it on birds it would hurt. Never mix it into the feed of a mixed flock.

Grit is a different thing entirely and the two get confused constantly. Grit is insoluble stone that sits in the gizzard and does the grinding, because a chicken has no teeth. Birds eating whole grains, scratch, or anything they forage need it. Birds on nothing but complete feed do not. And oyster shell is not grit; it is far too soft to grind anything.

Keep treats and scratch to no more than a tenth of the diet. A useful field version of that rule: whatever you throw in should be gone in about twenty minutes. Past that, you are diluting a ration somebody formulated carefully, and the bird eats less of the part that was doing the work.

What I would actually buy

For a small backyard flock, in this order.

First, the metal can. It is the cheapest line on this page and it closes the biggest opening. Do it even if you keep the feeder you already own.

Second, a feeder that keeps grain off the ground and can be shut at night. A port style feeder makes a hen put her head in to eat, which is the difference between feeding chickens and feeding the neighbourhood. If you are away at unpredictable hours, pay the extra for the treadle version and let the weight of the bird do the closing.

Third, size it by days. Work out your flock's daily pounds from the numbers above, decide how often you genuinely want to be out there refilling, and buy the capacity that matches that answer rather than the one that matches your budget.

Fourth, the small things that stop the arguments: a separate oyster shell container for the hens, and grit only if your birds eat anything other than complete feed.

Quick answers

Will chickens attract rats no matter what I do?

Chickens do not attract rats. Feed does, and so does spilled feed, and so does an open sack in a shed. Handle the food the way you would handle a bird feeder in a city and the problem shrinks to something ordinary. Leave it open and the answer is yes.

Should I take the feeder inside at night?

Taking it in works, and plenty of keepers do exactly that. The reason to buy a treadle feeder instead is that it does the same job on the nights you forget, and forgetting is not a character flaw. It is a Tuesday.

Can I just use one feeder for the whole flock?

One is usually fine for a small flock, but watch who eats. There is always a bird at the bottom of the order, and a single feeder in a corner lets a dominant hen guard it. If you see a bird waiting, add a second point somewhere else rather than a bigger one in the same place.

Do I need grit if I feed pellets?

No, not if complete feed is genuinely all they get. The moment you add scratch, whole grain, or free ranging, you do. And it is not the same purchase as oyster shell, which is for shells rather than for grinding.

The bottom line

You will not notice the good version working. There will just be no ring of grain around the feeder in the morning, no droppings along the shed wall, no night you spend with a flashlight wondering how it started. Buy the can, buy the feeder that shuts, size it in days rather than pounds, and the chain that ends with an anemic hen never gets its first link.

To keep your flock supplied with the right mechanical minerals and avoid common digestive issues, make sure you read chicken grit versus calcium requirements.

Proper nutrition plays a huge role in recovery, which connects directly to understanding autumn egg production drop.

Shared at the Homestead Blog Hop.