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. Plastic offers a cost-effective material that resists caustic solutions, can be as durable as its sheet metal predecessors, and offers better longevity since they never rust. In addition, with the advent of modern disinfectants, the new acidic cleaning agents proved to be far too corrosive for old galvanized sheet metal. Professional farmers adopted plastic and stainless steel devices because of their non-porous characteristics, which deny bacteria and viruses a place to hide and entrench themselves. Plastics have become the new standard for poultry equipment, both in the commercial sector and retail stores, but for different reasons. 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. 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.
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