How to Automate Chicken Life

Especially with the increasing price of eggs, having chickens is becoming an increasingly prevalent addition to the general population's backyard. But, the thing is, the dang things need to be kept alive! Who knew chickens need a steady supply of food and water to live?? Thankfully, most people know that, but that doesn't mean it's not effort to take care of them day after day. Today we're going to be righting the ship and turning on easy-mode for the chicken life by addressing and automating all of their needs as well as possible.

I generally enjoy front-loading work, but especially now with another kiddo on the way we don't want the sleep deprived delirium to cause us to neglect our animals for days on end. As such, we'll be automating their necessities as thoroughly as possible. They need to be let in and out of their coop, such that they can have access to their food and water during the day and still remain safe at night from predators (humans are far from the only ones who find chickens tasty). They also need food from as many convenient sources as we can muster, as well as fresh water. For the food in particular, I'll be getting a little (read: very) experimental, but by the end of all this, our chickens should require much less regular maintenance.

The basic supplies you'll need are:

• Automatic chicken door
• Chicken water cups
• Trash Can(s)
• Spare Gutters
• Wood
• Screws/nails
• Wire mesh

If you need to build a large feeder, you'll also need:

• A clean, sturdy trash can (preferably with a tight-fitting lid to keep out pests)
• PVC pipe
• PVC elbow joints
• Waterproof adhesive, silicone sealant or PVC cement

Tools:

• Drill
• Saw
• Staple gun

We're starting with water because it's all around the most satisfying part to setup. It's easy and, depending on how often it rains in your area, is very nearly completely self sustaining.

The first and easiest addition is a kiddie pool. You legitimately just drop it in the chicken run and it helps with the cause by being a big ol' tub for rainwater to accumulate in. Plus, if you're considering adding ducks to your flock, you need a kiddie pool for them anyway. Not only do ducks love splashing around in water, they legitimately need it to stay healthy. They rely on swimming in water to keep their feathers clean, as well as their eyes and nostrils. So it is definitely necessary if you have ducks to have a source of fresh water at all times, and this is the easiest way to provide it. It's also worth noting that chickens eat mosquito larvae, which should mitigate any concerns you might have about adding standing water to your yard. Instead of creating pests, you're just creating a bit more food for the chickens!

The more in-depth and effective solution involves repurposing an old trash can. You can buy chicken water cups for cheap online, and then you just drill a hole toward the bottom (as shown above) and screw the water cups in place. You'll need a 3/8" or 1/2" drill bit, depending on the cups you purchased. The ones linked in the supplies list require a 3/8" drill bit. They come with little twist-on pieces, so you can just shove the cups into the hole and tighten the twist-on piece until it's fully locked in place. These refill without overflowing, so the water that accumulates in the trash can keeps these little cups topped off. Chickens, as dumb as they might be, have no problem finding food and water and ours near-instantly figured out how to use the cups for water.

This brings us to how to fill and keep this trash can full of water. Trash can lids are often domed, and some even have a hole in the top middle already. If not, you can drill a hole in the middle of the lid. Then simply flip the lid upside down and secure it to the trash can to create a simple makeshift funnel.

Now for the important part - actually keeping the trash can full. It's becoming more prevalent to do rainwater collection from houses, and this is done by connecting a pipe into the gutters and filling a rain barrel from the runoff. We're going to do basically the same thing with our trash can. By adding sloped gutters to the chicken coop roof, we can very easily guide the water to our trash can and fill it with rainwater. Where we live it rains a lot, so even just with a small stretch of gutters we have had a consistent source of water for the chickens. Worst comes to worse, and it hasn't rained in weeks, just pull out the hose and fill er up every now and then.

One consideration is for when the chickens are stuck indoors for one reason or another. Whether that's weather, a dead battery in the automatic door, or whatever else, it makes sense to have a smaller water source indoors that can also get refilled. A likely addition that I'll install at some point is to add a small additional segment of water collection tubing outside the coop with a small pipe through the wall that can funnel water inside the coop into a gravity fed waterer. This way, there's yet another source of water in general, and possibly a huge help on a (maybe literally) rainy day.

This step will be pretty quick, since the goal is to utilize a resource that already exists. Chicken doors are available online for purchase, and many include solar power as well as normal battery or electric power hookups. I'm a big fan of solar power in general, since it's a green solution with a 1 and done cost that then provides power for itself from then on. If you have a lot of sunlight in your chicken run, or at least a convenient power source, you will likely be all set with the currently available options.

Chicken doors are pretty easy to install but have a few things to consider. Particularly with solar powered doors, you'll likely have an electronics box, battery backup, and the solar panel itself to place. I did end up installing ours within the door to the chicken coop, since I needed to build a new one anyway, so I attached the battery pack to the back of the door and created a small shelf off to the side for the electronics box. The solar panels should be mounted wherever you have the most sun regardless, so it's worth noting that you don't necessarily need to even install the chicken door within the larger door you use. You could just as easily cut a hole in a wall and install it there, which could be more ideal in some setups.

As noted, I was already making a door, so I just left a chicken-door-sized hole in the door and screwed it in place. Otherwise, in most cases it would just be a matter of creating an appropriately sized hole with something like a Sawzall if it's wood, or wire cutters if you have a wire set up, and screwing the chicken door in place.

This is actually the one part of my own setup that I'll be revisiting, so I may reinvent the wheel a bit on this one and build custom chicken door electronics so as to better optimize the low-power needs of our setup. Our chicken run is heavily shaded and not near a power source, so I'll likely look to build a new low-power option in the future. Hopefully the existing solar options suit your needs, or you at least have a convenient power hookup.

Food is harder to fully automate, but you better believe we're going to take a stab at it. First, though, there are some ridiculously easy steps we can take to make keeping them fed easier, and one of them is a bigger feeder. I'm not even sure that it's exaggeration to say that feeding chickens feels like a near-constant activity when you're rocking a small feeder. A big feeder is a definite game changer.

The initial intention I had was similar to that of the water feeder. I was going to repurpose an old trash can and set it up as a chicken feeder. We stumbled upon a larger feeder, so this became unnecessary. Even this though is worth a note - despite how many people are starting to get into raising chickens, there are still plenty of things being given away for chickens. We got this for free from someone that was moving, so it's certainly worth looking for. Regardless, here is how you can go about making a large feeder for yourself if needed -

1. Drill holes toward the bottom of the trash can that fit the size of the PVC piping you have. A two to three inch width pipe is best for fitting chicken heads inside. It's also a good idea to have the holes positioned a few inches up from the base of the trash can so the feed doesn't spill out onto the ground.
2. Cut your PVC pipe into sections long enough to reach from the holes in the trash can to just below the top of the can.
3. Attach a PVC elbow to one end of each pipe section. This elbow will be on the inside of the trash can and will be what the feed falls into. The other end of the pipe will stick out of the hole you cut in the trash can. Make sure the PVC elbow is facing upwards, to allow feed to collect in it.
4. Insert each pipe section through a hole in the trash can, so the elbow end is inside the can and the other end is outside.
5. Secure the pipe to the trash can using a waterproof adhesive, silicone sealant, or PVC cement around the hole. Ensure the seal is watertight to prevent feed from leaking out.
6. Allow everything to dry thoroughly before use.

Once it's dry, just fill the trash can with feed and you should be good to go. The feed will flow down into the PVC elbows inside the can, but not spill out thanks to the gravity-fed design. As chickens peck out feed from the exposed PVC pipe outside, more feed will flow down to replace it.

Since this step goes into acquiring or making a larger feeder, it seems the opportune time to talk about feed in general. Chickens will do fine on a basic store bought feed mix. But you will likely get more and better tasting (in our opinion) eggs, as well as keep them laying longer, with some extra ingredients. The recipe for feed is flexible, but generally you want to include:

7 parts generic chicken "layer" feed, pellets or crumbles

1 part cracked corn, sunflower seeds, or other treats

1 part grit and/or calcium source like crushed shells

1 part powdered chicken vitamins (or you can get liquid and pour it over rather than powder)

Chickens are nature's garbage disposals, and it's amazing. We set aside food scraps for compost anyway, so we started setting aside what chickens will eat as well. Sure, the coffee grounds go into the compost still, but anything you think could be considered food will more than likely be something the chickens will happily devour. That means the skins and tops of vegetables you cut off, bread crusts, apple and pear cores, watermelon rinds, dried out bagels, slightly smelly hard boiled eggs three weeks after Easter, or bits of leftovers from your dinner plate. Chickens are omnivores, so they will even pick clean a chicken or turkey carcass after making soup, or eat the fat from a steak or a pork roast. With a toddler in the house in particular, it feels fantastic to know that food doesn't get wasted.

One less intuitive one that's particularly noteworthy is that chickens eat egg shells. To the great surprise of no one, egg shells contain the nutriment chickens need to make egg shells. It's just a bit surprising (to me, anyway) that they're down to snack on those. It's better to crush these up before giving them to the chickens, though, because you don't want chickens to learn to eat eggs. That's a habit that doesn't really get unlearned, so crushing the shells up at least a bit helps keep them from seeing the eggs they lay as food.

Similar to how it's not particularly out of our way to set aside food scraps, it's pretty darn easy to consolidate weeds you pull from the yard and garden into a bucket as well. It turns out, chickens don't just want to pick through these greens. They'll just straight up eat a lot of the junk you clean from your yard. So, instead of being an eyesore, weeds can just fill the belly of your chickens that much further.

A last note on the easy, ongoing food, that isn't going to be applicable to everyone but really helps with the hands-off approach if this is you. Chickens are fantastic at foraging for food. If they're allowed to roam your yard, they'll go around feeding themselves by eating up weeds and bugs you probably didn't want anyway. Our yard is a bit too small for this, they do dig holes and tear up grass so it's not necessarily all aesthetic advantages, and we don't want them getting into our garden and such so this isn't something we're able to do, but as far as easy food goes - letting chickens feed themselves is pretty far up there! Hence why "free-ranging" is so big. It also makes for super healthy eggs.

I did two big experiments with ongoing, hands off, infinite food for the chickens and I think one of them is actually worth doing.

First, I do briefly want to touch on my less promising experiment in case someone wants to take it to the next level. The idea is that crickets are great chicken food. They don't require much sustenance themselves and are fantastic protein. By providing them an old foam cooler as a shelter, they have an insulated environment that better protects them from the elements and keeps the cooler out of the trash.

The idea is I created one singular point at which the crickets could escape, which is through a fairly tall pipe intended to be most accessible to full-grown crickets. With plenty of food in there, they should last a long time, but their water source is a wet sponge and would need topped off. It's worth noting that if the water source I mentioned for inside the coop were added, one could pretty easily create a very small cut in the cricket box, thread a cloth through, and inject the cloth into the water pipe, and have the cloth get topped off with water through capillary action. This could make it much more self sustaining and much more reasonable as an, albeit still very experimental, ongoing food source.

The experiment that I like will still undoubtedly sound crazy, and it is, but I did some tests and it actually seems legitimately promising. Dirt can sit atop a wire mesh. Some small amounts are lost over time, but just like how you'll find dirt in your gutters when you clean them out (I do it at least once a year and still end up finding trees trying to grow in them), leaves and dust and all that becomes new dirt.

If anything, that gives the worms something fresh to eat because, yes, the experiment is for worms. Worms will propagate to fill the area they're in, which means that so long as there are worms in the container of dirt you make, worms should fill the space. When it rains in particular, worms fall out. When I first came up with this idea, I sprayed different amounts of water on the dirt and very tediously counted how many worms came out. As fun as that wasn't, I'd say the general premise seemed to work about as well as I could hope.

I have this staged strategically. It sits right under the netting we use to help keep the chickens in and predators out. This keeps the chickens from trying to jump on top of it, flinging dirt everywhere, and inhaling all the worms like a spaghetti buffet. The run is sloped, so it sits at the top of the slope. Since it's most likely that the worms would fall out during rain, they'll be washed downward a little bit, but it's not exactly going to be a full fledged waterslide.

I expect that when the chickens are out and about and looking for food that the worms won't last particularly long, but even if they aren't food that's just another good thing. That means more worms are propagating in the immediate area of the chickens, or in the run itself.

As for setting it up, it's a pretty simple structure. Find 4 pieces of wood you can use as the legs and wider pieces that can be used for the border of the dirt container. You just screw or nail the border together. Then, you use your staple gun and connect your wire mesh to what will be the bottom of the container. If the mesh isn't wide enough, you can use zip ties to connect the pieces of mesh together to help keep the dirt in.

Then just screw the legs of the container onto the border and you're done. I went straight for the worst wood I had available to me and it served its purpose well. A brief note is that I used different length legs because of the slope of the chicken run, so that may be something to keep in mind for yours as well.

Then you add dirt on top of the wire mesh. I also added some leaves and such as well so that this is somewhat like a floating compost bin, with plenty for the worms to eat as they go. As far as getting worms goes, it's crazy easy to get a ton of worms. There's no need to buy them.

You can set pretty much anything down on dirt before a rain and find a plethora of worms underneath it when the rain has passed. I put down a log and a paver and both had a ton of worms under them following some rain. Once the dirt container is in place in the chicken run with worms in their new home, the experimental infinite food supply is online.

To be clear, I don't think the little bin of dirt I setup for this worm experiment will be enough to keep the chickens fully fed. I do, however, think there's a high chance that it will provide a small amount of ongoing food indefinitely, which serves as a helpful part of a whole when trying to actually, legitimately automate chicken life.

For now, the job of keeping a small flock of chickens alive and happy is made night and day easier with all these additions for automating food, water, and getting in and out of their shelter. Hopefully this helped you get on track for the easy-mode chicken life as well, and I'll be interested to hear what else people come up with. Have a good one!