For raising goats, you will need various types of feeders for feeding your goats. You can use your home used, recycled or inexpensive materials for making cheap homemade goat feeders. Goats are very curious, intelligent and hardy animal.
So their feeders or anything else which you put inside their area, needs to be as strong and durable as possible. Because they can push, beat up and in many cases destroy the feeders or other materials.
Even, sometimes your goats can also destroy the best designed commercial feeders and other equipment.
So their feeders must have to be strong enough. You can easily make homemade goat feeders by your own, using some inexpensive or recycled materials. This will also reduce your additional farm setup costs.
How To Make Homemade Goat Feeders?
Here we are describing the process of making various types of cheap homemade goat feeders and the required materials for this process.
Required Materials
Required materials for making cheap homemade goat feeders depend on the type of feeders. Usually goats need grain, hay and minerals feeders. Depending on the type of feeders, find out suitable scrap materials.
Materials for making homemade goat feeders may include chain, nails, cement, PVC primer, different pieces of dimensional lumber and plywood, screws, PVC pipes with different widths etc. Various types of wooden pallets are very useful for making feeders quickly and easily.
Basic tools for making homemade feeders include drills, saws, a tape measure and hammers.
If you don’t have any materials, then you can check any of your local construction company for excess materials left over from a construction project or check any of your local resale stores.
This types of construction company and local resale stores sell materials at a discount. And sometimes the construction companies give away the excess materials for free (if you are lucky, you can get some free materials).
Hay Feeder
In case of hay feeders, it requires openings. Make the openings small enough that the goats do not get their heads stuck, but large enough for the goats to access the hay. For making hay feeders for a few number of goats, use 2-by-4 board piece.
Put the boards together and make a crate with spaced slats. In case of larger herds, goats require a lot of hay. So you have to make larger sized hay feeders.
You can use a simple cube made from five wooden pallets screwed together. Attach a piece of plywood to the top with hinges for covering the top to keep rain water out of the hay.
Loose Mineral Feeder
For supplementing your goat’s diet, you have to provide them free-fed loose minerals along with their regular foods. PVC pipes works best for this purpose.
You can make a durable mineral feeder with PVC pipe through a few simple steps. For making a loose mineral feeder with PVC pipe, you will need 4 inch PVC pipe along with one 45-degree elbow connector, a female adapter, an end cap and a male threaded cap.
You will also need cement and PVC primer, to seal the feeder. Apply the primer to the top opening in the 45-degree elbow connector and to one end of the PVC pipe.
Allow the primer for a few minutes to sit perfectly. Immediately push the pipe into the connector after applying a thin layer of the cement to both sections.
At this point, you have a long pipe with the opening of the elbow connector (facing upward like the letter J). Do this same process again with the other end of the connector and the female adapter. For closing the bottom, screw in the male cap.
Before proceeding, allow the feeder to sit for at least one day (24 hours). For hanging the feeder, drill holes in the PVC and attach chain or rope to tie. You can also drill the feeder directly onto any walls in the goat shelter.
After successfully fitting the feeder, fill it with loose minerals at the top and close with the end cap. And finally you are done. 🙂
Trough Feeder
Trough feeders are very suitable for serving grain or goat pellets to your goats. Usually the 4 inch diameter PVC is used for this purpose. And it creates a wide enough trough for the goats. Cut the PVC to length, according to your desired trough length.
Split the PVC length in half, and create two half-moon pieces. Place a piece of 2-inch treated lumber at one end of the trough. Trace the shape of the curve onto the wood.
After that, cut two pieces of wood to this shape for creating the end caps of the trough. Place the wood pieces inside the PVC perfectly and secure it with wood screws.
It will be better if you screw an eyebolt into the top of each piece of wood. After that, attach a chain to each piece for hanging the trough. That’s it. You are done.
