Compare chick trays, hanging tube feeders, troughs and automatic feed lines: birds per feeder, capacity, height setting, cost against labour, flock size fit.
Halaal Farms Ghana team4 October 2026 · 13 min read
A hanging tube feeder with a 40 cm pan has about 125 cm of rim. That rim, and not the weight of feed in the tube, decides how many birds can eat at the same moment. A farmer who buys feeders by the kilo they hold, and then wonders why a tenth of the flock stays small, has usually bought the right capacity and too little rim.
A feeder has three jobs. It must let every bird eat without a fight, keep feed in the pan and off the floor, and hold enough that filling it does not swallow the working day. The four families of feeder (flat trays, hanging tubes, troughs and automatic lines) do those jobs in different ways and at different prices.
Rim space is the length of edge at which birds can stand and eat. For a round pan it is the diameter multiplied by 3.14. For a trough it is the length, doubled if birds can eat from both sides. Birds at a round pan stand like the spokes of a wheel, with their bodies fanning outward, so they need less edge each than birds standing shoulder to shoulder along a straight trough.
Working allowances for birds on full feed:
On those figures a 40 cm pan serves 30 to 35 broilers or about 25 layers. Manuals written for cool, closed houses allow many more birds to a pan. In Ghana's heat the flock eats mostly in the cool of early morning and evening, so nearly every bird wants to feed in the same two periods, and feeders filled by hand are sometimes late. Plan for the rush, not the average.
Holding capacity is the weight of feed the feeder takes. Compare it with what its birds eat. Thirty broilers near sale weight eat roughly 5 kg a day between them, and 25 layers about 3 kg. A 10 to 12 kg tube therefore holds two days of feed or more, which sounds convenient and is not. Feed left in a feeder goes stale, picks up moisture and separates into coarse and fine. Fill with about a day's supply, and let the birds clean the pans once a day before the next filling, so that the fine particles carrying the vitamins and minerals get eaten.
A day-old chick cannot reach into an adult feeder. For the first days feed goes on flat trays with a rim 2 to 3 cm high, on egg-tray flats, or on sheets of paper, where the chicks walk onto it and peck at what is under their feet. Allow one tray for every 50 to 100 chicks. With chicks from Halaal Farms Ghana, which travel in boxes of 50, one tray per box is easy to remember and is on the generous side.
Trays are dirty by design, because the chicks stand in them. Put out small amounts of feed often, and tip out and wipe each tray once a day. From about day five to seven, set small tube feeders or baby troughs among the trays. Remove the trays a few at a time and have them all out by about day ten to fourteen. The space each chick needs at each age, and how to tell when chicks are competing, is covered in feeder and drinker space for chicks, and the layout of the brooding area is in our chick brooding guide.
A tube feeder is a round hopper standing over a pan. Feed falls through a gap at the bottom of the tube as the birds eat it away. A cone in the middle of the pan pushes the feed outward to the rim. Most models let you widen or narrow the gap with pins or a screw collar. They are sold by capacity: about 3 kg for chicks, 6 to 8 kg for growers, and 10 to 15 kg or more for adult birds.
Four habits make them work.
Hang them. A feeder standing on the litter is fixed at one height, collects litter in the pan and gives rats an easy step up. Hang each one from a rafter or from a wire run along the house, on a cord that can be shortened. A hanging feeder also swings when a bird tries to perch on it, which discourages perching.
Set the gap. Feed should lie about one-third of the way up the pan wall. If the pan is full to the rim, narrow the gap or raise the tube. Pellets and crumbles flow faster than mash, so check the setting whenever the feed changes. The forms of feed and when each is used are explained in poultry feed types explained.
Tap them. In humid weather mash packs inside the tube and stops falling, a fault called bridging. The tube looks full and the pan is empty. Tap or shake each feeder as you pass, and look into the pan, not at the tube.
Use the lid. A lid keeps out droppings, dust and birds. Chickens will roost on the rim of an open tube and foul the feed below.
A trough is a long open channel on legs or hung from the roof. It can be bought in galvanised sheet or plastic, or made on the farm from planed boards or from a wide PVC pipe cut lengthwise. It is the cheapest feeding space you can provide, and it shows you at a glance how much feed is left.
Allow about 10 cm of edge for each adult layer. A trough 1.5 m long and open on both sides gives 3 m of edge, which serves 30 hens. A trough pushed against a wall serves half as many.
Three features separate a good trough from a wasteful one. A bar or reel along the top that spins when a bird steps on it stops birds standing, scratching and roosting in the feed. A lip turned inward along each edge stops them hooking feed out sideways with the beak. And a wide, steady base stops the whole thing tipping when a group of birds jumps on one end. Home-made troughs often lack the first two.
Troughs are useful wherever every bird must eat at the same time, for example when growing pullets are fed a measured daily ration. Their drawbacks are that they take up floor, are awkward to raise as birds grow, and collect more litter and droppings than a hanging pan. Wooden ones absorb moisture and cannot be disinfected properly, so replace them when they crack or stay damp. In cage houses the trough runs along the cage fronts and is filled by hand or from a hopper pushed along the row.
In a pan system, a hopper at one end of the house feeds an auger running inside a pipe. The auger carries feed along the pipe and drops it into a row of pans. The last pan holds a switch that stops the motor when it fills and starts it again when the birds have eaten the level down. The whole line hangs from winches and is raised a little each week. Chain feeders, more common in layer and breeder houses, drag feed around a circuit of trough with a flat chain.
These systems give every bird fresh feed at the same time, at the right depth, without a worker carrying a single bucket. They also need things a small farm may not have:
An automatic line still has to be checked daily. If the switch in the end pan fails in one position, the line runs empty. If it fails in the other, the pans overflow onto the litter.
The lip of the pan or trough should be level with the back of an average bird in the pen. At that height a bird reaches slightly forward and down to eat, and cannot easily rake feed out or scratch litter in.
Set too low, a feeder fills with litter and droppings, and birds bill the feed out onto the floor. Set too high, the smallest birds cannot reach, and they are exactly the birds that most need to eat. A flock with feeders too high grows more uneven every week.
Broilers grow fast enough that the correct height changes noticeably in a few days, so check twice a week and adjust at least weekly. Layers need adjustment through the rearing period and then little once they are grown. Make adjustment easy, or it will not be done: a chain with a hook that can be moved up a link, or a cord with a sliding knot, takes seconds. If the flock is uneven, set most feeders for the average bird and leave a few lower for the small ones until they catch up.
Divide the number of birds by the birds per feeder, round up, and add about one feeder in ten as spares.
| Flock | Feeder | Sum | Buy |
|---|---|---|---|
| 500 broilers | Hanging tube, 40 cm pan | 500 ÷ 30 = 17 | 19, plus 10 chick trays |
| 1,000 broilers | Hanging tube, 40 cm pan | 1,000 ÷ 30 = 34 | 37, plus 20 chick trays |
| 500 layers | Hanging tube, 40 cm pan | 500 ÷ 25 = 20 | 22 |
| 500 layers | Double-sided trough, 1.5 m | 500 × 10 cm = 50 m of edge; 50 ÷ 3 = 17 | 18 or 19 |
Spread the feeders evenly over the whole pen, in rows, alternating with the drinkers, so that no bird has to walk more than about three metres to feed. Do not line them up along the walls or bunch them near the door because that is where filling is easiest. Water equipment is chosen and counted in a similar way, and our comparison of nipple drinkers and bell drinkers covers it.
Feeders are bought once and used for years. The labour of filling them is paid for every day. A fair comparison puts both on the same footing.
Start with the equipment. As an example only, if a 12 kg tube feeder costs GH₵ 120, then 37 of them cost GH₵ 4,440. Used for six broiler batches a year over three years, that is 18 batches, or about GH₵ 250 a batch. Put your own quoted price and your own number of batches into the same sum.
Then measure the labour. A thousand broilers in their last week eat somewhere around 150 to 200 kg of feed a day, which is three or four 50 kg bags carried from the store and poured into three dozen feeders, usually in two rounds. Time the job with a watch for three days. That figure, multiplied by the wage, is what an automatic line would save, and you set it against the yearly cost of the line: its price divided by the years it will last, plus repairs and electricity.
For most farms below a few thousand birds the answer is that the line does not pay, because it does not remove a worker. The same person is still needed for water, litter, dead birds and watching the flock. Automatic feeding earns its cost when it lets one person look after many more birds than before.
Hand feeding has a benefit that never appears in the sums: whoever fills the feeders walks through the whole flock twice a day and sees the birds. Its weakness is consistency. Feeders get filled late on market days and Sundays. Cheap aids close much of the gap: a wheelbarrow or trolley, a day store at the end of the house, and a scoop of known weight, which also makes feed records easy.
| Flock in one house | Feeding equipment that fits |
|---|---|
| Up to about 200 birds | Chick trays, then hanging tube feeders. Home-made troughs with a spinner bar for layers. |
| 200 to 2,000 | Hanging tube feeders throughout, with a trolley and a day store at the house. |
| 2,000 to 5,000 | Tube feeders with well-organised feed handling, or automatic pans where power and repair service are dependable. |
| More than about 5,000 | Automatic pan or chain lines, with a generator and a bulk feed store. |
| Layers in cages | Front troughs filled by hand or by hopper trolley. |
Other species need small changes. Turkeys grow tall and heavy, so they need large, strong feeders hung higher, and young poults are slow to find feed and benefit from extra trays. Quail and guinea keets flick feed about and need small troughs with a grill over the top. If you are starting with keets, poults or quail, ask the supplier what feeder the young birds were started on.
Plastic feeders are light, do not rust and wash easily. Sunlight makes cheap plastic brittle, so dry them in the sun after washing but store them in shade, and look hard at the handle, which is the part that breaks. Galvanised feeders are stronger and rats cannot gnaw through them. They rust where damp mash sits, and badly finished ones have sharp edges that cut combs and wattles.
At the shop, check that:
Wash feeders with detergent between flocks and dry them fully before use. During a flock, scrape out any feed that has caked in a pan or tube. Damp, caked feed grows mould, and mould toxins harm birds at very low levels, as explained in aflatoxin and mouldy feed.
Count, buy, wash and hang the feeders before the chicks are booked, and lay out the trays the day before delivery. Then test the whole arrangement against your budget: the poultry profit calculator shows how the equipment cost sits beside feed and chicks.
Halaal Farms Ghana supplies broiler chicks, layer chicks and other birds to all 16 regions, with the price, hatch date and delivery cost confirmed before you pay. Advice is free before and after an order. If you are unsure how many feeders your flock needs, send the number and type of birds through the order form or call 024 915 1503.
For 100 broilers, buy four hanging tube feeders with pans of about 40 cm. Three would cover the birds on paper at 30 to 35 each, but a fourth gives room for the morning and evening rush and covers a breakage. For the first week you also need two flat chick trays, one for each box of 50, used together with feed scattered on paper.
Yes. A trough made from planed boards, galvanised sheet or a wide PVC pipe cut lengthwise works well for growers and layers. Give it an inward lip along each edge, a bar that spins along the top so birds cannot stand in the feed, and a steady base. Allow 10 cm of edge for each adult hen. Avoid open bowls and basins, which birds stand in and scratch out.
Mash absorbs moisture from humid air and packs together inside the tube, so the pan empties while the tube still looks full. Fine, dusty mash and a feed gap set too narrow make it worse. Tap or shake each feeder at every visit, fill with one day's feed instead of several, keep feeders away from drinkers and throw away any feed that has caked or smells musty.
Put small tube feeders or baby troughs among the trays from about day five to seven, with the pan resting on the litter or just above it. Take the trays away a few at a time over the following days, and have them all out by about day ten to fourteen. Removing every tray on one day leaves the slower chicks without feed while they learn.
Written by the Halaal Farms Ghana team. We hatch and import day-old chicks at Opeikuma, Kasoa, and deliver to all 16 regions. This article is general guidance for farmers. For diagnosis and treatment of sick birds, speak to a vet or your district veterinary office.
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