Inexpensive Space Savings Feeders
Are you contemplating a new barn or do you want to recover some space being taken up by bulk hay feeders? Want to eliminate hay being thrown out of the bunk feeders or buckets onto the floor? At Wild Hair Alpacas we have come up with cheap, space saving hay feeders using no climb horse fence and our existing pole barn structure. For inside feeders we use the pole barn structure and the wall of the barn, and nail the four foot no-climb horse fence between the supporting poles to create a vertical feeder that is 4-6 inches deep (depending on your pole barn pole size), four feet high, and as wide as we decide, based on the existing barn structure. The space between the barn wall and the fencing will hold a flake, and you can stack up to four feet of hay which provides a lot of flexibility as to how much you want to feed at one time. We feel this has reduced the spitting contests as the animals seem to have fewer issues with access to the hay. Putting the hay along the wall in the space between pole barn posts takes up only the space of the pole width giving us back the floor space originally taken up by hay bunks and hay buckets. We also put these kinds of feeders outside the barn under the overhang out to the poles supporting the overhang. This gave us 8 foot long two-sided feeders that the alpacas love, and they only take up 4-6 inches! These were built by nailing a 2x4 to the barn wall and then nailing no-climb fence two both sides of the 2x4 and the support pole.
Here is a photo of an inside feeder along a 10 foot wall in the barn and an inside feeder between two runs.
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