Filling The Automatic Feedlines

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December 15, 2025

When it comes to our automated feedline systems one of the most common questions I get is regarding how we fill them up. While their are several ways the farms using our systems fill their bins our own method is pretty simple and inexpensive.

We had an old Gehl grinder mixer sitting around the farm that was last used in the 90's by my father and grandfather. It had been worn out then and had been dutifully parked in the corner of an old barn and just let sat for nearly 30 years when I laid eyes on it.

It would die if I tried to grind feed with it, but we get all our feed ground to our specs and delivered to large permanent bins. I don't need this old machine to grind I just need it to tranfer the allready ground feed. So I pulled the grinding plates on it and just use the mix funtion with the boom arm.

It's nothing fancy with is manual crank cables to adjust the boom arm but it is simple, inexpensive and most importantly - it works.

A few times we have gotten small batches of feed in tote sacks and we have just lifted the back up from the bottom (sitting on a pallet) with forks and slowly split the side to dump the feed in the bin.

I know a few other farms use old grain carts or feed trucks to fill them - really anything with an old boom arm will do the trick.

It's amazing how much time it saves! Feeding broilers and hens used to take nearly half of every day now we fill bins once a week. It has been a game changer for our farm and the farms that have implemented it as well!

Michael put it pretty well when he said.....

" We've been using the PastureTek automatic feed lines for a year now, and few innovations have had this much impact on our farm. We haven’t lifted a 5-gallon bucket in over twelve months. Feeding 3,000 hens now takes me just one hour a week—freeing up my time to grow our farm instead of repeating the same task over and over. This system has made our egg production feel truly sustainable. I can't imagine raising birds without it. "

--Michael Gutschenritter - Three Brothers Farm

Pig and Turkey Feeder Overview

As you saw the Pig and Turkey Feeder allows you to add portable feed storage and additional durable feeder space to your farm operation with its 4500 lbs of feed capacity. No longer do you have to put up with 2nd rate pig and turkey feeders that are hard to move, hard to fill and waste too much feed from wastage and rain spoilage! The Pasture Tek Turkey & Pig Feeder keeps your feed dry and prevents waste with interchangeable feed grills to fit either pigs or turkeys. It also has an adjustable feed slide to limit or increase feed flow. It sits on skids so it can be easily towed and sports heavy duty D-links on all four corners so you can link multiple units together to further reduce the time it takes to move your feeders to fresh pasture.It also sports permanent fork mounts on the side so you can easily set it on a trailer and move it from farm to farm. The rain guard can be collapsed also for easy transport reducing the feeder to 4'x10' dimensions you can stack them double wide on a trailer to move farms if needed! The entire top is a water tight hinged lid which makes refilling a breeze and at only 6' tall it can easily be filled with augers or tote sacks.

Moving Chicks From Brooder To Pasture - The Easy Way

Moving chicks from the brooder to your pasture can be a huge hassle! We used to spend back breaking hours in the brooder catching three week old birds, then placing them in our catch crates (which involved moving heavy crates of birds around by hand- a huge no no for efficiency) and then moving them to our field shelters. Of course, once we got there, we had to down stack the heavy crates, walk them into the houses and then bend over to pull the birds back out of the crates. Inevitably birds were injured, a few legs were broken and everyone generally dreaded chick catch and move day (myself included). The losses hurt the bottom line of the farm and I hate stressing the birds. While some accidents and some losses are inevitable I couldn’t stand how we were moving them out to pasture but I also was just struggling to break my paradigm of how birds had to be moved from brooder to pasture. And so unfortunately we continued this archaic, stressful and back breaking method of moving birds to pasture for years double handling over 200,000 birds during that time. Then after watching a video online we attempted to herd them onto a stock trailer but found that coaxing them on was more time consuming and stressful than just catching them. They had no interest in walking up a ramp onto the trailer and the change in environment from inside the brooder to outside totally scared them (especially the sunlight change and even the air temperature). Also if it was hot at all outside (like 80 degrees which in Missouri is basically the min temp for most of Spring, Summer and Fall) the trailer would become an oven and the chicks would crowd (heat + chicken piles being an extraordinarily swift way to end any dreams of a profitable batch of broilers) and yea we only did that twice before we decided it was unworkable! I was still intrigued by the idea though, as until they hit the ramp the chicks would herd easily with some large poly political campaign signs (the losers signs are normally free for the taking). Our trailer experiment while a failure had done one important thing - it started to break my view of how broiler chicks had to be moved. Pondering on the problem, I started thinking outside the box and came up with a 4'x8' platform with 2' removable side walls and fork inserts on top instead of at the bottom like a normal pallet. We put a plywood floor in it and then threw used wood chips on top so that it would not appear to be any different from the brooder floor. With fork holes on top we could set it through our brooder door (over the retaining board) and also through the 4' wide doors of our PT1000 hoops. The brooded birds could then be readily herded onto these platforms "chick movers" and then the chick mover could be set on a flat bed trailer to take multiple out to pasture at the same time. We added a vented rollup shade cloth to the top so that we could move them even in the heat of the day which took a ton of pressure off of the chick moving mornings. It worked! Now with six chick movers and a little practice 2-3 people can easily move 2200 chicks from the brooder to pasture in a few hours with minimal stress to chicks and helpers! You can scan the QR code and see a video of how it works! I hope it provides some inspiration for you and your operation. -David

Filling The Automatic Feedlines

More from the blog

Pig and Turkey Feeder Overview

Moving Chicks From Brooder To Pasture - The Easy Way

How We Make Watering The Chickens Easy

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