"Made It Myself" Pellet Feeder

It took very little modification for Steve Kenyon to turn a 5-ft. dia. by 3 1/2 ft. wide flotation tire into an easy-to-load-and-use pellet feeder. Kenyon picked up the damaged tire (originally off a chemical spreader) for free at his local tire shop. He notes that when choosing a tire it's very important that it be as wide as possible, so it will be stable enough to stand in an upright position on its own.

Turning the tire into a pellet feeder required only two steps, according to Kenyon. First, he used an angle grinder to cut a 1-ft. hole in the face of the tire, shaping it to fit between two lugs. Since he has a Hydra-dec bale truck, the only other thing he needed was a 5-ft. section of drill stem that goes through the center of the tire like an axle.

"I just left the center of the tire open. You can buy a manufactured pellet feeder with the sides closed in and a pipe through the center so you can pick it up, but why go to all that work?" Kenyon asks. The main reason Kenyon chose to leave the sides of the tire open is that it makes filling much easier.

"If you're filling a commercial unit with a five-gal. pail, you have to lift it above your shoulders to pour it in, but with this one, you just pour it in from the side. Because of the wider tire, it still holds about twentyfive 5-gal. pails of pellets, even with open sides," he says. "Everytime it rolls a revolution, almost 5 gal. of pellets drop out."

Kenyon says the reason he built his low-input pellet feeder was because he had a bull pen with about 35 mature bulls in it "and you don't walk in there on foot with a pail of pellets!" Thanks to his almost free feeder, Kenyon has automated much of the job and can meander through the bullpen in his truck. He says the feeder can be emptied in about a minute and it spreads the pellets out so that even the less aggressive animals have access.