"When you are talking about pasture rotation, how many chickens are involved and what size are the pastures?"

--- Keith Alexander

When I started reading about pasture rotation, those were some of my first questions too, but I soon learned the answers aren't really numerical.  For example, I could tell you that the pasture in question (#7 on the map) is about a twentieth of an acre and fed 17 chickens for two weeks.  But you couldn't take that data and assume that a pasture half that size would feed 17 chickens for one week, even if you matched up the ages and breeds of the birds.  (These guys are two months old and thus are about half an adult chicken in terms of appetite.)  The trouble with such simple math is that every pasture has a different array of plants in it, and seasons also drastically change the amount of food available from that pasture.  Still, I thought it might be fun to take you on a tour of our pastures, starting with the three pastures our broilers enjoy.

Pasture 1 is about 490 square feet and was fenced in spring 2010.  It has suffered from lots of experiments since it was our first pasture, initiated before I understood anything about rotation or what chickens will and won't eat.  Pasture 1's biggest problem, though, is that it's way too small for a full flock of broilers, so I usually add temporary fences to turn this area into a thoroughfare through which our flock accesses grassy parts of the yard.

Pasture 2 is about 1,080 square feet and was fenced in spring 2010.  It's a bit better off than Pasture 1 because I'd learned a few things in the intervening months, and because the pasture is big enough to handle 15 to 20 broilers of just about any age for a week without being scratched bare.  There's still no real permanent sward on it, though, so the ground is dominated by chickweed this spring, just like pasture 5, with patches of other perennials poking through.  The key to managing this pasture so it can serve us all summer is to be sure to mow it after moving the flock out so the taller perennials don't turn woody and shade out the more tasty, small plants that chickens enjoy.

Pasture 7 is about 2,100 square feet and is brand new, having come into production only last year.  This is the pasture I've been playing around with all winter, adding terraces and planting comfrey and trees into.  If anything, I'd say pasture 7 is a bit too big for the broilers to utilize fully in a week, although they eat through it faster than you might think since the grazing quality is still very poor.  The area was a mess of brush until we cleared out the small trees last June, so the tender plants the chickens enjoy didn't have the sun to grow until recently.  The smaller photo above shows what the pasture looks like after the chickens moved out and Mark ran through with a weed eater to whack back the tall weeds.

Our broilers tend to do pretty well in this three-pasture rotation, but it's really a four-pasture rotation because I let the flock walk through pasture 1 into two different areas on different weeks.  (One of these spillover areas is shown in the photo above.)  Once I get all of the unwanted woody plants out and the wanted perennials in (including a permanent sward), this area should be sufficient for up to 20 broilers, although I'd like to eventually add another pasture between pastures 2 and 7 to give everything a bit of breathing room in the summer.  And I really need a second set of pastures just like this for the broilers shown above, who are a month old and nearly ready to leave the brooder.

I'll give you a tour of our more grassed pastures (used by our layers) in another post, so stay tuned!

I summed up ways to tell what has been eating your chickens in a previous post, but many of you have asked for the followup --- how to keep those predators at bay.  Even though we live in the middle of the woods, we've only lost a handful of chickens, so I figure we're doing a pretty good job of predator control (without shooting anything).  Here are our top tips:

Get a good dog.  I'm pretty sure Lucy does 95% of the predator control on our farm.  Whenever she hears a sound, she tears off looking for the source.  Nearly all of our chicken losses have occured recently since her old bones have kept our faithful dog closer to home.  (You'll first have to train your dog that chickens are to be protected, not eaten, of course.)

Locate the coop close to your house.  Speaking of close to home, you can go a long way toward scaring off predators by keeping your chickens in an area that you walk through many times a day.  After some experimentation, we've started locating our chick brooder right outside our back door, after which relocation we haven't lost a single chick to predators.

Include a rooster in your flock.  If you don't have neighbors who will complain about the crowing, a rooster will really pull his weight in chasing away predators.  One winter while our flock was free ranging, a hawk swooped down and started tearing at the neck of one of our hens.  The rooster made such a show and the flock yelled so loudly that I knew something was going on and had time to chase the hawk away before the hen was injured.

Close the chickens in at night.  To be honest, I only do this with our chicks, although I could probably have prevented our raccoon incursion by following suit with the adult hens.  To make this technique effective, you'll have to combine it with a campaign to turn your coop into a predator-proof establishment once the door is closed.  No, chicken-wire doesn't cut it, but hardware cloth might if it's screwed down tightly.

Include trees and bushes in the pasture.  During the day, hawks are our biggest danger, and these birds of prey usually hunt by circling over open areas.  Tree cover makes it much tougher for a hawk to notice your poultry, and bushes give your chickens a spot to hide if they are in danger.

What extra measures do you take on your own homestead to keep your layers from turning into fox dinners?

When's the best time to start silkworm eggs?  Probably about two weeks ago, although I only pulled mine out of the fridge on May 8.

The trick is to time your hatch for a period when there are plenty of young mulberry leaves around, and for the sake of safety, you probably should also work around the frost-free date.  It would be a shame to get baby silkworms going, only to have a frost nip back the leaves so you end up without a food source.

What I forgot to factor into my calculations is that it takes about two weeks for silkworm eggs to hatch after you take them out of cold storage and put them in a dish at room temperature.  So we'll be getting a slightly late start this year, but it shouldn't be a big deal.  I'll report more once we have little white caterpillars crawling around.

First of all, I apologize for the low quality of these photos.  You can't talk chickens into posing unless they feel like it, and when they did, my camera was broken and I had to borrow Mark's.  Plus, the day was dark and damp, which makes for bad photos.  All of those caveats aside, I did want to show you how our broilers are enjoying their forest pasture.

I usually like to rotate chickens out of a pasture after a week or less, but our flock had barely explored beyond the lower fenceline during that time, so I opted to leave them in this pasture longer.  I could tell they were really getting a kick out of the complexity of the environment, and the mulch boxes were a definite favorite.

One of the most intriguing things I noticed as I watched the flock was that the chickens walked right up the terraced pathways just like people do, ignoring the steeper slopes wherever possible.  Maybe that means I don't have to worry about erosion on the near-vertical slopes from chicken scratching.

The only downside of the glee with which our chickens explored their forest pasture is that I'm likely to lose their favorite species since I can't talk myself out of leaving the flock in this spot until they explore to the furthest extreme.  The solution to that problem is to break the pasture apart into smaller sections and rotate through them faster, but I'll have to put some thought into how to divide the space without losing the pathway aspect of the terraces.  In the meantime, I'm enjoying watching the chickens graze.

Our chicks spend the first month of their lives in paradise.  We set up their outdoor brooder somewhere with plenty of cover and enough sun for the time of year (full sun in early spring, morning sun in late spring, full shade in summer), then open the door each morning and let them wander free.  Until they get big enough to find the vegetable garden and start scratching up the mulch, our miniature chickens get to eat bugs, chickweed, and whatever else they can find all day every day.

This spring, we have most of the back garden in a rye cover crop to grow organic matter, so the lower end of the back garden seemed like the perfect spot for late spring chick habitat.  Tall plants like rye (or raspberries) make chicks feel very safe, so they spend more time pecking and less time running away.

Here's a shot of the brooder from the other direction so you get an idea of what our chicks' current habitat looks like.  The window side of the brooder faces east so the chicks warm up quickly on chilly mornings, but then they get shade during warm afternoons.  In contrast, the early spring chicks had their brooder window facing due south.  Since the door opens in a different direction now than it did then, we were able to move the brooder only about 15 feet down the slope and still give this set of chicks plenty of space to graze where the last set seldom wandered.

And this picture sums up the true theme of this post --- gratuitous chick photos.  They won't be this cute for long, though, so don't worry --- I'll post something more substantial soon.

While I'm profiling individual pastures, I thought it would be worth taking a look at chicken pasture 5.  If I had the space to put chickens elsewhere, I would have seeded grasses and clovers here last fall and left the ground fallow just like I'm doing for chicken pasture 6.  This spot ended up pretty bare at the end of 2011 due to moderate shade combined with overgrazing, and the seeds I planted in 2012 mostly seem to have perished since I continued grazing while the seedlings sprouted and tried to grow.

But simply being left alone for the winter did wonders for the pasture.  Some of the clovers, grass, and chicory seem to have survived after all, and the bare spots in between became home to a dense carpet of chickweed.  I'm sure the latter will disintegrate by summer, but it's currently turned chicken pasture 5 into our laying flock's favorite grazing grounds this spring. 

On a grass-and-clover pasture, the layers tend to get bored with the offerings after a day or two, then spend most of the rest of the week lounging with only occasional foraging behavior.  But our chickens ate pretty much straight through the week on the chickweed pasture.

(I'm envisioning a permaculture chicken keeper planting a whole pasture just in chickweed for her flock's springtime pleasure.  It might just be crazy enough to work if you could then plant something perfect for fall in the same spot once the chickweed was gone.)

About a fifth of chicken pasture 5 is much more sad-looking since our birds passed through this area all winter on their way to grazing in the woods.  The photo above shows the overgrazed area (on the right) along with chicken pasture 3 (on the left), depicted on moving day.  I just open the door to a new paddock and the flock is bright enough to run through the coop and onto greener pastures.  When they start regretting leaving the chickweed behind, I've already closed up the relevant pophole.  No more of your favorite pasture for two weeks, guys --- it needs time to regrow.

Forest pasture seven (the one I've spent the most time experimenting on over the last year) is brimming with potential this spring.  We have high hopes we'll taste our first homegrown Nanking cherries from there this year --- the fruits are already about half size and are swelling fast.

The fenceline planting is also doing well.  This area is actually right outside the pasture, which makes it easy to establish new perennials without worrying about trouble from chicken feet.  My hope is that the red curants, comfrey, and sunchokes I planted there will reach into the pasture and become chicken fodder over the years to come.

Of course, the biggest change in pasture 7 over the winter was the addition of a couple of terraces.  It seems like my worries about the rotting timbers we used to hold the vertical faces up were unfounded --- nothing has moved over the winter and plants are already beginning to grow back to hold the soil in place.

The comfrey roots I hacked out of the forest garden and slipped into subsoil on the lower banks of the terraces are also doing well.  That's the great thing about comfrey --- it thrives pretty much no matter what.  The logs I hauled out of the forest to add to that bank are also beginning to work their way into the soil.

The only real failure so far is the oat seeds that I scattered onto bare ground in early spring.  Despite a smattering of straw to help the seeds germinate, the pasture instead turned into a bird buffet, attracting cardinals and sparrows to the feeder.  Luckily, there seems to be enough wild growth present to keep our broilers happy as they explore this pasture for the first time.

I like this simple automatic coop closer configuration from Nu Trac.

It's unclear what kind of motor they're using, but it seems to be a good fit with that long shaft making string mishaps less likely.

The good news is: our second hatch turned out 16 happy, healthy chicks.  The bad news is: my hatch rate was a rather abysmal 73%.  What happened?

With a troubled hatch, I like to rule out the obvious factors first.  I gathered the eggs for this hatch during a wet week, so about half of them had minor dirt smears.  Could dirt be the problem?  It definitely didn't help, but since only half of the non-hatching eggs were dirty, versus 45% of all eggs that went into the incubator, dirt doesn't seem to have been the deciding factor.

How about mother of the eggs?  Two-thirds of the dead-in-the-shell chicks were laid by our Rhode Island Reds...but half of all the eggs that went into the incubator were from Rhode Island Red mothers.  While it's possible the mother was the problem, it seemed much less likely once I cracked the dud eggs open and discovered that all except one were fully formed but hadn't pipped.

Two symptoms caught my eye as being more likely to be tied to the root cause of my low hatch rate.  First, this hatch was long and strung out --- the first chick came out of its shell on Sunday morning, with the last one popping out nearly four days later on Wednesday night.  A good hatch will have nearly all chicks unzipping within 24 hours, so this elongated hatch was definitely a warning sign.

The other thing I noticed was that all of the dead chicks were in the top half of the tray, and eggs in that area also hatched later.  (Average hatch order for the bottom half of the tray was 4.5, with a 100% hatch rate; average hatch order for the top half of the tray was 7.8 with a 45% hatch rate.)  Combining the elongated hatch with the irregularities within the incubator, my analysis is that the temperature in the top half of the incubator was cool or irregular.

I've noticed minor temperature irregularities within the incubator before, but they seemed more problematic this time around.  I did notice a bit of fuzz up in the part of the incubator you're not really able to clean, and I could see how dirt up there might mess with the unit's operation.  Maybe I'll store up some bravery and take the unit apart before our next incubation run and do a wholesale cleaning.  At the least, I'll do a test run with thermometers in different parts of the incubator to make sure that temperature really is the problem.

All of that said, a hatch rate of 73% is still pretty good, so for now I'm rest on my laurels and enjoy the antics of our miniature flock.

With the flock back in the pastures, I was curious to see how my mulch boxes would work.  The idea is that raised walls would allow chickens to scratch through the mulch at the feet of our fruit trees without flinging the leaves out into the pasture and baring roots.  So far, mulch boxes seem to be a success!

I saw our hens scratching through the mulch a couple of times, but never when my camera was handy, so you'll have to settle for shots of chickens and mulch boxes separately.  But what you can see from these mulch boxes is that even a solid week of chicken activity only knocked a minor number of leaves out of the box.

The only question left is whether chicken scratching will harm feeder roots in the very top of the soil.  I figured these more-established trees (in the ground for two or more years) could handle a bit of scratching, but I'll let you know if results prove otherwise.