Annual chicken pasture with oats and peas

We planted one of our over-grazed pastures in oats, Austrian winter peas, oilseed radishes, mustard, and chicory on September 9.  The oats, especially, grew quickly, although I noticed that the leaves were a bit sparser than I'd hoped --- I think that on rough ground, I should increase my seeding rates.

It's a tricky topic to decide when to turn livestock into annual winter pastures.  On the one hand, young grains are most nutritious before the stems start to elongate, a change that occurs within about a month if the weather isn't too cold.  On the other hand, tender plants are more likely to be totally eradicated by grazing rather than just losing some top growth and rebounding during the following rest period.

Conventional information on grazing annual winter pastures comes from studies with ruminants, but chickens have the additional habit of scratching up the ground, which would make me inclined to let the pasture mature more before turning in the chickens.  On the other hand, chickens have stomachs that can't deal with very much roughage, which would make me inclined to turn the chickens into the pasture when the grass is even younger than is optimal for cows.

In the end, my decision was a bit random --- I just opened the fence one day and let the flock in.  Here's what the pasture looked like on October 2:

And the next day on October 3:

As you can see, the chickens did a bit of trampling damage in the first 24 hours.  I'll keep you posted when I have more of an idea of whether I should have waited longer, how long the chickens can spend in the annual pasture without causing long term damage, and so forth.  Right now, our fat and happy pullets are lazily resting along the fenceline --- I think I need to cut back their storebought feed.

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