Chickens in a forest pasture

This year, we're going to experiment with raising broilers on a forest pasture.  The method we've conceived is a lot like the way farmers used to raise chickens around here, letting them have free run of the woods to collect most of their food.  The traditional Appalachian farm family probably kept few or no chickens alive over the winter when food was scarce, but they also fed their chickens little or nothing during the growing season when bugs and fruits were abundant.

I haven't been able to find much information about forest pastures for chickens, so we're making most of it up as we go along.  A google search to find the carrying capacity of an acre churns up widely varying results, but conventional wisdom seems to come down to this:

• Traditional "free range" farmers put about 80 to 100 chickens on an acre.  At this level, your pasture won't be eaten down to bare earth, but your chickens won't get much sustenance from the land either.  Various sources estimate that chickens on this type of pasture may get between 5 and 20% of their food from the pasture.
• Less scientifically backed sources suggest that about 10 chickens can get all of their food from an acre of land.  This is more like what we're considering, but I think the websites we found are far too vague to be counted on.  After all, winter is the down time --- could ten chickens survive on an acre in the winter?  If so, could we raise three or four times that many on an acre in the summer, slaughtering most of them so that only a few breeding birds have to forage there during the cold weather?  Are there crops we can plant in parts of the pasture to give the chickens more nutrition?  Does that number consider rotating chickens through multiple paddocks to give the overgrazed regions time to recover?  Perhaps most importantly, how will we know if our chickens aren't getting enough forage in a forest pasture and need some supplemental feeding?
  

We're thrilled to be trying to answer those questions this year.  Maybe by this time next year, we will have licked the chicken pasture probem just like Mark licked the dirty chicken water problem.

This post is part of our Chicken Pasturing Systems series.  Read all of the entries: Wild chickens in suburbia The traditional chicken coop Transitioning to a chicken tractor Disadvantages of chicken tractors Chickens in a forest pasture

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