Although the traditional,
stationary chicken coop and run system has very little to recommend
it, the competing options all have pros and cons. In case you're
considering including chickens in a permaculture system, here are the
advantages and disadvantages I see with chicken tractors, forest
pastures, and deep bedding.
Chicken
tractors are all the
rage right now, and we jumped on the bandwagon when we first got
chickens. A chicken tractor is definitely superior to a
traditional coop and run as long as you make your tractor light enough
that you will move it every day. Using a chicken tractor, you can
provide your chickens with plenty of greenery for most of the year,
which keeps their egg yolks orange and healthy. Smart chickens
also tend to snag a bug here and there, which makes them healthier than
chickens living in the 
moonscape of a permanent
run. Finally, chicken tractors can be used in the garden to work
up new ground or to fertilize the soil during the winter, although I've
always felt that our chickens' health declines when they are stuck
working on the same bare ground for day after day. I would
definitely recommend chicken tractors to people in suburbia who don't
have room for anything else and who just have a couple of birds and a
small garden and lawn.
On the other hand,
chicken tractors have some serious disadvantages for the
self-sufficient farmer. If you're raising more than a handful of
egg-layers, you either need to build a big tractor (tough to move) or
lots of small tractors (time-consuming to move.) Tractors are
also too small for keeping a mature rooster with hens, so you'll be
stuck buying hatchlings as long as you're using chicken tractors.
Finally, although chickens in tractors are healthier than those in
coops, they are less healthy than those on true pasture.
We'll probably keep our tractors around for when we need isolation
coops, but other than that we've moved our chickens to the forest
pasture.
Forest
pastures are my
current obsession, so keep in mind that I'm a bit biased. Maybe
in a few years I will have discovered the disadvantages of this sytem
as well, but for now, I'll just mention a few basic pros and
cons. On the disadvantage side, forest pastures take several
years to really get established (although you can see some of the
benefits right away), and you need a lot more space than you do for
raising chickens in tractors. On the other hand, even during our
first year we've seen that chickens are healthier on pasture than in a
tractor since they're able to hunt for more insects and eat a more
varied diet. I've also found that I'm able to get the same number
of eggs while feeding the chickens less storebought feed, and that's
before any of our food trees come into production.
Harnessing the fertility from
your chickens' excrement is key in any permaculture system, and I
actually find the fertility a bit easier to manage with a forest
pasture than with a chicken tractor. We tended to use the latter
to fertilize our "lawn" since tractors don't work well with raised
beds, then we cut the grass to feed the garden. With the chickens
roosting in a coop, we'll be able to change out the manure-filled straw
or leaves at intervals and put it directly on the garden or in the
compost heap. We've also been able to use the chicken pasture as
a way of expediting wood
chip composting and
garden waste composting, while providing insects for the chickens at
the same time. And now that we've planted
winter wheat in one
paddock, I have high hopes we'll be able to harvest straw from the
pasture as well. So even though we lose the chickens' daily
manure as they wander around the pasture, I don't feel like the forest
pasture system really wastes their waste.
Although we haven't tried it
ourselves, many permaculture advocates are fond of the deep
bedding system,
where chickens are raised in a confined coop on dense layers of straw,
wood chips, or leaves. As the bedding is fouled, more layers are
added on top, so the deep bedding system concentrates all of the
chickens' waste and creates awesome compost. On the other hand, I
don't think the system is worth the health tradeoff --- without access
to fresh greenery and bugs, the chickens will be much less healthy, and
their meat and eggs will provide fewer nutrients for you. I also
don't like the idea of having to buy all of the deep bedding material,
since I'm trying to turn our farm into as much of a closed loop as
possible. Perhaps a deep bedding advocate would like to weigh in
on the issue?
While I'm on the
subject, why not go to the other extreme and free range your chickens? Truly
free ranged chickens do tend to be the very healthiest flocks, but they
wreak havoc on the vegetable garden, scratching up mulches and eating
tomatoes. I prefer to keep my flock healthy by continually
diversifying their pasture rather than risking the health of the garden
to their busy feet and beaks.
I
know this is a very long post, so let me sum up. In my opinion,
alternative methods of raising chickens are all a tradeoff between
providing the optimal fertility to your garden versus keeping your
chickens as healthy as possible. Deep bedding is at one extreme,
with unhealthy chickens and healthy gardens, while free range is at the
other extreme with healthy chickens and unhealthy gardens. Both
forest pastures and chicken tractors have some of the best of both
worlds, but chickens tend to be a bit healthier on forest pastures and
your garden tends to be a bit healthier with chicken tractors.
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Trying to establish a true permaculture is about using all your tools.
Using the forest pasture in conjunction with the chicken tractors will get you the direct fertilizization and the ability to produce chickens instead of buying hatchlings.
With the coop in the forest range you get the ability to have a large compost heap which can greatly reduce the need for supplemental feedstock.
I would keep my good brooders in the forest pasture and move out individual chickens to the chicken tractors to fatten them out on a supplemental feed regiment and get the benifit of direct fertilization on the field.
A worm farm located at the forest pasture would be a bonus as well and could be easily (effecient)taken advantage of to supplement the protein needs of the tractored chickens.
Just a thought
Great points! Since I wrote this, we've changed over to a forest pasture system with deep bedding in the coop and a compost pile in the pasture. So far, I'm thrilled with the change and don't plan to revisit our tractors, although we've kept the best one in good working order in case we need to use it as an isolation coop or to keep some of the chicks we're currently incubating apart from the main flock while they mature. With our raised beds, tractors don't work as well as having the chickens concentrate their fertility in the deep bedding of the coop, but folks with other types of gardens would probably feel differently.
We're hoping to branch out into black soldier flies this summer to add protein for our flock, but have to wait until they're flying (probably next month.) So far, we haven't fed the chickens any of our worms because we're using them to eat loads of food scraps from the local school and need every worm, but in a few months when the number of worms exceeds what we need to eat the scraps, we might feed some to the flock.
Here's how I've adapted to a southern Maine climate and barely a quarter acre of available lawn (after subtracting buildings and gardens).
First a chicken tractor big enough for 7 hens which I move every night during the months when the lawn is green. It's a 4' x 8' a-frame design with a detachable 4' x 6' pen. The roost and nest area is in the upper section of the a-frame, leaving the entire 4' x 14' footprint open to the grass. Daily movement allows the lawn to recover easily. I can usually go a month before returning to a specific spot. The hens seem to do very well with this arrangement, giving me 5-7 eggs every day most of the year.
In the fall after the gardens are mostly done, I often let the chickens "free range" for the last couple of hours of the day (as long as someone is around to keep an eye out for predators).
For winter digs, I built a raised bed in a sunny spot exactly the same size as the footprint of the chicken tractor and parked the tractor there for the winter, using a deep litter system with scavenged leaves, wood chips, etc. If it ever got packed down, I'd turn it a bit with a garden fork. Otherwise, a handful or two of scratch feed thrown on the litter motivates the birds to keep it stirred up.
This spring when the lawn was ready for the chicken tractor again, I added some mulch and chopped leaves to the raised bed and topped it off with a couple of inches of compost. Now it has squash, peppers, and tomatoes growing in it (quite happily so far).
Safe, healthy, convenient, and the only litter I handle is the little bit that accumulates in the upper roost area. This wood chip-manure mix goes right in the compost pile.
That sounds like a great combo! Our garden is too large and our flock too small for a tractor sitting on one garden bed to make any dent in our fertility needs, but I suspect that in a more urban setting, your method would be a great compromise.
Since I wrote this post, we've had a great six months plus on a deep bedding and pasture combo, and our chickens eat less food, lay oranger-yolked eggs, and seem healthier. Plus, I got all that delightful bedding to use as mulch around my fruit trees --- yum!