In my last post, I took
you on a tour
of the three pastures we use for
our broilers, so I
thought I’d round it off with a look at the pastures our layers live in
during the warm season. Our layer flock currently consists of
five hens and a rooster, but we sometimes have upwards of ten birds in
there, and the current layout just barely handles that many chickens.
Pasture 3 (1,170 square
feet) is in an area that was reclaimed from the woods a couple of years
before it turned into pasture. So, unlike all of the pastures I
wrote about previously, this one was already lawnlike and has
maintained its grassy character (except for a path we use twice daily
to walk to the coop). Although I can leave our layers in here for
a week with no problems, they do run out of the tastiest morsels and
start lazing about most of the time within a couple of days. I’ll
be slowly adding
complexity to the pasture to give our flock more
homegrown food and more fun.
Pasture 4 (aka “the bee
pasture,” 1,040 square feet) is pretty much identical to pasture 3,
except it’s a bit shadier, contains a young Asian persimmon and our bee
hive, and is L-shaped. The chickens enjoy
the safety of the hedge-like fences (covered in Japanese honeysuckle),
although I don’t like the invasive plant and know it’s going to pull my
fences down before long.
Pasture 5 (aka “the
mulberry pasture,” 1,040 square feet) was problematic until this
year. When I first turned chickens into this area, I didn’t
realize that tall weeds and bushes would shade out the tender undergrowth,
so I lost most of the existing plants. And I didn’t realize that
if I seeded grasses and clovers, then let the chickens into the area
the next spring, they’d nibble the seedlings until they were nearly
gone. The pasture does seem to be slowly turning into a solid sod
this year, although quite a bit of chickweed turned up there over the
winter (meaning there was lots of bare ground last fall). I
suspect the plants in pasture 5 will let me down this summer, but
hopefully by next year, the sward will be firm enough to withstand
chicken feet all through the growing season.
Pasture 6 (2,080 square feet)
is on sabbatical this summer for the same reason pasture 4 is currently
problematic. Hopefully letting the pasture have a few extra
months off will give the newly seeded bluegrass and white clover time
to grow, and will make this a premium grazing spot next year.
Like our broiler pasture
situation, our layer pastures are just barely sufficient during most
seasons, but let us down during the height of the summer. (During
the winter, I turn the chickens into the woods so they don’t ruin my
pastures.) My primary goals for improving these pastures include:
- Adding fruiting trees (Asian persimmons and mulberries)
- Planting comfrey along the fencelines to keep other weeds down
- Getting a solid sward going in pastures 5 and 6 so there’s no
more bare ground
I hope this two-post
tour of our pasture situation has been edifying, not boring! Feel
free to leave questions in the comments if you’re still confused about
anything.
Can you come up with a way to see how much pasturing chickens reduces feed, and compare that savings with the cost of fencing?
Daddy — I’d say very conservatively (boring grass pasture), pastures cut feed costs by around 15%. So, if you’ve got a flock of 8 hens, eating 2 pounds per day (about 64 cents), pasture would save you about $35 per year. If you made cheapo fences like we did to contain 4,000 square feet, divided into four paddocks, that might cost you about $250 to $300 to fence. So, you’d pay for the fencing after about 7 to 9 years.
There are ways to make the payoff faster if you need to. For example, non-permanent fences using a small amount of electric netting can be pretty cheap. And if you make the pastures more interesting to chickens (what we’ve been working on lately), you can decrease the feed your chickens eat much more. Joel Salatin reports a 67% cut in feed costs by grazing his layers in with cows, and by giving them each part of their diet free choice rather than mixing their ration.
All of that math aside, I don’t think the finances are the real reason to raise chickens on pasture. From a health standpoint, the eggs and meat from chickens raised without pasture are the same as storebought, and the chickens aren’t all that much better off than factory-farmed birds either. Since your goal when raising our own birds is probably to get out of the factory farm system, pasturing makes more sense.