Bill
Mollison’s Introduction to Permaculture is one of the few texts
I’ve read that includes in-depth information on developing a
high-yield forest
pasture rather
than simply grazing
animals under existing trees.  Mollison describes a rotational
pasture
arrangement that we may try to replicate around our new starplate
coop, and which
I’ve diagrammed above.  Basically, fencelines are doubled,
which turns them into protection for useful trees and shrubs while
the perennials are getting established.  Mollison shows trees
encircling his whole arrangement, but I think I might just double
the cross-fences to protect trees, and perhaps eventually make
hedges along the outside fencelines.

Mollison assumes
you’ll be grazing several different kinds of animals in your
pasture, which we may eventually work up to.  In his vision,
chickens are allowed to run through the moat areas nearly from the
beginning, but larger livestock are kept out until the trees are
at least four or five years old (or potentially forever).  As
the trees mature, they arch out over the pasture, providing shade
and dropping their fruits and seeds into areas all livestock can
reach.  During times of drought when grasses aren’t growing,
you can also cut and toss young willow and poplar branches from
the protected moats to goats and sheep to provide fresh feed.



Another innovation of
Mollison’s pasture design is the strawyard around the coop or main
animal shed.  This is a high-traffic area, and it tends to
become bare in permanent rotational pastures, so it would be worth
considering mulching this zone to provide invertebrates for
chickens to scratch up and to prevent erosion and mud.  If
you don’t have a
forest to give your chickens a winter pasture, you could
potentially keep them in the strawyard during cold weather (or during overgrazed periods
throughout the summer) to prevent damage to the main pastures.



I suspect the hardest
part of this design for me wouldn’t be the extra work and expense
required to make the fenced moats.  Instead, it would be
choosing livestock-friendly trees and shrubs for the moats rather
than turning those zones into intensively-grown human food. 
Mollison’s top suggestions for temperate-area poultry fodder
plants include: mulberries, gojiberries (won’t fruit for us, but
maybe will for you), elderberries, black locust, serviceberry,
hawthorn, and autumn olive (beware — a bad invasive
here!).  We already have several black locusts that we
carefully cleared around in that pasture, and I’m rooting half a
dozen or more mulberries, so we’ve got a good start in that
direction.

“When we bought 9
chicks last year, one turned out to be a rooster. He was a
fantastic protector of the flock, didn’t overmate but did have
a few dismayed favorites, but whoa was he scary! He became
particularly aggressive and had to go.
This year we hatched a dozen or so eggs in a friend’s
incubator, and she offered a few eggs from her mixed flock
too. We chose this year’s new roo with attention to avoiding
possible issues with inbreeding (and aggression!) and the
crossed-beak tendency of Easter eggers. So we chose a male
from our friend’s eggs. How many years do you imagine one can
inbreed a flock before the tight gene pool negative affects
the flock? Do you know offhand what negative impacts one would
see?

This is an interesting question, and one I don’t entirely know
the answer to.  I’ll answer the second part first since
it’s easier.

The first negative effects of inbreeding to show up in a chicken
flock will probably be a higher percentage
of dud eggs in the incubator.  Chicks that hatch may
also be weaker and less inclined to thrive.  Finally, you
may start seeing unusual genetic defects in the offspring of the
rooster and his sisters or daughters.

I don’t think there’s any
hard-and-fast rule for how soon you’ll notice inbreeding
problems.  In part, it will likely depend on how large and
diverse your flock is to begin with.  Are you starting with
just a few birds that have been linebred to produce show-quality
chickens of a certain breed?  If so, you’re much more
likely to see inbreeding problems quickly.  On the other
hand, if your flock is made up of several different varieties or
of mutt birds, inbreeding will probably take longer to show
negative effects.  I’ve noticed in my own flock that the
offspring of our rooster and a completely different variety of
chicken tend to show hybrid
vigor when compared to the smaller offspring of the
rooster and other birds of the same type.

Harvey
Ussery’s book suggests some methods for getting around
inbreeding problems, but his techniques rely on the
infrastructure to keep multiple flocks of chickens
separate.  On the backyard scale, I think the best bet is
to just save your best birds back for breeding each year, and to
add in outside blood if you start noticing genetic
problems.  I hope that helps!