I posted previously that our
chickens changed their pasture preferences as the year progressed.  So you shouldn’t be
surprised to learn that I think the perfect pasture system would have
seasonal components.  As I suggested in my post about pasture
rotation, I need to
start thinking about three separate seasons and either make each
pasture a mixture of plants for all three seasons or use different
pastures at different times of the year. 



Spring, summer, and fall pasture

The best spring, early
summer, and fall pasture would probably be a traditional perennial
mixture of grasses, clovers, and low weedy forbs (like plantain). 
(This is assuming you live far enough north that your pastures aren’t
dominated by warm season grasses, in which case your seasonal
progression will be totally different from mine.)  To maintain
low, tender growth that chickens enjoy in this type of traditional
pasture, we’ll have to either bushhog/mow the pasture occasionally to
keep tall weeds from taking over or add another grazer that will eat
woodier growth.  I’m pondering miniature
goats and sheep but
we may have too much on our plate to make that a reality anytime soon.



In southwest Virginia, we
need at least a few trees or shrubs in the summer pasture to keep the
chickens from overheating, but these should be useful trees that
produce fruits that the chickens enjoy rather than random trees that
only provide some fallen leaves to attract worms to the soil
surface.  Everbearing mulberries are the traditional choice — we
have three planted, but these will, of course, take years to produce
much fruit.  In the meantime, I suspect that some fruiting shrubs
would be a good option and perhaps I’ll transplant some of our extra
everbearing raspberries into the chicken pasture in the fall.  So,
the optimal pasture during spring, summer, and fall would look like New
Forest — useful
trees over a low grassy sward.



August pasture

In the heat of
midsummer, cool season grasses stop growing, so we need to start
thinking about extra pasture plants to feed the flock during this
season.  I was going to try to establish some Bermuda Grass in a
pasture or two since warm season grasses enjoy the heat, but I got
sticker shock when I checked out the seed prices at the local feed
store.  Instead, I’m pondering two
different options — either leaving a couple of cool season grass
pastures fallow during the early summer so that they stockpile extra
growth for the chickens to pick through in August, or planting tender
annuals like forage sorghum in a couple of spots for August
grazing. 



A third possibility is
to irrigate your pastures so they keep growing.  Although this
concept seems very wasteful at first glimpse, I’ve noticed that the
pastures directly downhill from our vegetable garden (watered weekly)
received enough runoff to stay much greener than other areas during our
August drought.  Perhaps you can drain your graywater into a
summer pasture or find some other way of irrigating without actually
running sprinklers on your summer pasture?



Of course, the positive
part about midsummer is that even though the pastures tend to get a bit
overgrazed, I’m giving the chickens garden scraps right and left, so
the flock stays healthy.  I could probably get away with no
special summer pasture as long as we don’t raise too many broilers.



Winter pasture

More troublesome is
winter.  Once the really cold weather hits and all of the grasses
stop growing, the flock either needs a lot more space or they need some
sort of designated winter forage.  Again, stockpiling summer
growth is one option; although ruminants like cows get more out of this
rotation scheme than chickens do, at least your chickens won’t end up
scratching the pasture down to mud.  Another option is to plant
annuals — here I’m considering oats, rye, and Austrian winter peas,
all of which can be grazed much later in the season and earlier in the
spring than perennial grasses.  If you want to look far into the
future, a few persimmon trees can provide winter fruit.



The final winter option
is to do what homesteaders of old did — cull relentlessly and go into
winter with only your best breeding stock.  Since we’ve been
raising a lot of broilers this year, we’ll naturally be minimizing our
flock for winter, going from a summer high of nineteen birds in one set
of pastures to a winter low of around nine to twelve birds.



Still more to learn

As you can tell, I’ve
changed my pasturing ideas drastically after a year and a quarter of
experimentation, so I suspect this vision will morph several more times
before it works well.  Please take my ideas with a grain of salt
and use them as the basis of your own experimentation.  If you’ve
already figured out seasonal chicken pasturing, I hope you’ll take a
minute to comment and tell me what you’ve learned works well or poorly.

This year, we’ve grazed our
chickens in four very different pastures
and I’m starting to get a feel for what kind of structure chickens like
best.  When I say “structure”, I’m talking about the difference
between
low
grasses and forbs (a
“traditional” pasture), tall
annual weeds
(what springs up in an unmown field after a year or two), and young
woods.  I had
hypothesized at the beginning of the year that the first
would be the least tasty since grasses are far from a chicken’s
favorite food and don’t host very much invertebrate life and that the
last would be their favorite.  I figured tall weeds would fall
somewhere in between.



Early spring observations
seemed to bear my hypothesis out.  When
placed on grassy pastures, the chickens gravitated to the few woodsy
areas where fallen leaves had built up and tender chickweed grew. 
In
the forest pasture, our flock went crazy, eating a huge variety of
tender wild plants and finding plenty of worms.  And when our
first set
of chicks of the year were allowed to run wherever they wanted, they
headed straight into the woods to graze.



Then summer hit and the
tables turned.  The grasses kept growing,
putting out tasty seeds and tender new leaves, while the plants in the
forest spurted up above the chickens’ heads and turned woody and
untasty.  I eventually had to stop rotating the chickens into the
forest pasture because they just weren’t getting anything out of it,
and I came to the same conclusion about the pasture full of tall
ragweed plants.



Meanwhile, Mark fenced
in a second forest pasture to keep the chickens
from overgrazing their two main pastures.  I didn’t expect much
when I opened up the new pasture since the other forest pasture had
turned into
the flock’s least favorite spot, but our chickens once again had a
heyday,
enjoying Japanese Stiltgrass leaves and lots of herbaceous plants’
seeds.  All of the photos in this post are from that new forest
pasture during the flock’s second morning of grazing.

On the other hand, after one day on wooded pasture, the ground was
already starting to change from this:

…into this:

Clearly, part of the
issue with forest pastures is that the sparse
ground cover can’t stand up to much chicken scratching.  Since
trees
capture so much of the light in a wooded pasture, the forest floor
tends to have less growth in reach of chicken beaks and the birds use
up what’s there very quickly.  I suspect that young to middle-aged
deciduous forest used as
pasture will support only half to a third as many chickens as a grassy
pasture and that chickens should be rotated out of it within three days
to maintain the health of the pasture.  The variety of plants and
invertebrates available in a forest pasture probably makes the chickens
healthier, but only if you can come up with two to five times as much
acreage as you would need in a more traditional pasture.



In contrast, even during
the
hot, dry summer lull in late August, our grassy pastures could handle
our flock for at least a week and then rebounded within two or three
weeks.  True, the chickens don’t enjoy grass as much as they
relish forest products, but traditional pastures have a huge plus —
the sod is resilient enough to stand up to abuse.  If you only
have a tiny bit of space, a traditional pasture is probably the way to
go.



Stay tuned for my next
post in which I’ll detail what I envision as the perfect pasture for
our region.