How much fence does it take
to keep chickens in?  If you don’t have a problem with predators
and do give your chickens a large, healthy pasture, the answer is —
not much.



Every time we build a
new pasture for our flock, the fence gets simpler and simpler because
our birds aren’t all that interested in breaking free.  Our most
recent fence consists of four foot tall metal fenceposts driven in the
ground about fifteen feet apart with five foot tall chicken wire run
between them.  The extra foot of chicken wire is bent over to lie
along the ground on the inside of the pasture and Mark screws an old
rotten board or log to the chicken wire at intervals along the bottom
to tack it down.



Our chickens could
easily get out if they wanted too.  They could tunnel under the
parts of the fence that aren’t tacked down or fly over the relatively
low top of the fence.  They could even hop straight out the holes
I never got around to patching up on the forest side of the pasture
(oops.)  Despite all of these opportunities, the only time we’ve
seen a fencebreak is when we first introduced our youngest Golden Comet
to the flock and she was being bullied and flew over the fence to
escape.  Once our rooster
stepped in and promoted harmony in the flock, our birds decided their
pastures were home and not prison.



I should mention that
many chicken keepers swear by electrified poultry netting for its easy
of construction and ability to hold in the flock.  Our permanent
pastures are on uneven, weedy ground where we’d have to put in a lot of
time mowing the edges and moving brush to keep electric fence from
grounding itself, but if you’re rotating chickens through a mowed,
relatively even pasture, poultry netting might be the way to go. 
Another option is to clip your chickens’ wing feathers to keep them
from flying over the fence, but I think that if your chickens are
trying to escape, you should probably figure out why.

Jonathan wrote in to ask how
we get our chickens into the appropriate field each morning, and I
realized that my blog entries have been very vague about the nuts and
bolts of our rotational chicken pasture system.  Let’s look at it
theoretically first, and then I’ll give you an idea of the specifics of
our own incarnation of the system.



If you’re working with
permanent pastures, you’ll want to situate your coop in the middle of
the area to be grazed, then build pastures like the petals of a daisy
radiating out from that central point.  In theory, you could make
as many pastures as you want, but you should keep in mind that chickens
will spend much less time at the extreme ends of the pasture (unless
you give them a reason to be there, like a chicken waterer, compost pile, or dust bath
spot.)  I suspect that eight to ten “petals” is about the maximum
you should put on your “daisy.”  Your petals will also be much
less regular than they look in
this diagram since you’ll have to work around trees, driveways, and any
other obstacles that restrict straight lines.



You’ll need a door in
the side of your coop leading to each pasture, but luckily these doors
can be quite small.  “Popholes”, as the British call them, are
openings just large enough for a chicken to fit through, perhaps a foot
wide and a foot or two tall.  All of the popholes but one will be
closed at any given time, so the chickens have no choice but to go out
into the open pasture each morning.  When it’s time to rotate to a
new pasture, wait until the chickens are tucked in for the night, then
close the old pophole and open up a new one.  So, to answer
Jonathan’s question, no, I don’t lead the chickens into the appropriate
field each morning.



At the moment, we have two
coops, one with two pastures and one with three, but my goal is
eventually to have four pastures radiating out from each coop. 
Although the two coop system was an accident (the
first house is in too shady of a location for winter chicken health), I’ve been pleased with the
flexibility that allows me to raise chicks of various ages alongside
older hens.  If you were planning for two coops, though, I’d
recommend making your daisies side by side so that you can place a gate
between the adjoining pastures to entirely contain your flock as you
lead them from coop to coop.