Factors that affect chicken pasture size

August 28, 2011 Posts No Comments

Chicken by compost pileI’ve posted before about the
data I found for how
much space chickens need on pasture.  The summary is that
semi-industrial pastured chicken farmers plan on around 30 feet per
bird, once you factor in rotation. 
After watching our chickens on pasture for over a year, I’ve figured
out why solid numbers are so hard to come by — every pasture is
different.



Climate.  Your pasture might be
three times as productive as mine if you live in a tropical climate, or
a tenth as productive if you live in a desert.  More productivity
means you can have a smaller pasture for the same number of birds.



Black australorp pulletChicken breed.  If your chickens are
the scratching type (like our Golden Comets), you’ll need a lot more
space than if you’re raising sedentary Cornish Cross.  On the
other hand, I think our Black Australorps are easier on the pasture
than our Golden Comets since they seem to be more inclined to hunt down
bugs on the wing and less inclined to scratch up the ground.



Seasons.  Here in the mountains
of southwest Virginia, our pasture plants grow fastest between late
April and the end of June, then it’s a slow decline to total lack of
growth in the winter.  (Plants in the forest
pasture stop growing earlier since they’re shaded by the canopy
above.)  Meanwhile, our kitchen scrap supply slowly builds through
the early summer until I’m bringing the chickens a gallon of tomato
tops, cucumber ends, and corn cobs every day starting in mid July and
continuing until cold weather hits.  All of that adds up to being
able to cram perhaps twice as many chickens into the May to November
pasture compared to the December to April pasture.



Six week old chickChicken age.  If you’re raising
chicks instead of just maintaining a laying flock, you need to consider
the growth rate of your hatchlings.  Until they’re four to six
weeks old, chicks seem to make no impact on the pasture at all — they
are eating, but are mostly consuming insects and tiny pieces of
leaves.  By six weeks, though, I figure a chick is equivalent to
about a third of an adult hen, and those cockerels and pullets have as
much impact as any other chicken once they reach three months.



Stay tuned for some
number crunching on how many square feet I think our chickens need to
stay happy and healthy (while keeping the pastures green.)  And
don’t forget their fresh water supply —- our chicken waterer is a must.

How many square feet do I need for my flock

August 28, 2011 Posts No Comments
Summer chicken pasture

I regaled you with factors
affecting chicken pasture size requirements last time, so now it’s time
for our specific example.  Starting this fall, I plan to have an
eight chicken permanent flock (seven hens and a rooster), and I’d like
to raise 30 to 40 broilers next year.  How many square feet of
pasture would I need?



Let’s look at how one
pasture is doing right now, in early August.  I currently have
seven adult (or near adult) hens and
nine chicks (about 3 adult equivalents) in chicken pasture 3.  The
pasture is still recovering a bit from being overgrazed last month, but
is
pretty lush (other than the bare spot in the shade where everyone hangs
out during the heat of the day.) 



Chicken eating watermelonMy gut feeling is that this
roughly
900 square foot pasture can handle the flock for a week with no
degradation while providing maximum forage to offset feed costs. 
Factoring in my three pasture rotation, that would come to 270 square
feet of pasture per bird at the peak of our food scrap season.  I
might need 500 square feet per bird in the dead of winter to keep the
same flock going without seeing chicken poop and bare ground.



(Clearly, I’m a snob
since the highly regarded Label Rouge system in France requires only 27
square feet per bird. 
That’s the difference between your chickens getting a significant
amount of their nutrition from pasture versus keeping just enough
greenery around that your plants can nibble a bit.)


Chicken pasture graph

So how much pasture
would I need for my ambitious broiler plan next year?  About 4800
square feet if I raise four broods of ten chicks each.  Since we
currently have about 3,150 square feet of pasture separated into five
paddocks, I guess we need to finish up at least two more pastures by
spring.


Our chicken waterer never spills in coops or
pastures.

How often should I rotate my chicken pasture

August 28, 2011 Posts No Comments
Chicken pasture

Once you figure out how
many square feet you’re going to allot to your chickens, the next step is deciding
how many pastures you’ll divide that area into.  I highly
recommend that you create more than one pasture so that you can rotate
your flock, but do
you want two pastures, five pastures, or twenty pastures?  Should
you move your chickens to new ground every day, every week, or every
month?



With ruminants (like
cows), you’re better off making as many small pastures as you can
handle.  Pros use electric fencing for their cattle so that they
can fence off just enough room for their cows to graze through in one
day, forcing their herd to eat even the plants they don’t like but not
giving the cows time enough to kill their favorite foods.  The
next day, the cattle are rotated into another small paddock, again just
large enough for that day’s grazing.


Chicken under tree

Since chickens get the
majority of their pasture nutrition from insects rather than from
plants, your rotational chicken pastures shouldn’t completely mimic the
cow model outlined above.  Instead, the pasture needs to be large
enough that there’s sufficient diversity
of habitat to keep the flock hunting for food all day.  In my
pastures, that means there’s room for a compost pile (food scraps),
trees or shrubs (worms under leaves), and a grassy area
(grasshoppers.)  New worms and insects will make their way into
the pasture daily, so there’s not as much need to rotate the flock if
they’re not demolishing their favorite food plants.


Bare spot in pasture

That said, if you keep
too many chickens in one pasture for too long, the ground gets
scratched bare, which means your chickens have little to eat.  In
June, I had to keep various sets of chickens separate and wasn’t able
to rotate, so my pastures became badly degraded.  Luckily, there’s
a solution for degraded pastures — quicker rotations.  Instead
of moving the flock every three weeks the way I had been doing, I began
to open up a new pasture every five to seven days.  The quick
rotations are working wonders at allowing plants to grow back, although
there are some permanent bare spots in the heavy use areas around
compost piles.


Hen and chicks

I can’t give you solid
numbers on how long to leave your chickens in each pasture since the
optimal time will depend on pasture size, number of chickens present,
and on all of the factors
that affect chicken pasture size.  Instead, I highly
recommend you spend a bit of time watching your chickens graze every
day.  Do they seem to be finding plenty to eat, or are they down
to the plants they don’t like as much?  If the photo above hadn’t
been taken at the edge of the compost pile, it would be a sure sign of
a pasture long overdue for rotation.


Our chicken waterer makes rotation easy — just
make a bucket waterer for each pasture and forget about watering your
chickens for months at a time.