Gene
Logsdon, author of Small-Scale
Grain Raising,
posted on his blog last week about
a farmer who sold a large crop of grain and used the same money to buy
a much smaller amount of processed chicken feed.  Logsdon wrote:

Since this concept is
right up my alley, I asked him for more information.  He explained
that his current flock of 12 laying hens and a rooster “range over
about an acre of woodland and a bit of pasture and some lawn.”  He
supplements their diet with about four ears of whole corn or a quart of
wheat every day, increasing the amount a bit in the winter and
providing oyster shell at all times.  Since we feed our chickens
about a cup apiece of processed feed per day, he’s cutting back his
feed by two thirds with his forest pasture.



On the other hand,
Logsdon does feed his meat birds commercial feed to “get them fattened
in a hurry and out of here.”  This bit of data makes me think that
my current forest pasture experiment is a bit too ambitious for phase
1.  I think our next incarnation will involve our layers on
pasture, and our broilers in tractors on commerical feed.



For those keeping track
of good
foraging chicken varieties at home, Logsdon and a
commenter suggested these breeds
— Rhode Island Reds, Buff Orphingtons, Golden Comets, Australorp,
Speckled Sessex, and bantams in general.

People
seem to have such an easy time turning their chicken run into a
moonscape, but it’s been a struggle around here.  We started our
chickens out on an 800
square foot pasture full of weeds, planning to have the birds
denude the ground so that I could plant some grains while moving the
flock to another paddock.  Over a month later, the pasture was
still quite green, so we chopped off two-thirds of the area and let the
chickens continue to graze on the small portion remaining.



Three more weeks passed,
in which our cockerels did a little work on the pasture, but mostly
entertained themselves eating up the wheelbarrow loads of garden weeds
I tossed into their enclosure nearly daily.  So Mark and I took
some time to root out the perennials with
a shovel — goldenrod, deertongue (a native grass), young trees, and
poison ivy all bit the dust.  Finally, the ground is beginning to
look bare.



I want the chickens to
continue to eat up any new sprouts for another week or so, then we’ll
rotate them into the other two-thirds of their original pasture. 
The mother
hen and her chick
have been having so much fun in there that they barely eat any
storebought feed.