Author: Anna & Mark

I’ve been working my way
around to mentioning rotational grazing over here for quite a
while.  The idea is simple — you move your flock into a new
paddock at intervals so that they always have access to fresh pasture
and never turn any one paddock into a moonscape.  Rotational
grazing has picked up a lot of momentum among sustainable cattle
farmers, but how well does the idea work with chickens?



The classic, Joel
Salatin example consists of grazing cows and chickens in a
multi-species rotation.  When the cows are moved to a new paddock,
the chickens are placed in the old one to scratch through those tasty
cow pies, spreading the fertility throughout the pasture.  At the
same time, the chickens eat up parasite larvae that would otherwise
recolonize cows the next time the bovines pass through.  The
system has gained a wide following, and is clearly a win-win for cows,
chickens, and pasture.  But what about those of us who don’t want
cows?



Without a large ruminant in
the mix, you have to envision the rotational chicken pasture a bit
differently.  The first thing to remember is that chickens’
stomachs aren’t set up to digest low quality food like grass, so while
they may pick at a leaf here and there, they’re not going to get much
out of a pure grass lawn.  Chickens’ stomachs are actually a lot
like ours, and they crave meat (invertebrates, mostly), fruits, and
tender vegetables.  That’s where my forest pasture idea comes into play — I’m
working on developing a suite of plants (and associated insect life)
that will provide the chickens with a large percentage of their dietary
needs.  Profitable Poultry reports that Joel Salatin
has planted mixtures of native grasses, broadleaf plants, clovers,
chicory, oats, and rye on his Virginia pastures so that tender plants
are available to the chickens throughout the year.  In the Pacific
Northwest, Robert Plamondon prefers oats for winter forage and white
ladino clover and alfalfa as summer feed.  There’s a lot of
room for experimentation in discovering the best plants for a chicken
pasture in your neck of the woods.



Another option to consider
with rotational grazing is combining a vegetable garden with a chicken
pasture.  If you can run your chickens in the vegetable garden
during the winter, the flock will control many problematic pests while
fertilizing the soil and working any plant debris into the
ground.  I’ve found that combining the garden with a chicken
pasture works best with a relatively short season summer crop rather
than with a diversified garden since the latter is often active
year-round if planned correctly.  Our grain paddocks are the first
step in this direction for us, and have shown a lot of potential.



No matter how you go
about it, rotational grazing has a lot of advantages over other types
of chicken management.  The more fresh food your chickens eat, the
less you have to pay for storebought feed.  Even more important,
the healthier chickens on pasture produce tastier and healthier eggs
and meat for you to eat.  I’ve recently decided that rotational
grazing is the best chicken management system for anyone who lives
outside the city.

The main reason I hunted down
a copy of Raising Poultry on Pasture
was to figure out which pasture plants are best for chickens to eat.  The unfortunate answer is that most people raising chickens on pasture just use typical forage grasses and legumes, assuming that chickens eat the same thing as cows, even though their stomachs and dietary needs are entirely different.  Small wonder that one chapter’s author basically said that chickens don’t get much except vitamins and minerals from pasture.

In a previous post, I’ve written about ways of combining chickens with cows or vegetable gardens to spice up rotational pastures, so I won’t repeat that information here.  Instead, I thought I’d list the plants various medium-scale producers have planted in their pastures:

• Unimproved pastures are quite common.  In other words, farmers put their chickens on some kind of low grass/weed mixture that’s probably been kept tree-less through annual bush-hogging and/or grazing with other animals.  One unimproved pasture listed in Raising Poultry on Pasture was made up of fescue, thinning brome, broadleaf weeds, and lespedeza.
• Legumes are cited by many producers as being favorites of their chickens. Specifically, white clover
  (New Zealand and other varieties) is mentioned by several chicken keepers as a good long term cover. Subclovers (subterranean
  clovers) are useful in very poor soil and are commonly grown in
  Australia, Texas, and California.  One farmer mentioned growing peas in an early spring pasture, but said that the chickens didn’t get as excited about the succulent peas as he thought they would.
• Broadleaf plants, in general, are preferred by chickens over grasses.  No wonder — chickens aren’t ruminants and they aren’t able to digest grass any more than you can.  I wonder if there are weeds like dock, plantain, or others that stand up well to heavy chicken scratching and browsing and are still tasty for our chickens?
• Grasses are usually mixed in with broadleaf plants on permanent pastures to hold the soil in place, even if the grasses don’t do much for the chickens.  Common grasses in the chicken pasture include orchardgrass, perennial ryegrass, tall fescue, and annual ryegrass.  Although I don’t think grasses
  provide much food for chickens directly, Joel Salatin wrote that grass provides habitat for grasshoppers, which his chickens love, so perhaps these nearly inedible plants have a place in the chicken pasture after all.
• Grains are used by many chicken producers for early spring pasture, especially by farmers who use the chickens in rotation with row crops and thus till the pasture every year.  Oats and annual rye are both listed as early spring pasture crops.  On the other hand, grains are grasses, and chickens don’t tend to get much out of them once the leaves age and firm up.

Pasture management is another important point to consider when planning for your chickens’
needs.  When plants get over four to eight inches tall (depending on who you talk to), the leaves become higher in carbon and less digestible by chickens.  Many farmers advocate mowing or heavy
grazing to keep plants short and always producing more green shoots.  On the other hand, I wonder whether taller grass would provide a more diversified habitat for the insects chickens crave?

Have you planted a traditional pasture for chickens?  What did you put in it?  Which plants did your chickens gravitate toward?