Author: Anna & Mark

At first, chicks have nearly
no impact on a pasture.  They seem to be eating constantly, but
they’re just so tiny that the plants grow back faster than the tiny
birds can consume the greenery.



But as chicks morph into
miniature chickens around week four to six, they suddenly start eating
much faster (and scratching up the ground to boot).  Last year, I
wasn’t prepared for our broilers’ suddenly voracious appetites, and let
our pastures get overgrazed, but this year I vowed to do better. 
So far, it’s working.



Everyone’s homestead is
different, so my techniques won’t necessarily work for you, but here
are some tricks that have made our grazing lives easier:

• Start broilers early. 
  Since our chicks hatched at the beginning of March, the pasture plants
  are currently at peak growth at the same time the chicks start to
  double down on the greenery.
• Pay attention to the pasture. 
  It really helped to put the chicks right outside our kitchen window,
  because I could tell when their forays
  into the forest garden began to have a negative impact on the
  perennials.  Be sure to rotate chickens to a new pasture before
  the ground is really stressed.
• Have plenty of room to rotate
  into.  We’re using temporary
  fencing material, so it only took fifteen minutes to move the
  chicks’ pasture from around the peach tree to encompass a big patch of
  clover-filled “lawn”.  We’ve got quite a lot of these lawn patches
  between fruit trees and berries, so I hope we won’t run out of fresh
  ground before the time comes to put the broilers in the freezer. 
  (Movable coops make utilizing bits and pieces of space like this much
  more feasible.)
• Mow pasture areas.  Chicks,
  especially, will only eat greenery if it’s very tender and young, so
  treat their pasture like a lawn.  It should be mowed about a week
  or two before you turn your birds into the space, and again right after
  you rotate the flock out.
• Raise fewer birds at a time. 
  If you buy chicks from a hatchery, you’re forced to bring home 25 or
  more at a time, but incubating
  your own eggs lets you keep the number of voracious beaks
  down.  Assuming you don’t mind the limited selection, picking up
  chicks at the feed store gives you the same flexibility.
• Plan an emergency release valve. 
  If it looks like your chickens are going to turn their pasture into a
  moonscape, don’t simply throw up your hands and let them do it. 
  Plan ahead and have an area to turn the chicks into where they can’t do
  much harm.  Our release valve is let the adult hens forage
  in the woods (assuming we finish fencing off the garden), but yours
  might be a heavily mulched run or a patch of ground you want to have
  eaten bare to turn into a garden next year.

We still have plenty of
time to make mistakes since our first set of broilers is only six weeks
old and they’ll soon be joined by another batch.  Here’s hoping we
manage to keep over-grazing to a minimum and have even tastier meat
this year.

An isolation coop is a must
for every chicken-owner.  Hopefully you’ll seldom have to use it,
but if a chicken is being picked on mercilessly by the flock, having a
spot to put the downtrodden hen can mean the difference between life
and death.



It’s sometimes hard to
tell what started the pecking.  We’ve only had to separate three
hens from the flock in the last five years or so — one was old and
coming to a natural end of her life, one had been overmated by a
rooster so she started to bleed, and this most recent hen somehow
became our current rooster’s punching bag.  We considered culling
the rooster, but he’s treating all of his other ladies with gentlemanly
aplomb, so I figured he was probably picking up some weakness on the
part of the hen.



An isolation coop is a
sort of time out for everyone involved.  It’s a cool, quiet place
where your picked on bird can heal from her wounds and build back her
spunk — a spare coop or chicken
tractor works well, but seriously injured birds can even be put in
a cardboard box.  This is one of the reasons we like to have a
spare chicken waterer
around — you can just toss some food on the ground for the loner each
day, but she’ll need fresh, clean water to regain her strength.



If the hen recovers
enough, she can be reintegrated into the flock.  Chickens
naturally pick on weak or sick members, but they generally forget their
bad feelings if the hen reappears a week later, back in tip-top
health.  Unfortunately, in many cases, the problem doesn’t heal,
in which case you have to choose whether to keep a loner hen around or
cull her for the good of the flock.  Our hen is still in the
rehabilitation stage — hopefully next week, we’ll see if she’s ready
for reintegration.