Author: Anna & Mark

I wrote that one of the advantages
of free range chickens
is that you can feed them much less…and the next day it seemed like
our young pullets and cockerels started wanting more to eat.  I
suspect the frosts that wiped out the last tomatoes also killed off
some of their favorite foods, but regardless of the reason, I suddenly
felt like I was starving the poor little things.  Time to increase
their rations back up to recommended levels.



There’s a fine line
between feeding your chickens little enough that they want to forage
and so little that you stunt their growth, and I think I might have
stepped over the line briefly.  I won’t really know until I pluck
them and put them on the scales, but I figure if these broilers weigh
less than the previous batches, it will be my fault.



Meanwhile, I’m slowly coming
up with some helpful tricks.  There’s the full
crop technique I’ve mentioned previously, but as chickens get
bigger, it’s tougher to tell how full their crops are through all those
feathers.  One idea is to decrease your chickens’ rations by no
more than 30% to 40% and watch to see how fast they eat the food
up.  If there’s any food left on the ground fifteen minutes after
the morning feeding, you can probably cut back a bit — they’re
getting plenty of forage.  On the other hand, if the food is gone
in a heartbeat and the chickens start obsessing over clover (a moderate
quality food), then they might not be getting enough to eat.



I feed our adult
chickens only once a day, but I’ve found that it’s easier to keep rigid
control over broiler rations while not under-feeding them if I give the
chickens a second snack at nightfall.  If the day has been cold
and rainy and the chickens don’t look as well nourished as usual, I can
increase their dinner without impacting their urge to forage.



Do you have any tricks
for feeding your chickens just enough storebought feed while making
sure they forage as much as possible?

I’ve been reading up on
intensive rotational pasture management, and in the process realized
that I planned my rotations completely wrong this past year.  Greener Pastures on Your Side of the Fence
by Bill Murphy is an information-packed text detailing how to apply
Voisin management techniques to American pastures.  He explained
that you want to plan your rotation so that your pasture plants are
always growing at their fastest, which means giving your pasture less time
between grazing periods in the spring, then slowly extending the
recovery period as the grasses and clovers slow down in mid to late
summer.



A look at my pasture
rotation data from 2011 shows that I did just the opposite.  There
was so much greenery in the April pastures that I left our chickens in
each spot for two to three weeks, which resulted in recovery periods a
month long.  That method would have worked if I’d come along
behind the flock and mowed the pasture, but since I just ignored the
pasture during the recovery period, the grasses went to seed. 
Yes, our chickens enjoyed eating the grass seeds, but as you can tell
from the diagram at the top of this post, once grasses go to seed,
their growth slows considerably.  No wonder my pastures felt
terribly overgrazed throughout the summer — I told them to stop
growing in May!



Although I’d already stacked
the deck against myself, I compounded my mistake with quick rotations
in the summer.  I didn’t feel good about leaving chickens in
troubled pastures very long, so I started rotating every five to seven
days.  The result was recovery periods too short for the pasture
plants to put out much growth, so bare spots developed…despite a
stocking density perhaps a tenth of what my pasture should be able to
handle.



I’ve got several ideas
for preventing these problems next year, including:

• Setting aside one of the pastures to be mowed regularly for hay
  or garden mulch in the spring, then letting it reenter the chicken
  pasture rotation once we need the extra grazing area in the summer.
• Raising all of our broilers in the spring to take advantage of
  the extra pasture growth.
• Subdividing our existing pastures into smaller areas to allow
  longer recovery periods in the summer without letting chickens spend
  more than 6 days in each paddock.

I’ve also realized that
I probably need to keep our chickens off pasture between
October/November and March/April to prevent degrading our pasture
quality.  That’s why we’ve gotten interested in making free range work with our farm, and I’ve
also got some other winter ideas coming up.  Hopefully a more
scientific approach to pasture rotation will result in happier grass,
clover, and chickens in 2012.