Author: Anna & Mark

Chicken
tractors
are perfect for use in a confined space like a lawn or garden. 
But as we considered branching out into raising our own birds for meat,
the idea of multiplying our chicken tractors by three began to seem
unfeasible.



Over the last three
years, we’d given several hens away and then added some new chicks to
bring us back up to nine hens in three tractors.  The nine hens
laid enough eggs to keep us eating farm fresh all through the winter (a
tribute to our tractors since our neighbors’ chickens all stopped
laying for a while.)  During the summer, I wished we had twice as
many chickens to keep the yard mowed and fertilized, but during the
coldest week of winter I wished we had half as many since the grassy
areas began to give out and churn into masses of mud.  Overall,
nine hens in three small tractors seemed to be our two acre cultivated
area’s carrying capacity, and I couldn’t conceive of adding several
more tractors to house broilers.



We’d also discovered the
chicken tractor’s weakest link — roosters.  Chicken tractors
have been used on a large scale to raise male chickens for meat, but
the cockerels are slaughtered before they fully mature and begin to
fight.  As we’d discovered, chicken tractors are also great for
hens as long as you get the nest box right so that they don’t lay on
the ground.  But a mixture of hens and a rooster in a tractor is a
nightmare.  We couldn’t fit the recommended 10 to 12 hens and a
rooster in a tractor, so the rooster overmated his harem of five. 
When
our hens’ backs became featherless and bloody, the rooster went into
our bellies.



Without a rooster,
though, we’re stuck always ordering chicks, which is not so
appealing.  Clearly there had to be a solution to our meat bird
dilemma.  (While you’re waiting for the answer, check out our homemade chicken
waterer, great in
tractors.)

This year, we’re going to experiment with
raising broilers on a forest
pasture. 
The method we’ve conceived is a lot like the way farmers used to raise
chickens around here, letting them have free run of the woods to
collect most of their food.  The traditional Appalachian farm
family probably kept few or no chickens alive over the winter when food
was scarce, but they also fed their chickens little or nothing during
the growing season when bugs and fruits were abundant.



I haven’t been able to
find much information about forest pastures for chickens, so we’re
making most of it up as we go along.  A google search to find the
carrying capacity of an acre churns up widely varying results, but
conventional wisdom seems to come down to this:

• Traditional “free range” farmers
  put about 80 to 100 chickens on an acre. 
  At this level, your pasture won’t be eaten down to bare earth, but your
  chickens won’t get much sustenance from the land either.  Various
  sources estimate that chickens on this type of pasture may get between
  5 and 20% of their food from the pasture.
• Less scientifically backed
  sources suggest that about 10 chickens can get all of their food from
  an acre of land. 
  This is more like what we’re considering, but I think the websites we
  found are far too vague to be counted on.  After all, winter is
  the down time — could ten chickens survive on an acre in the
  winter?  If so, could we raise three or four times that many on an
  acre in the summer, slaughtering most of them so that only a few
  breeding birds have to forage there during the cold weather?  Are
  there crops we can plant in parts of the pasture to give the chickens
  more nutrition?  Does that number consider rotating chickens
  through multiple paddocks to give the overgrazed regions time to
  recover?  Perhaps most importantly, how will we know if our
  chickens aren’t getting enough forage in a forest pasture and need some
  supplemental feeding?

We’re thrilled to be
trying to answer those questions this year.  Maybe by this time
next year, we will have licked the chicken pasture probem just like
Mark licked the dirty chicken water problem.