Chicken forest pasture experiment: Year 1
I've
been posting all year about our forest pasture experiment over on our Avian Aqua Miser blog. For those of you
haven't been following along over there, the
idea is to create a permaculture system that feeds our chickens with
very little input of storebought food. Our first season of
experimentation was very much a learning experience --- now I know that
even heirloom
broiler breeds have been bred to bulk up quickly on grain, so they look at foraging
about the same way a modern teenager looks at the idea of getting rid
of his TV and Wii. I'm changing my focus now to a forest pasture
system that will keep our 
laying
hens happy and healthy, with the goal of revisiting persnickety meat
birds in the future.
With the broilers in the
freezer, our forest pasture experiment started making progress.
In late August, I realized that our
two pastured chickens were so happy on their diet of kitchen scraps and
wild edibles that they didn't want any storebought grain. For six weeks now,
I've only given them a cup of feed every couple of weeks, on days when
I felt like our kitchen scraps weren't quite up to snuff.
Meanwhile, I seeded
the fallow paddock with buckwheat and shelling beans, which are now mature.
With our coop remodelled to accommodate laying hens, we turned our four
prime layers into the fallow paddock, expecting them to gorge on the
high quality seeds. Instead, they focused their energy on
nightshade berries, tender young chickweed leaves, calcium-rich snails,
and bugs found by scratching through the old compost pile.
In
fact, now that I could look at our tractored chickens and pastured
chickens side by side, I was shocked to realize that the former were
not the epitome of avian health I'd thought they were. The
pastured chickens have brilliantly red combs --- a sign of good health
--- while our confined birds' skin is a much paler shade. Keep in
mind that our tractored birds have as much grass as they can eat, along
with occassional bugs that hop through their tractor, but that they get
the majority of their nutrition from the corn and soybeans in their
laying pellets. Clearly, a grain-based diet is no better for them
than
it is for me.
With the garden's
exuberance winding down, I'm sure I'll have to continue feeding our
laying hens grain through the winter, but my long term goal is to come
up with a system that deletes the grain entirely. Two more
paddocks are on the horizon, which will allow us to rotate our flock
frequently enough to give them plenty of forage during the growing
season. Our Illinois
Ever-bearing Mulberry
and Nanking
Cherries should be
reaching full productivity in a few years, which will go a long way
toward feeding the flock during the summer months. Buying less
and less processed food in the grocery store will also mean more and
more food byproducts to give the chickens year round --- for example,
our oil
expeller will
produce high protein seed cakes perfect for chicken feed. We'll
continue to work on insect
farming as a
supplemental food option, and will keep you updated as our forest
pasture experiment progresses.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Those are good questions. Unfortunately, I don't have any real data on laying yet --- the one hen we've had in there is a broody hen who doesn't lay much anyway. On the other hand, we just discovered that she had started laying under a bush before we put the laying boxes into the coop --- she'd been laying an egg a day! I figured I'd play it safe and feed the eggs back to the chickens since I didn't know how old they were, but I didn't want to give whole eggs to our flock and promote egg eating. So I threw them at a stump, and one egg was so hard it bounced! Clearly, she was finding plenty of calcium along with protein.
We don't really use our tractors very efficiently in the garden, which is why I think that concentrating their fertilizer into the coop is actually best for us. We drag them across the grassy areas around the garden, then throw the grass clippings on the beds, but the beds themselves are too high to drag a chicken tractor onto easily. I've used the tractors now and then to break up new garden ground, but that's pretty minimal --- we can always throw a few hens in a tractor if we need to do that.
This puts you one step closer to free ranging. After they get acquainted with their new coop and the garden stops producing, maybe you can let them roam during the day?
We started rotating our lawn grass clippings through our coop and small attached run (used during spring planting) before going to the garden. Old clippings come out of the coop for mulch for gardens and new clippings go in to have weed seeds removed and nutrients added. Works great and helps keep things clean.
Side note: If you remember the urban chicken tractor I made to my brothers high standards, he now uses it only as a coop and lets the chickens roam his back yard. His neighbors started sitting on their patio in the mornings just to watch his chickens.
A lot of people seem to enjoy true free range, but it doesn't work well with our garden. I like to mulch individual beds, and the chickens have a hay day spreading all of my carefully tended mulch into the aisles. I also have a four season garden --- there is always something alive and growing --- so there's no real fallow season when the chickens wouldn't bother my crops.
If I concentrated all of my winter crops and perennials in a certain part of the garden, I could probably fence the chickens into the other half of the garden rather than using cover crops, but cover crops give me a lot more organic matter than chicken poop does, and right now I'm working on building my soil's organic matter rather than just the fertility.
I plan to do something very much like your coop rotation --- put leaves, straw, weeds, etc., in the coop, and then rotate them out to be mulch in the garden once they've been well fertilized. I also plan to plant wheat in one of the paddocks after the chickens eat up the buckwheat, which will give me not only grain for the chickens, but also (I hope) straw for the garden. I definitely don't have it figured out yet, but I'm having fun playing with it! It sounds like you (and your neighbors
) are too.