Best chicken pasture

I posted previously that our chickens changed their pasture preferences as the year progressed.  So you shouldn't be surprised to learn that I think the perfect pasture system would have seasonal components.  As I suggested in my post about pasture rotation, I need to start thinking about three separate seasons and either make each pasture a mixture of plants for all three seasons or use different pastures at different times of the year. 

Spring, summer, and fall pasture
The best spring, early summer, and fall pasture would probably be a traditional perennial mixture of grasses, clovers, and low weedy forbs (like plantain).  (This is assuming you live far enough north that your pastures aren't dominated by warm season grasses, in which case your seasonal progression will be totally different from mine.)  To maintain low, tender growth that chickens enjoy in this type of traditional pasture, we'll have to either bushhog/mow the pasture occasionally to keep tall weeds from taking over or add another grazer that will eat woodier growth.  I'm pondering miniature goats and sheep but we may have too much on our plate to make that a reality anytime soon.

In southwest Virginia, we need at least a few trees or shrubs in the summer pasture to keep the chickens from overheating, but these should be useful trees that produce fruits that the chickens enjoy rather than random trees that only provide some fallen leaves to attract worms to the soil surface.  Everbearing mulberries are the traditional choice --- we have three planted, but these will, of course, take years to produce much fruit.  In the meantime, I suspect that some fruiting shrubs would be a good option and perhaps I'll transplant some of our extra everbearing raspberries into the chicken pasture in the fall.  So, the optimal pasture during spring, summer, and fall would look like New Forest --- useful trees over a low grassy sward.

August pasture
In the heat of midsummer, cool season grasses stop growing, so we need to start thinking about extra pasture plants to feed the flock during this season.  I was going to try to establish some Bermuda Grass in a pasture or two since warm season grasses enjoy the heat, but I got sticker shock when I checked out the seed prices at the local feed store.  Instead, I'm pondering two different options --- either leaving a couple of cool season grass pastures fallow during the early summer so that they stockpile extra growth for the chickens to pick through in August, or planting tender annuals like forage sorghum in a couple of spots for August grazing. 

A third possibility is to irrigate your pastures so they keep growing.  Although this concept seems very wasteful at first glimpse, I've noticed that the pastures directly downhill from our vegetable garden (watered weekly) received enough runoff to stay much greener than other areas during our August drought.  Perhaps you can drain your graywater into a summer pasture or find some other way of irrigating without actually running sprinklers on your summer pasture?

Of course, the positive part about midsummer is that even though the pastures tend to get a bit overgrazed, I'm giving the chickens garden scraps right and left, so the flock stays healthy.  I could probably get away with no special summer pasture as long as we don't raise too many broilers.

Winter pasture
More troublesome is winter.  Once the really cold weather hits and all of the grasses stop growing, the flock either needs a lot more space or they need some sort of designated winter forage.  Again, stockpiling summer growth is one option; although ruminants like cows get more out of this rotation scheme than chickens do, at least your chickens won't end up scratching the pasture down to mud.  Another option is to plant annuals --- here I'm considering oats, rye, and Austrian winter peas, all of which can be grazed much later in the season and earlier in the spring than perennial grasses.  If you want to look far into the future, a few persimmon trees can provide winter fruit.

The final winter option is to do what homesteaders of old did --- cull relentlessly and go into winter with only your best breeding stock.  Since we've been raising a lot of broilers this year, we'll naturally be minimizing our flock for winter, going from a summer high of nineteen birds in one set of pastures to a winter low of around nine to twelve birds.

Still more to learn
As you can tell, I've changed my pasturing ideas drastically after a year and a quarter of experimentation, so I suspect this vision will morph several more times before it works well.  Please take my ideas with a grain of salt and use them as the basis of your own experimentation.  If you've already figured out seasonal chicken pasturing, I hope you'll take a minute to comment and tell me what you've learned works well or poorly.