Fences for chickens

How much fence does it take to keep chickens in?  If you don't have a problem with predators and do give your chickens a large, healthy pasture, the answer is --- not much.

Every time we build a new pasture for our flock, the fence gets simpler and simpler because our birds aren't all that interested in breaking free.  Our most recent fence consists of four foot tall metal fenceposts driven in the ground about fifteen feet apart with five foot tall chicken wire run between them.  The extra foot of chicken wire is bent over to lie along the ground on the inside of the pasture and Mark screws an old rotten board or log to the chicken wire at intervals along the bottom to tack it down.

Our chickens could easily get out if they wanted too.  They could tunnel under the parts of the fence that aren't tacked down or fly over the relatively low top of the fence.  They could even hop straight out the holes I never got around to patching up on the forest side of the pasture (oops.)  Despite all of these opportunities, the only time we've seen a fencebreak is when we first introduced our youngest Golden Comet to the flock and she was being bullied and flew over the fence to escape.  Once our rooster stepped in and promoted harmony in the flock, our birds decided their pastures were home and not prison.

I should mention that many chicken keepers swear by electrified poultry netting for its easy of construction and ability to hold in the flock.  Our permanent pastures are on uneven, weedy ground where we'd have to put in a lot of time mowing the edges and moving brush to keep electric fence from grounding itself, but if you're rotating chickens through a mowed, relatively even pasture, poultry netting might be the way to go.  Another option is to clip your chickens' wing feathers to keep them from flying over the fence, but I think that if your chickens are trying to escape, you should probably figure out why.