How often should I rotate my chicken pasture?

Once you figure out how many square feet you're going to allot to your chickens, the next step is deciding how many pastures you'll divide that area into.  I highly recommend that you create more than one pasture so that you can rotate your flock, but do you want two pastures, five pastures, or twenty pastures?  Should you move your chickens to new ground every day, every week, or every month?

With ruminants (like cows), you're better off making as many small pastures as you can handle.  Pros use electric fencing for their cattle so that they can fence off just enough room for their cows to graze through in one day, forcing their herd to eat even the plants they don't like but not giving the cows time enough to kill their favorite foods.  The next day, the cattle are rotated into another small paddock, again just large enough for that day's grazing.

Since chickens get the majority of their pasture nutrition from insects rather than from plants, your rotational chicken pastures shouldn't completely mimic the cow model outlined above.  Instead, the pasture needs to be large enough that there's sufficient diversity of habitat to keep the flock hunting for food all day.  In my pastures, that means there's room for a compost pile (food scraps), trees or shrubs (worms under leaves), and a grassy area (grasshoppers.)  New worms and insects will make their way into the pasture daily, so there's not as much need to rotate the flock if they're not demolishing their favorite food plants.

That said, if you keep too many chickens in one pasture for too long, the ground gets scratched bare, which means your chickens have little to eat.  In June, I had to keep various sets of chickens separate and wasn't able to rotate, so my pastures became badly degraded.  Luckily, there's a solution for degraded pastures --- quicker rotations.  Instead of moving the flock every three weeks the way I had been doing, I began to open up a new pasture every five to seven days.  The quick rotations are working wonders at allowing plants to grow back, although there are some permanent bare spots in the heavy use areas around compost piles.

I can't give you solid numbers on how long to leave your chickens in each pasture since the optimal time will depend on pasture size, number of chickens present, and on all of the factors that affect chicken pasture size.  Instead, I highly recommend you spend a bit of time watching your chickens graze every day.  Do they seem to be finding plenty to eat, or are they down to the plants they don't like as much?  If the photo above hadn't been taken at the edge of the compost pile, it would be a sure sign of a pasture long overdue for rotation.

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