Seasonal changes in chicken pasture preferences

This year, we've grazed our chickens in four very different pastures and I'm starting to get a feel for what kind of structure chickens like best.  When I say "structure", I'm talking about the difference between low grasses and forbs (a "traditional" pasture), tall annual weeds (what springs up in an unmown field after a year or two), and young woods.  I had hypothesized at the beginning of the year that the first would be the least tasty since grasses are far from a chicken's favorite food and don't host very much invertebrate life and that the last would be their favorite.  I figured tall weeds would fall somewhere in between.

Early spring observations seemed to bear my hypothesis out.  When placed on grassy pastures, the chickens gravitated to the few woodsy areas where fallen leaves had built up and tender chickweed grew.  In the forest pasture, our flock went crazy, eating a huge variety of tender wild plants and finding plenty of worms.  And when our first set of chicks of the year were allowed to run wherever they wanted, they headed straight into the woods to graze.

Then summer hit and the tables turned.  The grasses kept growing, putting out tasty seeds and tender new leaves, while the plants in the forest spurted up above the chickens' heads and turned woody and untasty.  I eventually had to stop rotating the chickens into the forest pasture because they just weren't getting anything out of it, and I came to the same conclusion about the pasture full of tall ragweed plants.

Meanwhile, Mark fenced in a second forest pasture to keep the chickens from overgrazing their two main pastures.  I didn't expect much when I opened up the new pasture since the other forest pasture had turned into the flock's least favorite spot, but our chickens once again had a heyday, enjoying Japanese Stiltgrass leaves and lots of herbaceous plants' seeds.  All of the photos in this post are from that new forest pasture during the flock's second morning of grazing.

On the other hand, after one day on wooded pasture, the ground was already starting to change from this:

...into this:

Clearly, part of the issue with forest pastures is that the sparse ground cover can't stand up to much chicken scratching.  Since trees capture so much of the light in a wooded pasture, the forest floor tends to have less growth in reach of chicken beaks and the birds use up what's there very quickly.  I suspect that young to middle-aged deciduous forest used as pasture will support only half to a third as many chickens as a grassy pasture and that chickens should be rotated out of it within three days to maintain the health of the pasture.  The variety of plants and invertebrates available in a forest pasture probably makes the chickens healthier, but only if you can come up with two to five times as much acreage as you would need in a more traditional pasture.

In contrast, even during the hot, dry summer lull in late August, our grassy pastures could handle our flock for at least a week and then rebounded within two or three weeks.  True, the chickens don't enjoy grass as much as they relish forest products, but traditional pastures have a huge plus --- the sod is resilient enough to stand up to abuse.  If you only have a tiny bit of space, a traditional pasture is probably the way to go.

Stay tuned for my next post in which I'll detail what I envision as the perfect pasture for our region.