The winter chicken pasture

Winter is a tough time for raising chickens on pasture.  As Eliot Coleman explains in his Winter Harvest Handbook, most evergreen plants enter a semi-dormant state after the day length drops below 10 hours.  This period, which he calls the Persephone Days, lasts for two months from late November to late January here in southwest Virginia.  During this mid-winter period, you can't count on any new growth from your pasture and must be very careful not to overgraze and damage the soil.

We're still trying to figure out the best way to provide our chickens with greenery during the winter.  In the past, we've used chicken tractors, which allowed us to move our flock through the sunniest parts of the yard and capture as much of the stored up summer greenery as possible.  However, by January, we generally ran out of fresh grass and had to pull the chickens back over areas that had previously been scratched bare.

In the long run, I suspect that the solution will be multiple pasture paddocks, at least two of which are planted in winter grains.  Since we had to plant our winter wheat late to prevent Hessian fly damage, the plants are still quite small and may not be ready for chicken beaks until the spring.  I think it might be worth planting one of their pastures in an earlier grain like oats or barley next year, to be used completely as green fodder during the Persephone Days.  Giving chickens optimal pasture during the winter months will probably come down to planning fallow summer and fall pastures to stockpile energy and then doling that energy out during the Persephone Days.