Winter chicken pasture: The woods

The wintering methods of Harvey Ussery and Throwback at Trapper Creek both share one common feature --- they keep chickens off pasture.  Unfortunately, the idea of rotating chickens quickly through small pastures falls apart once real cold weather hits, which may be in October, November, December, or even January, depending on where you live and on how much you've built up the organic matter of your soil.  At that point, grass stops growing and soil microorganisms stop being able to handle the influx of chicken waste.  If you keep grazing your flock after this point, chickens will kill the plants and their manure will run off into local streams, causing pollution.

I don't have enough spare organic matter to mulch a winter yard, nor do I have a greenhouse, so I've had to come up with a lower tech solution --- running the chickens in the woods.  This technique clearly won't work for everyone since neighbors would complain and predators could eat the flock, but our chickens are all still present and none have crossed our "moats" --- two creeks, a swamp, and our pasture fences which together bound about 2.25 acres.

The chickens spend most of their time in the acre closest to home, where they've pretty thoroughly scratched through the leaf litter already.  But each week they range a little further, and there's still plenty of ground to be hunted through.  I figure their current range will probably be enough to to keep all 11 chickens happy until spring --- I'll let you know if I start seeing degradation of the woods.

As I learn more about rotational pastures, I'm discovering that it's helpful to have a release valve on the system, a place to send the flock if they're starting to degrade the plants in their pasture.  Well-managed rotational pastures should be able to handle more animals each year, but you can easily set them back in the early stages by overgrazing.  So we compromise, losing the organic matter of their daytime manure when we need to graze them in the woods, but keeping their scratching feet off the resting pastures.  And, as a bonus, we get to enjoy the happiness of our flock when faced with acres of leaf litter to scratch through.