Many Ways to Keep a Chicken – Guest Post by Anna

When my husband and I first brought chickens to our new homestead, we jumped on the chicken tractor bandwagon because it seemed to be the thing to do. Since then, though, we’ve been assessing various alternative chicken keeping arrangements and no longer believe that chicken tractors are the best method for every situation. I’ve summed up the pros and cons of several chicken management strategies below to help those of you who are new to chickens (or are just not sure that you like your current arrangement) choose an alternative.

Traditional coop and stationary run.
Remember your grandfather’s chicken coop with the twenty-five square foot run outside? Chickens scratch up these small runs so quickly that within a week or two, all that remains is bare earth. After that, your flock no longer gets the nutritious greenery and insects that are so important to their health (and to the quality of their eggs and meat.) Cooped up chickens also tend to develop bad behaviors, like feather picking and egg eating, since they have nothing else to do all day except beat up on their neighbors. This is the old way of keeping chickens, and I’m glad to see it fading into the distance.

Chicken tractors.
Also known as chicken arks in the UK, chicken tractors are small, moveable run and coop combos. Tractors are perfect for urbanites with a tiny yard, since the chickens are contained in a small area but also have some access to fresh grass and bugs when you move the tractor daily onto a fresh patch of lawn. In practice, we found that our chickens ate up the tastiest morsels within an hour or so in the morning, then spent the rest of the day lounging about like cooped up chickens, but that bit of fresh food is better than nothing. Many gardeners use chicken tractors to work over their garden or to scratch up new ground, but here I feel like you have to choose between the health of your garden and the health of your birds — I felt guilty about leaving our chickens scratching the same bare patch of earth day after day while waiting for them to deposit their manure on the winter garden, and their comb color and egg yolk color suffered. In the end, I think that people who live outside the city and have a bit more space should choose a method other than the chicken tractor, but if you do go for a tractor, I have one final word of wisdom — make it as light as possible or the tractor-mover in your family will soon tire of the chore and the tractor will become a smaller version of the stationary coop and run combo.

Deep bedding.
Chickens raised on deep bedding are kept confined in a relatively large coop, but fresh bedding is added to the floor every week so that the birds aren’t walking over their own waste and the coop doesn’t develop a foul smell. From a gardening standpoint, deep bedding is the best chicken management system since you concentrate and sequester all of that high nitrogen chicken manure in one spot, mixing the manure with high carbon leaves or straw to produce the perfect compost. Unfortunately, from a chicken health standpoint, deep bedding is a real loser — chickens have no access to bugs or greenery, so you’ll end up with pale yellow egg yolks like those seen in the grocery store. On the other hand, if you’re willing to bring a lot of treats to your flock to round out their diet, deep bedding is a smell-free way to raise a lot of chickens in a small area. Better yet, use deep bedding in a coop with one of the pasturing arrangements listed below to get the best of both worlds — the chickens will hang out in the coop at night (and when it’s bitterly cold outside), creating that black gold gardeners crave, but the birds can also have the run of a pasture to get fresh food.

The healthiest chickens are completely free ranged. You’ll need to make a coop for the flock to roost in at night (and shut them in if you have predator pressure in your area), but otherwise the chickens just wander around all day finding supplements to the grain you feed them. The downside of free range is that chickens and gardens don’t mix – chickens adore strawberries and tomatoes and get a real kick out of moving your mulch to new locations. In addition, free range chickens are much more likely to be picked off by predators since they may explore beyond your usual perimeter. Of course, free range chickens won’t be allowed in the city, and your neighbors may not be pleased if you let chickens run into their yard even in the country. But if you aren’t a gardener and live in an isolated location far from neighbors, you might decide that losing a few chickens to owls and foxes is worth the brilliant orange egg yolks you’ll get in exchange. That’s what Everett (pictured here with his free range chickens and dogs) has resigned to for now. His garden will require a large fence to keep the deer out anyway, so chickens in the garden shouldn’t be a problem.

Rotational pastures.
After running through all of the other options, we’ve currently settled on rotational pastures as our favorite chicken-keeping method. There are dozens of variations, but the basic idea consists of a stationary coop with doors on each side opening into four separate
paddocks. Some people go so far as to make the coop light enough to be dragged to a new area at intervals, then use electric poultry fencing to make paddocks that can be easily changed in shape based on your whim. The pastures can be a simple grass lawn (the worst option since chickens aren’t grazers and get only a small amount of their nutrients
from grass) or a forest pasture planted with trees, shrubs and herbs which will feed your chicken
throughout the year. Alternatively, you can make the chickens’ pasture and your garden one and the same, planting crops in an area that your flock fertilized and debugged last year, a method that works especially well if your garden is simply a grain crop to feed the flock. Whatever you plant there, rotational pastures are likely to produce chickens nearly as healthy as those on free range since your flock will always have fresh ground to scratch over in search of the insects that make up such a large part of their natural diet.

To sum it all up, I think the chicken tractor is good for urban homesteaders, free ranging your chickens is a great idea if you aren’t a gardener but live in a secluded location, and rotational pastures are probably the best option for everyone else. But we’re still working toward our goal of raising the world’s healthiest chickens while feeding them the smallest amount of storebought feed possible. Maybe you’ve got a better way? We’d love to hear about it!