Rotational Grazing: Chicken Soil Engineers in Gardens & Pastures

Integrating chickens and other livestock into the garden can benefit everyone. By allowing them to do what they do at just the right time and place, we can create more sustainable food systems. This type of rotational grazing system can be implemented on many different scales, from silvopastures to backyard gardens. It also demonstrates how cyclic disturbance and ecological succession can be used in agroecological systems around the world.
__
The purpose of this work is to demonstrate a variety of food production systems and engage the community in sustainable & ethical land management. It is intended to provide food as well as interdisciplinary educational opportunities for people of all ages & backgrounds.
People of all ages and backgrounds reside on campus and participate in farming and gardening activities as part of their education. We hope to create more productive outdoor learning spaces and opportunities to demonstrate ideas such as agroecology, permaculture, and sustainable food production.
Some of the work we want to demonstrate are so-called “alternative” or “non-conventional” agricultural practices. These include disciplines such as agroecology (agriculture that mimics natural ecological systems), permaculture (sustainable & self-sufficient design), regenerative agriculture (conservation approach that focuses on topsoil regeneration, biodiversity, improving water cycle, biosequestration, & mitigating climate change), agroforestry & silvopasture (integration of trees & shrubs with animals), organic agriculture (growing & processing food without the use of synthetic fertilizers & pesticides), and food sovereignty (the right to healthy & culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound & sustainable methods), among others.
This KZbin channel and these videos are for educational purposes and for my own personal documentation of various projects.

[@SuerteDelMolinoFarm]

Greetings from the LooseNatural farm in Andalusia Spain where we currently look into having chickens. Thank you for sharing

[@AgroecologicalSystems]

Greetings! Looks really nice over there, very interesting climate and environment. I subscribed and will watch through your videos when I get a chance, I love to see all the different things people are doing around the world!

[@hippieacresnv]

Gorgeous!! We like to use ducks in our food forest also! :) 🦆🦆🦆

[@AgroecologicalSystems]

Sounds awesome. We had a few ducks for a short time but what I really want is an entire duck army for the forest garden haha.

[@tcotroneo]

Thank you for a great video! I’ve had my chickens in the same forest plot for years and you gave me a new idea! I was thinking of uplifting my coop/shed and putting it on wheels, but it makes sense to just build a new portable structure to setup my chickens in other areas.

[@AgroecologicalSystems]

That's a great idea! It’s more work but worth it IMO.

[@krzysztofrudnicki5841]

I have two 150m2 vegetable gardens separated in the middle by chicken coop with run. In one year I grow vegetables in one garden, and in second I grow cover crops and keep chickens. In next year I change the sides.

[@AgroecologicalSystems]

Ooh I like that setup. I’ve been wanting to make something like that.

[@GardeningWithCoffee]

Love the video! Can't wait to have chickens 😊

[@AgroecologicalSystems]

Thanks! Chickens are amazing.

[@gardeninginuae]

Excellent video

[@AgroecologicalSystems]

Thanks, I hope to make more like this that are focused on a specific topic. I've been amassing tons of footage lol so I should be able to put together some interesting videos.

[@MG-ep5mm]

Can you provide any resources showing how to build that lightweight modular chicken shelter? I like the idea of being able to move something around like that in pieces without having to build a full on chicken tractor. As fun as that would be - it's also time consuming to construct. A pole tent with some roost bars leaned up and a free-standing nest box looks very tempting...

[@AgroecologicalSystems]

I don’t have any plans or anything sorry, but we’ve built a few shelters that use pvc or aluminum poles, chicken wire, and a tarp and they work pretty well. I wonder if you could find and modify one of those expanding canopy tents or something. There can be advantages but still took 4 of us to move the shelter and the heavy nesting box, whereas our newer fancier shelter on a trailer (seen toward the end of the video) can be hooked up / towed around by one person. I want to build something smaller that one person can move around by hand, so maybe modular is the way to go. Lightweight shelter, separate nesting boxes, etc.,

[@mavisdavisify]

If you transferred them at night you’d have a hell of a lot less trauma to those birds and frustration of your workers. In the dark you can walk right up to them and they do not seem to register that a big old human has gotten a hold of them. It’s so much easier, if you must catch a bird to move it, to do the transfer in the dark.

[@AgroecologicalSystems]

Thanks that’s good to know, I was worried about them. I’m know we try to move our meat birds during the night before harvesting. Makes sense to wait til they’re sleepy chickens.

[@TheVigilantStewards]

Wonderful video work!

[@AgroecologicalSystems]

Thank you very much!

[@toldt]

I would love to know more about how you manage and rotate your chickens (ie how often, how many sq ft per hen). At the end of your video, it also looks like you have wildflowers and other pollinator habitat in a hedgerow. Please tell us more about that and how your farm overall is laid out and organized.

[@AgroecologicalSystems]

Sure I can tell you what I know, which isn’t everything haha. But yea the chickens are rotated around every few days or weeks, as far as I know it isn’t a set schedule but more of seeing when they have grazed everything down and are ready to move. The cells are around 2700 sq ft, with about 100 chickens I believe. So about 27 sq ft per hen. I think that can vary as well. Lots of variables to play with, but they seem happy and healthy. The long flower bed shown at the end is one of our beloved traditions, it’s a 500’ long bed along the side of the driveway next to a horse pasture. It’s for pollinators and aesthetics. Across the driveway is the annual production garden, where we grow our veggies. Nearby is the barn, and more pasture. Elsewhere we have perennial gardens, and a 40 acre sugar bush for maple syrup! I’m interested in how all these different elements can work together to produce good local food. Hope to make more videos soon.

[@franklieful]

great video!

[@FallofftheMap]

I have a citrus and avocado orchard. Would it be ok to graze chickens in the orchard where they may come into contact with fallen fruit that is harmful to them? Will they naturally avoid eating too much of it if they have enough healthy food, or will they damage their health gobbling avocados and lemons?

[@AgroecologicalSystems]

I think that would be a great place for them, although I see some sources saying they shouldn’t eat too much avocado or citrus, but others saying it’s fine.. we’ve allowed our chickens to rummage through food waste including avocado/citrus and haven’t had an issue. I generally assume chickens are smart enough to avoid mildly toxic stuff if they have a choice. In your orchard there are probably all kinds of other food sources like little insects and worms as well, so I think they would be fine in that setting but would be good to keep an eye on it.

[@hanliehanekom6994]

Can you please explain how you will do such a system with horses? I saw your horses at the end of the video. Can you do it with chickens and horses only? Do one need other grazing animals too? Thank you.

[@AgroecologicalSystems]

The horses would just need more area. We have different pastures for them to go to so they can rotate that way. I think you could have chickens follow the horses and it would work well.

[@lkhfun6575]

Great video! Subbed to see more. 🙂

[@AgroecologicalSystems]

Thanks! I’m planning to make many more videos like this.

[@alishaberrey4479]

Thanks. We're getting into sheep and chickens. I have 2 acres of fescue I want to replace with other grasses and clover. Do you think I could do this and then go behind them with the seeds of the pasture I want?

[@AgroecologicalSystems]

Yea that would probably work, you might try to play around with the interval / rest period and other variables but we’ve done something similar. Over time you’ll start to see more diversity.

[@VideoconferencingUSA]

Nice job

[@AgroecologicalSystems]

Thanks!

[@oghran]

How do you prevent chickens from flying over the fence? Your fence is not that high.

[@gardeninginuae]

I was thinking of the same since chickens can fly a bit so its quite risky

[@AgroecologicalSystems]

They rarely fly over, I think it's partly because of the fact that they are kept happy and interested in their fresh pasture. But I'm not totally sure, they definitely can fly over and occasionally do, but it hasn't been a big problem. They'll mostly just hang out around the outside of the fence, almost like they regret their decision to escape lol.

[@krzysztofrudnicki5841]

My fence is about 3 ft high and my chicken don't want to fly over.

[@breezein-breezeout]

Thanks for sharing. Does this mean you don't work with permanent beds for your vegetable garden? And how long will you leave the beds area to rest after the chickens are done doing their work and before you plant it again? 🙏

[@AgroecologicalSystems]

The beds in the vegetable garden are permanent in that they’re cultivated year after year with annual crops if that’s what you mean. We try to change it up so some are tilled, sown with cover crops, or get the chicken treatment, some beds aren’t tilled, we also add a lot of compost and manure. Not all of the beds will be picked through by chickens, and they get rotated around so the time that each bed rests is slightly different for each, but all of it will rest through our long winter and then be planted again in the spring, rotating different crops through different beds and often multiple crops cycle through a bed in a single growing season. We get maybe 15 frost free weeks a year. These beds have been cultivated for decades, essentially “organic” practices but not certified organic. So the beds are full of deep good quality soil.

[@rwrobbins56]

How do you protect your chickens from aerial raptors? We have plenty of them in our area, I have witnessed our chickens being attacked in the past.

[@AgroecologicalSystems]

So far no issues with predatory birds, I’ve seen plenty hawks, some eagles, foxes, etc and I don’t think they’re at the point where they’re predating upon the the chickens. We did have a problem with ravens getting in and stealing eggs at one point, and we have had a mink kill some of our chickens before. We just do our best and give the chickens the best life possible.

[@boogerie]

About how large are the "cells"?

[@AgroecologicalSystems]

~200’ perimeter, so like 2,700 sq ft. You can go bigger or smaller, but also rotate them over shorter or longer intervals.

[@JS-jh4cy]

Chicken 🐓 shit does the job

[@AgroecologicalSystems]

Ideed 😂

[@HelenEk7]

2:30

[@AgroecologicalSystems]

Indeed

[@HelenEk7]

@@AgroecologicalSystems I just wanted to save where you show the movable chicken shelter. :) Do they stay there during winter as well? If yes, how cold does your winters get?

[@janebishop5885]

Well, if the world were different this might be good practice. It is not because there should be no ability for wild birds to contact farm chickens due to the viruses that would enter into wild birds that have no defenses and has already occurred and birds are dying off. Use a chicken tractor with sides made of hardware cloth for land management and manually move it from one area to another.

[@AgroecologicalSystems]

Yea it’s definitely a concern and we’re doing what we can. As far as I’m aware, it is possible for farmed birds to infect wild populations, but the concern is the other way around. The virus is unfortunately already prevalent in wild birds and the issue is preventing it from infecting farm birds. We follow most of the guidelines but some aren’t feasible or actually cause more problems. Keeping them in confined indoor spaces all the time is not healthy and can lead to other respiratory viruses, obsessive behaviors, etc. The virus is so contagious that even using hardware cloth to completely enclose them is not likely to prevent infection. Keeping rodents out is just not feasible, but can be mitigated with basic cleanliness. We’ve also been told to cull any wild birds that come near, which I think is ridiculous. We’re told to “Avoid visiting any ponds or streams, especially with pets”, but we’re surrounded by ponds and streams with lots of people visiting them.. we’re supposed to “reduce large puddles and standing water that may be a nice resting place for migratory birds.” This is just not possible and honestly sounds ridiculous, we’re surrounded by lakes and wetlands with tons of migratory birds which we love and don’t want to reduce lol. We use basic sanitary practices and common sense precautions, focus on the health of the birds, and keep a close eye on it. The HPAI is a pandemic, it’s everywhere and it’s highly contagious. Avian flu is a risk you take when keeping birds, but there are other risks as well and we do our best to reduce all of that. So far we’ve had no issues with HPAI, though it definitely could happen!

[@saimandebbarma]

Good' hope we will do better each time, lovely! ☝️🤍🙏

[@AgroecologicalSystems]

Thank you!

[@saimandebbarma]

@@AgroecologicalSystems Welcome !👍 🤍🙏