Should You Move Your Chickens?

Written By Nathan LaPointe

If you have chickens, you’ve got to get them on the move. Here’s why:

Where we Started:

When we began keeping chickens at the start of our journey, it was all new to us. I had never heard of or seen people move their egg layers weekly, or their meat chickens daily. Everything I had ever seen was a stationary coop with a small run with dirt in the bottom where the chickens were let out a couple days a week at best, if at all. I did not know you even could rotationally graze chickens. However, our first 20 egg layers and first 10 meat birds were a huge learning curve as to why we needed to create a simple, and that is the defining word here, system that would allow all of our chickens to remain healthy, happy and clean while offering them a free range lifestyle without being difficult to execute.

What Happened:

The Laying Hens:

We had 20 egg layers in a small barn with shavings on the ground, a 5 gallon hanging water bucket, and a trough feeder. We let them out every single day in the spring, summer and fall to come and go as they pleased, completely free range. No fences, no boundaries. Here’s what happened - they destroyed the pasture over the course of just one season. They were so eager to get outside in the morning that they would ravenously eat the grass right outside the barn first, which after only a few days into our first spring, they turned to dirt. And what started as a dirt patch grew almost daily. To make a long story short, they ate the best forage so aggressively and ignored the undesirable stuff, that pretty soon all we had was the undesirable stuff and all the grass had gone. We had inadvertently taken an awesome Timothy grass pasture that we bought in great shape, and turned it into a completely non-nutritional field full of weeds and wild carrots. We saw it happening but couldn’t stop it and did not know what to do. As we did more research, we happened upon the ideas and practices of large scale permaculturists like Joel Salatin, John Suscovich and Justin Rhodes and dove into designing systems where rotational grazing is king, and very simple. And we cannot understate the benefits we have seen.

We designed our own Egg Mobile and accompanied it with Premier 1 fencing to create a moveable, safe, spacious rotational grazing power house. It will go anywhere and house up to 100 laying hens. We have a picture of it for you here (and others in the Gallery):

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Now before we go any further, this is not the only answer. There are much smaller moveable structures that we can build to house 5, 10, 20 or 30 birds for you. It does not have to be this large, but the principles remain the same. The benefits to our pastures have been nothing short of miraculous. We’ve never seeded clover anywhere on our farm, but it comes up in almost a perfect ratio to pasture grasses. The chickens fertilized and essentially broke into the seed bank already stored in our soil for decades, and all of those beneficial and protein rich grazing crops surfaced. I’m not going to dive into the science of that, but I will proved links that I found useful if you’d like a better understanding of rotational grazing and why it works. The main gist of it is this: Rotational grazing will fertilize your pastures, enrich your soil, completely replenish your protein rich forage, and make you some of the happiest, healthiest, cleanest and most nutrient dense eggs and hens you’ve ever seen. In the spring they help the grass come up, in the summer they help maintain and fertilize, and in the fall you can move them to the garden or compost pile to help you turn over and finish off the garden for the winter.

These ideas and this system has been a huge win for not just our chickens and our egg quality, but it has changed the entire homestead. It’s begun this trickle down effect of fertilization, and now we have some of the most fertile top soil I’ve ever seen. Our fields are fuller of the right crops and our garden/compost yields higher than top soil purchased in a bag. If you have egg layers, they do more than lay eggs. All you have to do is let them.

The Meat Birds:

We kept our meat birds inside the entire time the first summer. We had an 8’x8’ stall in the barn that was originally for a horse or two. But seemed like it would fit 10 meat chickens in our first year perfectly. Here’s what happened:

After only three weeks, we had to clean the shavings daily. And even then, the smell and the filth was overpowering. If you’ve never had meat chickens before let me say this: the amount of manure they produce is astonishing. If you have raised them before then you know exactly what I’m talking about. The ammonia and the nitrogen mixed with hot weather and dust from the barn makes for some very unhealthy birds. They could barely move, they labored for every breath and a few ended up with respiratory illnesses, and some died. Conventional farming says you lose about 20% of your birds to illness, IF they are vaccinated and receive medicated feed full of antibiotics. Well, our first year that was spot on accurate. We lost 20% in a model that mimicked factory farming. Now we still used organic feed and had unvaccinated birds, but the conditions were almost identical to what you’d find on a mass production scale. After seeing that, we had to get them outside.

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Again, we saw the most amazing difference not only in our pasture, but in the health of these chickens. They were no longer half feathered with a completely bare and brown breast area, dark red skin and breathing heavy while sitting down 23 hours a day. When we put the meat birds on grass and moved their chicken tractor daily, we say completely feathered birds, with bright white bodies, eating grass and bugs and worms, chasing each other and literally frolicking through the grass like an 8 week old puppy does with his first squeaky toy. I mean it made us happy and fulfilled knowing we were giving these chickens the best lives possible before harvest. We’ve gotten to the point where losing one bird out of 80 is a surprise. In 2020 we lost one bird to a bad thunderstorm in their first day outside. After that, not one. No medicated feed, no vaccines, no mortality rates. Just chickens being chickens.

And the best part is, it takes about 3 minutes a day to move them if you’re going slow and enjoying the morning. We’ve timed it. Which is far less than it takes to clean out the dirty stall each day. If you’re raising birds for meat, let’s get them outside now. Its never too late to start seeing the benefits of rotational grazing. We can build you one of our chicken tractors, or anything you can find on Google/YouTube. Check out the videos and articles below!



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Nathan LaPointe
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