I have had chickens get into my garden. Not good, they love garden plants.
Chickens love to scratch the ground to find bugs, seeds and worms. Its what they naturally eat. They can dig up a lot of ground trying for worms. it's even worse if the ground has already been plowed, lots of soft easy digging.
Once the chickens figure out that there are seeds planted in the ground they will start scratching and dig all the seed up. They are smart enough to figure out to look for seed planted in rows too.
They will also eat any sprouted seed pulling out the corn root and all, until the plants are too big to swallow. That's around 5 inches tall. Chickens will sometimes still snip the top tips off plants, like mowing the lawn. To be safe i would wait until the corn is over a foot high before letting the chicken into the corn. At that point chickens are great at controlling bugs.
Chickens love to scratch the ground to find bugs, seeds and worms. Its what they naturally eat. They can dig up a lot of ground trying for worms. it's even worse if the ground has already been plowed, lots of soft easy digging.
Once the chickens figure out that there are seeds planted in the ground they will start scratching and dig all the seed up. They are smart enough to figure out to look for seed planted in rows too.
They will also eat any sprouted seed pulling out the corn root and all, until the plants are too big to swallow. That's around 5 inches tall. Chickens will sometimes still snip the top tips off plants, like mowing the lawn. To be safe i would wait until the corn is over a foot high before letting the chicken into the corn. At that point chickens are great at controlling bugs.
