How much land for raising pasture fed chickens?

[JoshR]

I hope I put this in the right forum section.

Hi. I'm hoping you guys could help me with something. We currently have 19 chickens and 1 rooster. And we plan on getting 15-20 more chickens next year. (There all layers as well as 5 turkeys). And with the price of feed going up (we go through a 50ib bag a week), my parent want to either completely pasture feed the chickens next year or reduce what they eat by half. (They would get chicken feed in the winter, and we do give then scraps everyday). I'm kind of against this as I don't know if we have enough land, or if it's healthy for the chickens. So I guess I would like to know.

How much land do you need to raise possibly 40 pasture fed chickens? And is that even healthy for the chickens?

I would like to add that the chicken yard should big enough to hold 40 chickens but that is with giving them chicken feed every day. I think the yard is 100ft by 60ft.

 

[JoshR]

I'm assuming that by the lack of response, that no one knows the answer.

 

[trailchick]

Hi Josh & welcomeo BYC!

Pasture feeding has a lot of factors
involved.. ... .. Generally, pasture feeding may or may not
reduce your feed requirements by about 30%.
Many people use a chicken tractor which moves the flock around
to fresh areas on regular basis.

So are you planning to keep 40
birds in a yard that is 100 x 60 = 6000 sq ft?
That comes out to a little over a 10' sq for each bird.
Not enough IMO. Unless you have a whole lot of vegetation &
insects for them. If you have more land to add, then that would
be a better idea. How much more, one would need to account
for type of vegetation & quality of it.

But, you dont say where you are, or what type of land you have.
For instance I live in dry arid environment,
where I was pulling weeds out of
my garden for my free range birds this spring.
We hardly had any bugs aound for them to search for......

I know turkeys eat a whole lot, bird size of the others, some breeds
are better known at foraging, etc, so those is another factor!

Give some others on here some more time to chime in.
Also you might do a search on BYC for pasture feeding.

good luck

 

[JoshR]

Thanks for the reply. I live in the mid lower section of Michigan (near the lower end of the thumb) I agree that the current yard isn't big enough. We do have almost a half of an acre that I wouldn't mind giving to the chickens, but I don't think I could convince my parents on that since that's were they have the pool and garden. We are hoping to buy the land next to us next year, which is about 2 acres. The vegetation we have is mostly grass.

Here is an over view of our yard. I don't know what time of year it's showing, but every thing is green now.

Red = chicken yard, green = coop, yellow = garden blue = pool, and the white is the fencing around the side yard. I personally would want to give them all the white fenced in area, but I don't think that's going to happen.