Pastured Poultry

This was our first year of actually raising poultry on pasture. It’s been a success so far. For years we’ve kept chicks in the green chicken tractor showed in these pictures but always moved them to a bigger pen as the birds grew larger.

But, this year with Joel Salatin as our inspiration we decided to go the whole route and raise them all the way to finish out on pasture. It has made a big difference. The birds are cleaner and healthier.


This summer we had a huge abundance of grasshoppers and crickets so these chickens have had lots to eat besides their regular ration of corn and broiler grower. One thing we didn’t do though was to come up with a custom feed to get away from that commercial stuff. Oh well, just taking it one step at a time. Maybe next year we will be able to come up with an alternative to the packaged feed.





The tractor with the gray tarp for a cover we built this year. Plus we modified the green one adding a watering system and a feeding tube identical to what we did with the gray one. The gray one is a little over 3 feet longer than the green one so therefore it is a “faster” unit. In retrospect I should have made them both the same length, as the gray one covers more ground with each daily move. We turn them around after about 130 feet and since they don’t keep the same pace there’s always one coming or going and they pass each other head on every so often.


I’ve noticed that the grass that grows back after the tractors have passed is quite a bit thicker and greener than the grass that is mowed just adjacent to were we started them off from. Lots of good fertilizer, besides the chickens scratching through and aerating the turf a bit.

In the video below you can see the chickens drinking out of the automatic water that we got for these units. I’m impressed with the simple design and the fact that they work well being gravity fed hooked up to a 5 gallon bucket. They have a real simple valve that looks similar to a tire valve. A spring keeps it compressed but as the bowl fills it decompresses the valve and therefore shuts off the water flow. The only thing is, every so often I have to take it apart and clean the strainer since bits of debris always manage to get mixed in the water.

We started with 58 broilers but now have 55. A few started getting leg problems so before they continued to get worse we simply ate them. They were pretty small then but, made we made family meals out of them nonetheless.




Actually we don’t have 55 anymore, since we began butchering them yesterday and a dozen are now in the freezer. We are very excited to now have an automatic chicken plucker. Our apologies go out to Herrick Kimball. We did not build the Whiz Bang. I got the plans from him some time ago and had every intension in building one but, as things go never got around to rounding up the parts and so forth so we bit the bullet and bought a Featherman. It works really well and it is totally unbelievable how fast the feathers come off. I’m sure the Whiz Bang works just as good. Actually we watched a couple videos on You Tube of Whiz Bangs and it seems just as good as the Featherman. But, now that we can pluck a chicken in nothing flat we are going to need to do something about scalding. So hopefully before next season we’ll have built the Whiz Bang chicken scalder from the plans we got from Herrick.

We are planning on raising more chickens to sell for next year. After butchering some of these I’m not going to be bashful about asking for a good price since they are some superior birds after being on pasture. Best birds we’ve ever raised, without a doubt!

Until Next Time