The Benefits of The Grazing Chicken

It's funny how things work out. I had mentioned in an earlier post the importance of walking your pastures and taking notice. Learning the lay of the land and studying the little micro-ecologies that exist on every parcel of land. We had a major storm system blow through the other night. It spawned tornadoes all over Missouri, in January! Anyway, the storm took off the roof of our barn and moved our chicken coop about six inches.

Today I got to thinking that perhaps the storm had blown a branch or something on top of the electric fence that I did not see during my initial investigation. Truth be told, it was an excuse to use my new toy I got for Christmas-a fault finder.

Low and behold, I found a fault in the fence. In the process of tracing the fault to it's cause, I happened to notice a couple of areas that had some new green grass poking through the soil. "Wow!", I thought. "This is too cool!" We have been having some nice, warm weather here lately. For about a week. Which is probably what kicked off the storms to begin with. But, with it being so warm, the grass has started to grow. This piqued my curiosity, so I looked for more. What I found should have been no surprise to me, but it was. In places that had a huge amount of hay fed last year the grass was growing. (Can you say "carbon?) In places that we had inadvertantly accomplished high stock density grazing with the broilers, the grass was growing. (Can you say Nitrogen?) In places that I have fed hay since November had grass growing. In places that I have done nothing at all, or very minimal, the grass was not growing. Hmmm. I think I am beginning to see the importance of animal diversification. Chickens seem to be phenominal fertilizer machines. There is one place, in particular, there is a clearly visible green path that the chicken tractor blazed during the last days of our last batch of birds for the season. The grass is dead and brown all around, but a nice, green path is there-even in January. This is astounding to me because we have had our share of cold weather this winter, save the last week or so.

Are we going to continue to raise broilers in this fashion? Oh my, yes. Not only do we have the priveledge of serving the community and our family with food that is fit to eat, but we are building the soil as well. Which is what God intends, isn't it, to take care of His land? It's funny how things work out.