Like... dude, how do you get such amazing grass? Look look at the height of this stuff! I mean ryegrass over my head... oats up to my chest... This is incredible! How do you do this? Well, it's
simple. You just kneel down in the pasture. Of course, if I stand up it's
still pretty remarkable, just not quite as. So if you're trying to
raise chickens on a pasture like this there's going to be—if you're not
spraying it with herbicides and insecticides and all that kind of stuff—
there's gonna be some grasshoppers, they're gonna eat some grass off the
pasture, they're gonna get some, it's gonna be okay... Well what'd be really
great is if you could actually have your chickens and pasture like this! Yeah boy.
He agrees with me. A pasture like this where you've got all kinds of cereal
grains, rye, wheat, oats, Austrian winter pea, some clover... things that have
overwintered and have come up and the chickens are self harvesting and you
don't have to do very much work. You just run them through it, they tromp it down,
they eat all the seed heads out, they miss a few it re-seeds the pasture, and you get some for next year. If you've got old, degraded pasture though how do you get
pasture like this when you're sitting on a pasture that's just not producing much?
It's pretty old, pretty worn out, maybe you're just starting to put chickens on
it? Well my experience is: the more chickens you can put on—as long as you
keep moving them around—the better. When I started out pretty much the whole
pasture looked like this. It was actually worse than this because this is actually
a thicker sward than I started out with. And there was no clover in this pasture
when I started. There wasn't very much grass; it was almost entirely weeds. What
I found was: if I can put chickens on this pasture at a high enough density—
say, 12 hours of 40 chickens in an 8x8 area—then the pasture would actually
start changing from that to this which is just thick and insane. And you can see what's in here:
oats, rye, wheat, crimson clover, there's a number of
different cereal grains in here that are growing well. And you can look at how
thick the sward is. It's pretty obvious this is much, much thicker. The effect
from this is actually meat birds— broilers. I put them on here in Joel Salatin
style pens, ran them here for a few months, and just kept moving him twice a day and the effect is just unbelievable. This far
out in the pasture we've never actually had animals over here. No goats, no
chickens, no nothing. So you could see it's pretty sparse, it's pretty weedy,
there's a lot of jack oaks and things growing up in the pasture. Literally a
few feet away where we have had chickens and actually where their hutch has been
you have what amounts to a forest of grass. And I'm trying to run the chickens
over this when the seeds are relatively ready to harvest. And assuming that the
chickens will self harvest a whole bunch of it, what they don't harvest they're
gonna tromp, hopefully spread some of the seed around, help the pasture re-seed
itself. And obviously their manure will help the next thing that is gonna
grow in its place. But what they don't tromp or what they what they don't
harvest... when they tromp down it's not a bad thing. Because you can see the mulch that's created by just the tromping action. And for here, this is actually a
path where we walk to the house and back from the chickens. And you can see how
thick the growth is here and then how thick that the layer of mulch—
effectively—is. And if you're familiar with Gabe Brown and some of of what he talks about with "keeping armor on the soil surface" this
is that same kind of thing. Even if the chickens didn't harvest any of it
and it all got completely tromped down and destroyed or I had the neighbor
come and mow it all down... it's still putting a ton of biomass on the soil,
that's putting a lot of carbon on the top of the soil that'll feed the the
microbiology. It's going to feed the the earthworms, it's going to protect the
soil when it rains from the the dirt sort of splashing up and washing away in
a heavy rain, it's going to keep the soil surface cooler in a hot summer, it's
going to keep the moisture in... There's so many good effects that this
sort of natural mulch—or this kind of cover crop—is going to do for your
pasture whether or not you have an animal eat it. Which is my difficulty
right now with not having an herbivore on the pasture to eat the stuff. I just
look at it I'm like "This is so much great biomass! I'd love to run an animal
over this!" But if you don't have an animal or you can't commit to an animal
yet, you can still grow this stuff and then mow it down, tromp it down, crimp it
down, whatever you need to do and just that action itself is gonna help
create a lot of good ecology on your pasture. So whatever the chickens aren't
gonna eat that can just go down on the soil surface. That's totally fine.
So... was I just super fortunate enough to have all these oats and clover and all
that kind of stuff growing in my field and when I just ran chickens over it
it just sprouted and "I don't know where it came from!"
Nope. What actually happened was when we first moved here and I saw how bad the
pasture was I thought "I'm just gonna seed this whole thing with all kinds of
oats and clover and and wheat and turnip greens and all kinds of stuff and then
it's gonna be a totally different pasture!" And that was three, almost four
years ago. And I seeded the whole pasture and nothing came up! Like, literally,
nothing. I think maybe I had a few turnips come up and then, you know, make a turnip sprout about that far into the ground.
Because our pasture is so dense, I mean it's rock-hard red clay underneath. You
can see I'm in a section of the pasture right next to the woods where we haven't
put any animals. But you can look down here it's... I mean this stuff is just
hard. It's sparse. This is not great pasture. But I planted all that stuff out
and waited for cool weather to happen and—in South Carolina where I am—
you can plant right on... you can throw seed out right on the top of the soil
and there's enough moisture, stuff will just germinate automatically. Well
nothing germinated and we had plenty of rain and I thought "What in the world is
going on? Did I just waste like $400 worth of seed to seed these several acres?" So then I started running broilers in small pens across the pasture just as an experiment.
I ran maybe... I guess it was about 15 the first time in just this little tiny pen.
And behind them, a couple months later, and there was just this trail. You could just see exactly where the chickens had been through in the pasture. And it
sprouted up with all the things that I had planted. And that was my answer. Like, the the problem was not the seed, the problem was not the weather, the problem was not any of that. The problem was that there's something in the ecology of the
existing soil that is not going to allow this stuff to germinate. And the action
of having chickens with laying down tons of manure on the soil surface was the
ecological change that needed to happen or in order to germinate all of this
stuff. So could you without buying any wheat, any clover or any of that sort of
thing revitalize a pasture just moving
chickens around that pasture and bring back all the grass, bring back all the
latent seed that's in the soil bank? I'm sure you could; I'm sure you could. For us
it was a matter of: we'd really like to try to grow a lot of the grain
that our chickens are wanting to eat, [rooster crow] that helps them create a lot of eggs,
that makes that rooster crow during every video that I make. [big rooster crow] There it is! [little rooster crow] There's the other rooster that crows during every video I make. [big rooster crow][laughter] [little rooster crow] He has "crow envy." So if you want to try
revitalizing a pasture using chickens and not planting anything, just try it! Just
go for it! See if it works! If you want to try growing your own grain that your
chickens will self harvest to help cut your feed bill you'll probably have to
invest in some seed at the beginning. One other strategy to consider in this is: if
you're throwing out scratch grains for your chickens, try to avoid corn. Corn
normally is not that digestible unless it's crushed and if you get crushed corn
in your scratch grains it's not viable seed. So shoot for non-GMO scratch grains that are whole seeds that you wouldn't mind re-seeding the pasture with. You know: barley and wheat and oats and millet and sorghum and all that sort of good stuff.
You're throwing that out for your chickens, you're gonna start seeing it
coming up in the pasture. And that's kind of a a cheap re-seeding possibility. Hey, thanks for watching! If you like this video, hit the like button down below
subscribe to the channel that helps me make more videos just like this one. And
remember: whatever you're doing on the homestead, whatever you're doing on your
farm, Just Try Something. Just Try Something.
