Free-range folly

7 hard lessons for raising backyard chickens.

Now that I’ve come clean on my decision to give away our flock, I’ll share with you what I’ve learned about trying to free-range and otherwise humanely raise chickens. This will help you wannabe backyard chicken-keepers avoid mistakes and build on my hard lessons learned.

1. Avoid mobile coops.

A lot of homesteaders these days are bringing in much-needed side income by selling their lifestyle to others online. There’s nothing wrong with that; more power to them; but the vast majority of their audiences simply cannot replicate their model.

I got sucked into Justin Rhodes’ chickshaw design when I was looking for a mobile coop I wouldn’t have to bend over to move and literally googled “mobile coop with high center of gravity” and got his.

It turned out to be a terrible option. First, the egg door in back was totally open to predators. Second, the ‘shaw was too wide for my garden paths. Third, even after I covered over the retarded egg door, there was no way to keep the chickens safe when they weren’t locked inside the chickshaw.

Now maybe the chickshaw works fine for farmers temporarily moving their flock to another field for fresh forage, but even so, the farmer would have to be there, with dogs and roosters at work, to keep aerial predators from feasting on the flock. I, on the other hand, have neither dogs nor roosters and was inside working at a computer when hawks took out three of my hens in broad daylight.

Me, pulling the chickshaw like a rickshaw.

Unfortunately, mobile coops of any kind just aren’t going to work for the average backyard chicken-keeper. If there’s no run integrated into the design, as is true for the chickshaw, then you have to place it inside some kind of fencing, a problem I’ll get to in a moment. And the ones that do have a run integrated aren’t secure on the bottom—they can’t be, as they’re meant for you to pick up and move—so predators can easily tunnel under them at night.

I’m not pooh-poohing mobile coops for farmers or rural homesteaders. If you’ve got dogs and roosters and are outside working near your flock, and you’re securing them at night or moving them to a more secure coop at night, then yay for mobile coops. Remember, I wrote a book about Wilcox Farms, with its ingenious, large-scale system.

I’m also a fan of Joel Salatin, who basically wrote the book on the subject (a commission link¹).

What I am saying is that mobile coops are impractical for the majority of backyard chicken-keepers.

2. Forget electric fencing.

When they’re young, chickens can wriggle right through the tighter weave at the bottom of the fence. I waited to let them out into the electric-fenced run until they were the age recommended by the fence manufacturer, and they still wriggled out. When they’re full grown, they just glide right over the top of the fence. I bought the tallest height available; it didn’t matter.

In videos put out by farmers and homesteaders, you’ll see plenty of electric fences with chickens inside them.

But these are much, much larger grazing areas than you can find in the average backyard, and the flock is also being moved frequently, so there’s less incentive for chickens to jump the fence because they’ve got plenty of fresh forage inside it.

Chickens can completely clear a crop waaay faster than you think. My 1,000-square-foot runs were taken down to dirt within a month, and since my overall space (just shy of a quarter-acre) was relatively small, no area had enough recovery time for the rotation-grazing to work.

The solar energizer powering the electric fences shorted out in the first big electric storm, so we were left without protection for the hens until that was fixed under warranty. A farmer would likely have backup on hand, but backyard chicken keepers don’t have that luxury.

It’s also a lot of work to frequently move a mobile coop and electric fences, and if you’re not doing this for an income, it’s probably not worth the trouble for a small flock of laying hens.

There’s no advantage to using electric fences with a backyard chicken flock, and most people will find them unattractive in the home landscape as well.

3. Build a secure coop and covered run.

Your design should keep out a wide range of predators, from aerial to tunneling. For ventilation, include some mesh sections, but only 1/4-inch hardware cloth, securely fastened, will be enough to keep out smaller predators.

You’ll also need to line the outside of the run itself with a hardware-cloth border dug 4-6 inches into the ground, to keep out those tunnelers.

Don’t gloss over this step, or you’ll lose a lot of chickens.

If you’re not in a rural area, it’s likely you’ll run up against bans on roosters in the city limits. Our town limited the number of chickens we could keep to six, no males.

Roosters provide key protection for hens—they actually grow fighting spurs on their legs for this purpose—and hens are safer in larger numbers. So those laws put the backyard chicken keeper at a distinct disadvantage, and you have to work with that.

As a reader recently emailed me about, if you have a tiny flock of three chickens that you let out for a short forage run while you’re out there working in your garden, that’s great for you! But you better not let them out of a secure run unsupervised, especially if you only have three.

When I had eight chickens, it would have been a pain to let them out, watch over all of them in a big backyard with lots of hiding places, and then go find eggs they’d inevitably laid outside the coop and nesting box.

Chickens roost at night, slipping into a fugue state to sleep. In this condition, they are even more vulnerable to predators. So unless you plan to install an automatic coop door, you’ll need to close the coop at sundown and open it at sunup, every day.

Two hens inside the cage, on top of hay next to the chickshaw.

4. Mimic natural conditions as much as you can.

Since free-ranging in a backyard isn’t a practical option, your chickens won’t benefit from always having fresh greens, as well as the activity of scratching and pecking, both of which are key to hen health.

That’s a substantial, disappointing difference when it comes to backyard chicken-keeping and my number-one reason for deciding to give away the hens. In my experience, pasture-raised chickens are healthiest and produce the best eggs.

You can try to grow edible plants inside the run, but your run will be a denuded poopscape in short order, trust me. Most backyard chicken-keepers, if they think about their chickens at all beyond standard feed, choose to gather greens from elsewhere and toss them in the run, a secondary solution.

One idea I had: Rotate potted forage in and out of the runs. Chickens have no problem pecking and scratching in a pot, and it might be worth the trouble to bring them fresh, growing greens. Maybe you could even devise a system of wheeled pots. If I ever raise chickens again, that’s what I’ll try to do.

5. Commit to your bird’s health.

The chicken species originated in the jungle, where there is cover for protection and shade, branches for roosting, and juicy greens and biodiverse earth to scratch and peck for food.

Besides covering the egg door, the other amendment I made to the chickshaw was to take two tree branches and nail them across the top for additional roosts. The chickens loved those. I also succeeded in positioning their run where they had shade and protection, the best of which was a dense grove of thorny native plum trees.

At the end of my chicken-keeping adventure, when I had to throw in the towel on free ranging, I added a deep bed of dried leaves to both the caged run and inside the chickshaw, and it made a huge difference. The hens found lingering bits of food on the leaves and enjoyed fluffing around in the crinkly, dry bed, which also soaked up and distributed their droppings.

I raked out the inside of the chickshaw and added a fresh bed every two weeks. For the run, as recommended by Harvey Ussery in The Small-Scale Poultry Flock (commission link), I left the leaves, adding fresh layers on top as the bottom layer breaks down. This is a “deep-litter” system, and it’s based on research showing that scratching and pecking in a decomposing medium boosts bird health.

That system mimics a forest floor, so it’s not surprising it works.

Another thing to try is active compost in the chicken run. I placed my compost drums in the run, and the chickens pecked and scratched all around them, gobbling up black-soldier fly larvae and other critters, especially after a rain.

In my two years of chicken-keeping, I never had a sick chicken despite choosing not to have them vaccinated (on Ussery’s recommendation). I raised them in the healthiest manner I could, feeding them only soy-free feed, healthy kitchen scraps, and fresh forage from the backyard, which included wild volunteers chickens love like henbit dead nettle and clover, as well as other natives and comfrey.

For pasty butt, I cleaned them manually and treated with garlic and apple-cider vinegar. I also added crushed garlic to their water occasionally as a preventative measure.

That said, I located a vet nearby who would treat chickens in case something did happen and bought a dog cage for transport.

Want more honest advice like this? Access 200+ posts on gardening and backyard chicken-keeping as a paid member.

6. Know your limits.

Consider this: What will you do if a hen gets sick? Treat her yourself? Take her to a vet? Or cull her? What if one of your chicks turns out to be a rooster instead of a hen (there’s always a good chance this happens, as chicks are notoriously hard to sex), and your town forbids them? Will you rehome, or harvest?

I ambitiously purchased basic butchering equipment—nothing too crazy, just a pair of poultry scissors, knives, and a restraining cone. My husband and I even attended a live demonstration given by none other than Joel Salatin.

However, we didn’t harvest any chickens ourselves. I’m a tremendous goob for animals, so that was part of it. But I might have surmounted my emotional obstacle if we could justify setting up a sanitary slaughtering-and-butchering station outside, away from the neighbors’ view, for just that one time one of our hens turned out to be a rooster. We gave him to a farm instead.

Losing 7 out of 15 chickens to predators didn’t net me any edible ones, as the mink that took four of them left little behind, and it’s not a good idea to eat even hawk-killed hens, due to the possibility of disease transmission.

I did harvest their feet for stock, however, since the kill in all three cases was a clean blow to the neck. Yeah, so I did at least that much: cut off their feet, degloved them in a quick, hot-water bath, removing the toenails, and then cooked them in a crockpot. Chicken feet give the stock a more gelatinous consistency, a wonderful supplement for your own joint health.

7. Assess your scope.

Do you really know how much work and expense it is to raise chickens? Granted, my attempt to free range made a small backyard flock far more of a chore than it would have been if I’d just done what everyone else does and not worried about the health of the bird so much. But that’s me… I have a big, fuzzy heart for animals. I also wanted the healthiest eggs possible.

One of the hens I’ve rehomed.

Another thing I didn’t realize is that when the temperatures dip below freezing, as they can here for weeks and months at a time, you have to accommodate the flock.

Because we shut off our outdoor faucet to keep the pipe from bursting (it did one winter), I had no easy access to water. When the hens’ water tube froze, I had to replace it with fresh water from the kitchen in a black rubber bowl and then replace that each time it froze.

We also winterized the chickshaw with bales of hay stacked up and placed next to it, to block the elements. Chickens are OK with cold temperatures, especially our winter-hardy barred Plymouth rocks, but they can get frostbite and freeze when they’re wet and cold.

A woman I know told me a sad tale of feetless chickens from her youth when her family’s flock suffered frostbite one particularly cold winter.

A heated waterer, just like an automatic coop door, would have added to the cost, and we were already at $5,000 by this point.

I took up chicken keeping mainly for a steady supply of healthy eggs, adhering to a clean diet to minimize autoimmune symptoms.

But I was also growing a good portion of our fruit and vegetables, sprouting and grinding grain, baking with sourdough, culturing dairy and kefir water, growing herbs to use for herbal medicine, washing dishes by hand, filtering tap water, and preserving food through canning, fermentation, and dehydrating.

I did all that while also volunteering as a citizen scientist, conducting bee surveys in my garden. AND I was working as a story consultant on app games (that biz is called Brunette, too), managing a full-time staff of five, and writing posts at least once a week for this Substack.

Even with my husband’s awesome help with all of this, it was too much. I loved the chickens, and they seemed to thrill to their lady farmer and her recognizable blue bowl of kitchen scraps. But we had to part for the better health of us both.

So my backyard flock gave me the best lesson of all: I learned how to pace. My autoimmune condition was exacerbated by a propensity to pile on the responsibilities, biting off way more than I could chew and running myself ragged trying to get through long to-do lists every day.

This behavior was conditioned into me at a very young age. It’s taken me more than a year to retrain myself to pace and slow down—and I’m still consciously practicing this new skill.

Rather than trying to accomplish everything, I’m now looking at what makes most sense, given my situation. Will I continue to sprout and grind grains? Can I really give up the magic of sourdough? What about all those herbal teas I’ve learned to use?

Since it’s hard to find jams made without sugar, maybe that’s something I outta keep firmly in my wheelhouse…

I hope you’ll take this pacing note to heart and do the same. Maybe a backyard flock fits into life for you, in a cozy way that’s just right. Or perhaps it’s better to instead support a local farmer who’s already got this one licked! 😉

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