If you’ve ever passed by the farm between the months of May and November there’s a good chance you’ve seen a wily gang of chickens partying hard on some patch of our hilly, rocky pastures. Surrounded by lightweight electric netting to keep them from ransacking the entire place, the birds will scratch, peck, and claw into the earth, searching for bugs to eat, grass, clover, forbs, seed heads, lost pieces of grain, and anything else they can fit into their beak (once I’m pretty sure they ate a salamander). After a day of tiny dinosaur-ing, the chickens hop back into their mobile coop for bed and I move them to a new patch of pasture, re-set their fence, and wish them all a good night and thank you for the eggs. And the next morning, they are released onto fresh pasture to repeat the process.
Their mobile chicken coop – a white box on wheels – is known as the Chick Shaw. Think of it like a cruise ship for hens. It has all the accommodations: roosts for sleeping, nest boxes for laying eggs, a supplement buffet (oyster shells and grit, anyone?), fresh water and feed, and by all means just ask your concierge where the next port excursion is, he’ll be happy to tell you (it’s me, Farmer Rich, and the next port excursion is right over there, in the elderberry patch, where you can de-weed and fertilize the bushes for next summer! And if you’re lucky, you’ll find some low-hanging fruit I missed). The chickens live a luxurious life on the open sea that is Something Wild Farm.
When I got into farming, I immediately knew I wanted to do things the best possible way. Even if it takes more work to make the animals happy. A happy chicken is going to lay a superior egg. Happiness for farm critters means two things: excellent nutrition and excellent living conditions. Both of those can be achieved with a method of livestock management known as Intensive Pasture-Raised Intensive Grazing. This means moving animals around to fresh pasture daily, or as much as necessary. This is actually a land-management practice designed to create the healthiest land possible; it’s a beautiful inter-dependent mutual benefit operation for both land and animal.
The chickens (or sheep, or any livestock) get fresh pasture. Yummy goodies! And they tear it up a bit, poop all over it, lay it to waste. Or so you think. As long as they are removed from that patch before too long, and it is given time to rest and recuperate, it will come back stronger. There’s a lot of nuance to this and every spot is different. Usually it’s a day or two. If I stick the chickens – who are tiny gardeners – in a messy, weedy overgrown area, I might let them spend 3-5 days on a spot and really tear it apart. If I leave them on a spot for too long, it will start to look like a Wal-Mart parking lot. I call this “moonscaping” and I avoid it at all costs. Look in any permanent chicken run or barn yard and you will see a moonscape. A sterile environment where nothing grows. When the land has a chance to regenerate, it comes back beautifully. Usually the chickens stir up seeds and we see clover and grass make a comeback. I always take note in November at how green my fields look compared to the brown fields which are only mowed once a year and have minimal animal impact on them. It’s a delight to see so much green this time of year.
Nature is extremely resilient and a regenerative farm mimics nature. Resilience means to bounce back stronger after adversity. Regenerative farming means to improve the land through farming practices, rather than strip-mining it and relying on outside inputs to keep it from becoming dead and sterile (like most major farming operations in America).
Intensive grazing is actually mimicking nature. In nature, there is predator and prey. The predators (wolves, let’s say) will circle the prey (buffalo!) and pick off the stragglers for dinner. The buffalo will herd closely together, to stay as safe as possible. And they graze a patch of land down and then move on – again, to stay safe. If they linger too long, the predators will start making moves. The buffalo then move on to greener pastures (literally) and not return to it for a while. The land, well-fertilized and no longer under pressure from the buffalo, will grow back strong and resilient, ready for next time. We mimic this system by keeping our herds and flocks inside electric netting (the predator) and moving them regularly to keep them from over-stressing the land. When done correctly, it rejuvenates old farm fields into lush, rich pastures in a matter of years with minimal outside input.
It's extremely important to me as a farmer that my chickens are mobile as much as possible. A stationary chicken coop is perfectly acceptable for a backyard operation, but I think large-scale egg farms sticking thousands of birds into a barn and pretending they have “outdoor access” because there’s a concrete patio in one corner that may or may not be used is grotesque. Nutrition advocate Robb Wolf once joked on a podcast, “So the hens can sneak out and have a smoke.” When you see “free range” on a package of eggs in the grocery store, you should assume this is what they mean. None of those terms are regulated. Side rant: “Vegetarian fed” on a package of eggs gets a major BLECH from me. If you ever see a recycled egg carton in our stand that has “vegetarian fed” on it, please admire how I cross it out with a sharpie. Birds are omnivores and should be eating bugs and animal proteins as well as pasture foods and grain. Birds will even eat their own eggs if they aren’t getting enough protein.
On the backyard scale, free range can be fine for most people but it is not for me. Free range birds can definitely do some good work around the house, eating ticks and bugs, keeping weeds down, etc. But they can also poop all over your front steps and on your car and lay eggs wherever they want. And I will tell you, no one wants to crack (and smell) an egg they find in the corner of the barn a year after it was laid. Unless you’re Templeton the Rat, of course. Free range birds are also the most likely to get picked off by predators (or cars). They also can get lazy and stay in their comfort zone, eventually over-grazing the zone around their permanent coop, and ignoring other sections of the property entirely.
No, my birds have to be mobile. They need to be out in the sun, digging dust baths in the fields, and picking fat, juicy bugs off the branches like grapes from a vine. They need to be producing hard-shelled eggs with thick, orange yolks and higher nutrient profiles than anything a grocery store could ever produce. When I crack the egg, I want to swoon at how beautiful it looks and shudder at how delicious it tastes. And know it’s making me stronger and healthier. I want to know my birds are in the pastures writing me love poems and I am in my kitchen reading them aloud ‘round the breakfast table.
There are multiple designs for mobile chicken coops. Larger scale regenerative agriculture farms often use something similar to Joel Salatin’s Eggmobile. Basically a mobile home for chickens you can pull with a tractor. Sometimes it’s a greenhouse-style design. Many large, established farms have less predator pressure and might even have Livestock Guardian Dogs, so the birds don’t always need to be fenced in. Or if you have thousands of birds, it doesn’t matter so much when you lose a few. Who’s counting? Birds die all the time (I’ve lost a few this year). Dinosaurs eat and dinosaurs get eaten, unfortunately.
These options are hard to scale-down to the homesteader/small farm operation. This is where Justin Rhodes found his niche. He took Joel Salatin’s practices and scaled them down to designs which might work for a backyard farmer. He designed the Chick Shaw – a fun spin on the rickshaw, a human-powered cart that originated in Japan – for just this purpose. A 6’x6’ box with roosts, on two solid bicycle tires, with a handle and a pop-top. Add some built-in nest boxes and you have yourself a mobile egg production facility. And by design, there is minimal cleaning required – compared to a permanent coop – the birds spend all day outside pooping in the pasture, and at night, while roosting, their droppings fall through a chicken wire floor right onto the ground. Just move them and leave the mess behind for nature to claim it back. I change the hay in the nest boxes a few times a month and pressure wash the Shaw at the end of each season; that’s about all the cleaning I need to do.
I bought Justin’s book Permaculture Chickens in 2021 and built the Shaw in October of that year. In May of 2022, I put it out in the field with our five existing chickens. I was naïve and did not electrify the netting. A bear attacked it within weeks and we lost a few birds. Lesson learned. Since lighting up that netting (7.0 volts, anyone?) we’ve yet to have another attack. I test it every night before bed to confirm it’s a hot, zingy fence. Now our 45 hens cozy right up in there all summer long, safe and sound.
Our birds do live in the permanent barn coop from first snow (this year it was the week of Thanksgiving) until the pastures are ready to handle livestock (usually late May). Sometimes the birds go out in April and spend time on the gardens tilling and weeding for me before the pastures are fair game. The Shaw gives us a lot of flexibility as to how we can utilize the chickens to perform multiple functions on the farm. They do much more than lay eggs. I can park them near the compost piles and let them turn that. I can put them on the edge of the woods where I am clearing land and let them clear back the brambles and brush that wants to take over after cutting trees down. I can stick them in weird rocky, hilly spots I can’t mow or areas I want to apply a chicken fertilizer plan to. If I feel like I’ve seen too many ticks on me after working in a certain area, I let the birds live there for a few days. It’s a workout, but if I can pull the Shaw somewhere, I can put the chickens there. I don’t think I need a gym membership with some of the places I’ve dragged that thing. This farm is a gym.
The Shaw is a cruise ship, but it is also a pirate ship. It needs a tiny skull & crossbones flag. Brownie, our matriarch Buff Orpington hen, needs a pirate cap and possibly a longbeard. The pastures are the briny seven seas, and plunder is afoot! But we won’t stay too long, because we know we have to come back someday for more loot. So we’ll venture off onto our great adventures, and come back when least expected. Ahoy, Brownie and my other feathery rapscallions, let us set sail in the Shaw, while the suns sets behind the great white pines to the west.
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