Planning
Rotations
Poultry Rotation

"The word of the day is rotation. Rotation of crops, rotation of tillage, rotation. The only place you can't use it is in marriage otherwise, it's a pretty good word"

Dick Thompson - speaking to Innovative Farmers of Ohio
January, 2004

Moving Poultry Around The Garden

This is really easy, not like designing a 9-fold vegetable rotation!

What you need is a poultry house with wheels so that the house and the hens can be moved easily from one garden block to the other.

You also need some way to contain the hens in the area that you want them to forage in. We use an electric mesh fence that not only keeps the birds in but keeps the foxes out.

Erecting the fence around an area of spent crop and weeds which are starting to flower.

One of our mobile poultry houses that takes 75 laying birds.

Nesting boxes have been built on both ends and are easily accessible from the outside of the house.

There are plenty of roosts inside the shed and the floor is made of weld mesh which allows the manure to drop through to the ground.

These sheds are moved every day to ensure an even spread of manure.

More details of moving poultry around the vegetable areas will be found in the section: Getting to Bare Earth - Poultry as a Tool