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Cattle to Chicken Ratio

Matt McSpadden

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I like the way Joel Salatin (and many others) have chickens follow cattle through rotational grazing. I have read many articles and watched many videos on this process and I feel I understand the concept and the benefits fairly well. The piece of information I am missing, is the ratio of chickens to cows. I'm sure there is some difference between hundreds of cows, and doing it on a much smaller scale, with say... two cows. Is there a rough ratio of chickens to cows? Has anyone done this, or have any links to some information?

Thanks.

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John C Daley

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Matt McSpadden

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Thanks John. That gives me a little bit of an idea... but its not very specific. Either 4 chickens to 1 cow, just based purely on overall numbers. Or 50 chickens to 3 cows based on per acre load. I'm not sure either of those is exact, but its a starting point.

Douglas Alpenstock

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posted 4 years ago

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When I saw the thread title, the image that came to my (admittedly weird) mind was:

John C Daley

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If you read one of his books he actually talks about it I think.
Otherwise ask him.

Matt McSpadden

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@Douglas - Haha!

@John - I'm guessing that is the Salad Bar Beef book? I have been meaning to get a few of his books, but had not had a chance.

Laurel Jones

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Matt McSpadden wrote:Thanks John. That gives me a little bit of an idea... but its not very specific. Either 4 chickens to 1 cow, just based purely on overall numbers. Or 50 chickens to 3 cows based on per acre load. I'm not sure either of those is exact, but its a starting point.

I may be mistaken, but I believe that Salatin also uses turkeys to do some of the same jobs as chickens do, so I'm not sure how they factor in.

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Andrew Mayflower

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posted 4 years ago

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You're just looking for an idea of how many chickens to effectively break up the cow poo and eat the parasite larvae, if I'm reading your post correctly.

Not sure that there's a definite number as it probably depends on how big each daily paddock is, how resistant your cows are to parasites, general parasite load for your land, quality of the forage for the chickens, types of chickens, and so on.

That said, I'd probably just take however many chickens you have (assuming we're talking 10's not 100's or 1000's) and start by running them all 3 days behind your cows. If that's obviously too many, cut it down by half. If it's obviously not enough, start working on buying/breeding more chickens. Over the space of several months to a year you'll dial in the number for your situation.

It's been a while since I've seen any Salatin videos, but I want to say he had around 20 cows he was rotating around. And it seemed like he had around 100 egg layers cleaning the pastures behind them. So, if my memory is correct that would imply 5:1. But I could be WAY off.

Matt McSpadden

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@Laurel - Thanks, I did not know that about the turkeys. I've heard of some people using ducks.

@Andrew - that was worded so much better than I put it :) I should have you write my posts for me. Yes that is what I was looking for, and that makes sense. The land I'm looking at, wouldn't be able to hold more than 3 or 4 cows, so we are not talking about an awful lot of chickens.

Andrew Mayflower

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Matt McSpadden wrote:@Laurel - Thanks, I did not know that about the turkeys. I've heard of some people using ducks.

@Andrew - that was worded so much better than I put it :) I should have you write my posts for me. Yes that is what I was looking for, and that makes sense. The land I'm looking at, wouldn't be able to hold more than 3 or 4 cows, so we are not talking about an awful lot of chickens.

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I’d probably start by running 20 chickens behind the cows, give or take. See how that works out and adjust as needed. Be interested to hear the results.

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