Chickens can help achieve a permaculture smallholding, but it’s principles can be applied by backyard chicken keepers too. Fiona & Hugh Osborne guide you through how to make this happen.
Permaculture is a word that is used in smallholding a lot, but we rarely see it described for new-comers. To some it can seem a little overwhelming as a way of growing your own food and raising animals, but it’s actually very simple and the principles can be applied on a small-scale too. You don’t need acres and acres to apply the philosophy.
At its core, permaculture is inspired by nature, in part making use of old farming principles. In a traditional mixed farming model, a farmer would keep a number of animals which would provide protein for the farmer, but also fertiliser for the land. The fertiliser would be used to enrich the soil to grow crops which would nourish both the farmer and the animals.
You could think of it as a natural loop where part of what you do to support a natural cycle, provides support to another part of the natural cycle and so on. If we break it down to its simplest level, permaculture is about working with nature, not against it. If you think of it that way instead of reading convoluted and complex definitions of large-scale permaculture projects, it makes it easier to see how chickens will support a natural cycle in your back garden, allotment or smallholding.
In this article we’ll try and show ways that chickens can be an integral part of delivering a permaculture environment whether you keep a hen in your back garden, or if you have a 15-acre smallholding.
PEST CONTROL
It surprises many people but chickens are omnivores and do love a bit of protein. Most chicken keepers have seen their little darlings digging for worms, but they love many forms of protein from tiny insects to larger prey like frogs and even the odd mouse. We can’t tell you how many times we have chased a chicken who has caught a frog (there’s a large spawning pond on a neighbouring property) and the frog is still alive, screaming. We didn’t know that frogs would scream, until we kept chickens…, anyway, we digress from the point.
Chickens are very effective pest managers enjoying insects, slugs and weeds. Let’s start with the insect population. Tiny flying insects are a favourite of the chickens and provide hours of entertainment for them too as they jump and leap into the air to catch the gnat, fly or even butterfly as they fly by. We do feel sorry for the butterflies as they are beautiful, but their caterpillar offspring aren’t our favourites as they threaten our cabbages and cauliflower crops. Slugs are bit of a favourite of our chickens and I have seen Puffin, one of our breeding Orpington hens, steal a snail from a thrush after the thrush had done all of the hard work in smashing the snail’s shell.
This article extract was taken from the March 2025 edition of The Country Smallholder. To read the article in full, you can buy the issue here.
