Here is our complete list of pros & cons when it comes to letting chickens free range. We’re not experts, so we always recommend asking the pros for the best advice. This post contains affiliate links, which may lead to a commission if purchased. This comes at no extra cost to you. Thanks!
Letting Chickens Free Range: Pros and Cons
If you’re thinking about letting chickens free range on your property, you’ve come to the right place! We’re here to break down the pros and cons of letting chickens free range on your property, whether it’s a small urban yard or acres of property. We’ve been free ranging chickens for years, and we’ve definitely noticed both pros and cons along the way. While we choose to free range our hens regularly, it may not be the right option for everyone.
Pros of Letting Chickens Free Range
- Use less layer feed
- Darker egg yolks & more nutritious eggs
- Happier, healthier chickens
- Less inter-flock drama
- Fewer Coop Cleanings
- Lower maintenance overall (dust baths, toenails, etc)
Cons of Letting Chickens Free Range
- Increased Predator Risk
- Professional Yard Ruiners
- Lost/Rogue Birds
- Egg Hiding
- Risk of poisoning?
Let’s break it down some more below!
Pros Of Letting Chickens Free Range
Let’s break down the reasons one should consider letting chickens free range
Letting Chickens Free Range Uses Less Layer Feed
Everyone loves to save money, right? Letting chickens free range saves quite a bit of dough in the form of reduced feed costs. For us, even more important that reduced feed costs is the fact that chickens consuming less feed means fewer trips to the feed store. The best part? Less lugging of giant bags of feed from store to home. When chickens free range, they can make up a larger portion of their diet with yard finds like bugs, grubs, and greens.
Darker Egg Yolks & More Nutritious Eggs
I’m all for a diet with a wide variety of nutrients: for both chickens and people! Remember — you are what you eat, and you are what you eat… eats. (I hope that made sense.) Free ranging & pasture-raised hens often produce darker egg yolks and eggs with a wider variety of nutrients than confined hens produce. Thanks to the wider variety in their diet, these happy chickens pass on the micronutrients to those that consume the eggs, too. Did I mention that free-range eggs typically score the highest in taste tests, too? Wins all around!
Happier, Healthier Chickens
As a general rule of thumb, letting chickens free range results in a healthier, happy flock. This is largely for two reasons.
- More square footage per hen. The more crammed that a flock of chickens is, the easier it is for disease to take hold and spread in the flock. This can include many conditions such as mites, bumble foot, avian influenza, salmonella, and more. By letting chickens free range, the waste is distributed in a bigger area, and contamination between chickens is less likely.
- Plenty of daily mental stimulation. One of the things that brings me the most joy in this world is watching our chickens be… chickens. They spend all day, every day, doing just what they were made to do. Pecking, scratching, exploring, and enjoying finding jewels in the dirt. This mental stimulation makes for happier hens all around. Confined flocks often have to invest in “boredom busting” toys, in an effort to offset the boredom that confined flocks can endure.
Less Inter-Flock Drama
Less inter-flock drama means less bullying between chickens. When chickens have the chance to free range, their little minds receive lots of stimulation, and boredom is rare, or even nonexistent. This is a huge pro to letting chickens free range, because boredom leads to more fighting between flock members and physical altercations. Physical altercations can quickly lead to infection, so obviously, giving everyone plenty of room to spread out is a huge contributor to happier, healthier hens, too.
Fewer Coop Cleanings
Who doesn’t appreciate a cleaner coop?! I’m often asked how often the coop should be cleaned out, and unfortunately, there is no strict answer. The coop cleaning schedule will be determined by the number of hens, the amount of square footage, the season, how much time they spend in the coop, and even breed. It’s important for any chicken keeper to learn to read the bedding in the coop to determine how often it should be cleaned. However, one thing is for sure: letting chickens free range means less poop in the coop, and therefore, fewer coop cleanings.
Lower Maintenance Overall
At the risk of sounding too vague, letting chickens free range is generally lower maintenance overall. By this, I mean that it eliminates many of the “chicken upkeep chores” that come with confined flocks. For example, since my chickens scratch to their hearts’ content all day long, I never have to trim their nails or beaks. In addition, I don’t need to worry about keeping a dust bath in their enclosure, since they find their own dust baths in dry dirt all around the barn. One of the major perks to letting chickens free range is that they have the access to many natural resources which keep them happy and healthy.
Cons Of Free Ranging Poultry
Now that we’ve gone over the perks of free ranging, let’s break down the reasons one might not consider letting chickens free range.
Letting Chickens Free Range Comes With Increased Predator Risk
And when I say increased predator risk, I mean greatly increased predator risk. Sure, if your coop isn’t up to par, confined flocks can be just as much at risk as free ranging flocks. (Here is the prefab coop that we’re currently using for the Silkies and Polishes.) However, we have found that free ranging chickens are much more susceptible to predator attacks. Namely, we have had more trouble with air predators than we did before. Roosters can be fantastic tool in deterring and combatting air predators such as hawks, however, they can only cover so much area. Free ranging hens tend to spread out more than a single rooster can protect, so a rooster’s presence likely isn’t a cure-all for the increased predator risk that comes with letting chickens free range.
Free Range Chickens Are Professional Yard Ruiners
It’s amazing how much destruction one meaty little bird can cause! Our free range chickens love to wreak havoc on our yard, no matter how big or small. Here are some examples of how free range hens might destroy your yard.
- Digging/dust bathing and leaving craters around the lawn (they especially like to do this around building foundations!)
- Overgrazing and killing the grass
- Leaving poop droppings everywhere you’re most likely to step
- Destroying the garden
Even though we love free ranging our laying hens, we don’t love the mess they create. We found that the chickens’ destructiveness was much worse on our old suburban lot; we hardly notice their effects on the acreage we now occupy. So if you’re dealing with a smaller area, this might be more of a concern.
Free Ranging Chickens Can Get Lost/Go Rogue
When we used to keep laying poultry on a suburban lot, this was almost a non-issue. With our fenced-in backyard, our chickens never went very far. However, now that our flock has access to so much more acreage, we’ve noticed that they can be harder to corral. Especially the new chicks: they like to take their sweet time coming in at night, which puts them at higher risk of predator attacks. We even had one of our Polish chicks get herself totally separated and lost, because she has a hard time seeing due to her big head of feathers. (We now keep her confined in our smaller, prefab coop setup.)
Though it hasn’t happened to us yet, we’ve heard plenty of stories of free ranging chickens disappearing for days at a time, only to re-appear days later. Long story short, letting chickens free range adds a layer of uncertainty when it comes to collecting everyone at the end of the day.
Egg Hiding
This is another we haven’t personally dealt with in our own flock. However, free ranging birds can spontaneously decide to hide their eggs in the brush, rather than laying in the nest box. This can create a very unwelcome game of egg hunting for chicken keepers, which we usually end up losing. Though it’s not very common in our experience, the possibility of losing eggs to hide-y hens may be enough to discourage some from free ranging their flock. You can always use dummy eggs to encourage hens to lay where they’re supposed to again.
Risk of Poisoning
Finally, free ranging chickens carries some risk of birds eating toxic plants or chemicals. Again, this is not something we have ever personally experienced. In my experience, chickens are pretty darn good at discerning what is safe and what isn’t safe to eat, as long as they are provided plenty of feed. However, some chicken owners have reported bird loss which they believe is due to toxic plant ingestion. In addition, those who have toxic chemicals/pest poison laying around the property should be even more concerned about bird loss due to poisoning. Confined flock owners likely don’t have to worry about this risk on the same level.
Should Chickens Be Allowed To Free Range?
In the end, there is no right or wrong answer as to whether chickens should free range or not! You, as the chicken keeper, must take all factors into consideration and make the call best for your flock and your property. Like many aspects of homesteading, this is largely a situation where the trial-and-error approach will yield the best long-term results.
On our previous property, we free ranged our hens regularly in the backyard with no problems, other than how they completely destroyed our garden and lawn with droppings. However, on our current property, we have lost a couple birds to air predators. We have since added a couple roosters to our flock in hopes that this deters the rare air predator attacks, however, we will certainly revisit their free ranging schedule if the roos don’t help.
On our next property, we will likely use a hybrid free range/chicken tractor approach, utilizing electric poultry netting to keep the fiercest ground predators away, and roosters to deter air predators. We plan to move the tractor & poultry netting every few days, to keep the birds from overgrazing any one specific area. As always, I’m sure there will be many lessons to learn with this approach, as well!