The surprising symbiosis of chicken / egg / and cobnut comes to light this weekend to celebrate the annual agroforestry open weekend, a nation-wide event to showcase many of the early adopters of this dual use farming system.
Following a couple of days on the shelling machines at fellow nut producers David and Tom, we wanted to shine a light on the use of chickens to graze beneath the cobnut trees. This method, a staple of backyard Kentish production for generations, has a host of benefits that, for the most part, are practically scalable.
Chickens, guinea fowl, turkeys, all have the habit of grubbing up tasty morsels from the pasture beneath the cobnuts. This combination of grazing and grubbing helps keep ground cover at reasonable lengths, meaning less need for mowing at harvest time. Turning grass into eggs rather than blanket spraying herbicide is both a sensible productive choice and, needless to say, much more fruitful ecologically.
The grubbing habit is also key for addressing one of the most prevalent pests. Eating them during the winter whilst the weevils hibernate in the soil, turkeys do a particularly good job of eating them up, preventing them harming the cobnut crop the following summer.
Intriguingly, guinea fowl roost within the tree tops, so this may provide a feasible option for us to replicate at our cobnut orchard. Because our two Sevenoaks sites are bordered by established woodland, using chickens there unattended would likely be a cruel death sentence, given the prevalence of foxes in the area. How to “scale” or bring this practice to bare without humans around near constantly, or fort knox style security fencing is a challenge. One which comes with the patch work of smaller sized plats (orchards) typical of the Kentish countryside. Small patches with proportionally longer perimeters means the economics of fox and deer proof fencing just doesn’t add up, the cost per kilo for that level of protection would be astronomical. There’ll be the sweet spot between parcel size and fencing economics, finding where these axis converge would be useful starting task for nascent professional nut agronomy.
Curiously, one of the key benefits of converting existing arable outfits into more dual use alley cropping systems, is that their comparative isolation from existing woodland habitat gives them the advantage of being insulated from squirrel and fox pests, making introducing fowl a little more feasible.
For now, we savor the Sunday egg delights as the hens brood contentedly.. If anyone in the Ivy Hatch area would like to be a dedicated chicken minder, please give us a call.