Figure 4.8. One major hazard to electrical fence chargers is lightning strikes. A lightning arrester wired into your fence system will take the surge of power that lightning sends through fence wires to earth before they reach — and fry — your charger.
(Redrawn from David Pratt, “Grounding Electric Fences,” Livestock and Range Report #914, Fall 1991.)
Most modern chargers are designed to allow a pulsed flow of energy. Like a reservoir, an internal capacitor stores electrons until it’s full; then the capacitor spills out what it has stored as a pulse of electricity. A short, intense pulse is better than a long, less intense pulse. Avoid the cheapest chargers; they run a continuous charge or have long pulse times. Either can injure an animal caught in the wires, or start grass fires.
Voltage. Ideally, voltage on your wires should run between 4,000 and 5,000. Voltage is the electrical pressure that must be applied to cause electrons to flow. Amperage is a measure of the current flow through a conductor (wire) of known resistance.
volts x amps = watts, or the power used
Voltage can be checked with a voltmeter.
Joules. When shopping for a charger, a more important measure to look for than volts is joules. A joule is the effective power the unit supplies, or a unit of energy delivered at a specific point in time (watts per second). As you increase the joules, you increase the “jolt” of the fence. How many joules you need depends on your total length of wire. Table 4.2 shows recommended joule ratings for different lengths of wire. (Remember that if you are running multiple strands, you must multiply the length of fence by the number of strands to get the length of wire.) A good way to comparison-shop for chargers is to calculate the cost per joule.
Table 4.2
JOULES
Minimum Recommended Joule Rating
Miles of Electrical Fence Wire on the System
1
6
2
12
3
18
4
24
Impedance. Impedance refers to the internal resistance in the charger. Low-impedance chargers don’t leak as much energy as high-impedance models. The impedance is related to the duration of the pulse and the voltage.
Chargers come ready to plug into a 110-volt AC service, or in battery style. (Note: Voltage and frequency of incoming electric supply vary from country to country, but chargers are available to meet the needs of international users.) Some battery chargers are available in solar models. In our experience, battery chargers worked well for small areas, but weren’t adequate for the miles of wire that ran around our farm. However, some of the newer battery-operated chargers are supposed to be quite a bit more powerful.
Grounding. Chargers must be well grounded. When the ground is wet, even a poorly grounded charger will deliver a good jolt, but if the ground is very dry or frozen a poorly grounded charger is like no charger at all. We learned this lesson the hard way one winter, when our pigs kept walking right through the wire to go and help themselves to our haystacks. Unfortunately, every time the pigs took the wire down, the sheep joined them. Self-serve feeding became the order of the day. Drive at least three 8-foot-long (2.4 m) ground rods, spaced 10 feet (3.1 m) apart (Figure 4.9).
Tautness
Wire for electric fence doesn’t need to be run real tightly. In fact, leaving the wire a little bit slack is better. This slackness may not look quite as spiffy as people are used to, but if an animal runs into the fence the wire will act like a rubber band if it isn’t too tight. An animal that runs into a very tight wire either breaks the wire or pops it off the insulators.
Posts
Fence posts act as the skeleton for your fencing system. They provide the structural integrity that keeps everything in place. For permanent fences, a little preliminary planning can save a lot of time and effort down the line. (See chapter 14.)
Figure 4.9. Electric fencing works by sending a pulse of electrons down the wire. Those electrons must somehow return to the negative side of the charger to complete a circuit for a fence to deliver a jolt. (A.) A single hot wire works well in areas where there is normally some natural moisture in the soil; the charge can simply pass through an animal’s body and go to ground, returning to the negative side of the charger through the ground rods. (B.) A hot wire (top) and a ground wire (bottom) complete the circuit. This is often needed in areas with extremely dry soils or areas where soils freeze solid and deep.
(Redrawn from David Pratt, “Grounding Electric Fences,” Livestock and Range Report #914, Fall 1991.)
Corner posts. Corner posts do most of the work, so they should be strong, well-buried, wooden posts. For short runs of fence — say, less than ¼ mile (0.4 km) — a single corner post will probably be sufficient. Longer runs require the use of braced corner posts (Figure 4.10).
T-posts. Between corner posts on exterior or property-line fences, we exclusively use metal T-posts with good plastic insulators. These T-posts should be well driven so that the bottom plate is completely buried by an inch or so (2.5 cm) of soil. Between corner posts use metal T-posts, placed about 60 to 75 feet (18.3 to 22.9 m) apart. Leaving a fairly good space between the posts helps the rubber-band effect.
T-posts can also serve as corner posts for small, or temporary, enclosures. If you plan to take the T-post out again in the near future, leave about ½ inch (1.3 cm) of the top plate exposed above the soil.
Fiber posts. Fiber posts are a real boon for livestock farmers. They are made from fiberglass and are designed to be either “stepped in” or easily driven. The step-in style has a little footpad attached at the bottom for you to push down with your foot. The convenience of step-in posts is worth the extra expense. Fiber posts are ideal for temporary fencing. We also use them on interior permanent fences in place of two-thirds of the T-posts: Alternate one T-post with two fiber posts between corner posts.
Shorts
A regular problem with electric fencing is that it can short out. In a short, the flow of electrons is lost to the ground, meaning that the fence has no jolt at all. Shorts can either be a dead short (the wire carries no jolt) or a minor short (the wire still carries a jolt, but it is not as strong as usual).
The most common cause of dead shorts is a charged wire touching an old woven-wire or barbed-wire fence, or touching a metal T-post. The hardest short we ever had to find was one that occurred where a plastic insulator had split, so the charge was being lost to the T-post through the insulator.
When you’re trying to secure an old metal fence with electric wire, run a new fence on the inside of it, leaving about 3 feet (91 cm) between. Simply offsetting an electric wire onto an existing fence is a sure way to spend half your free time looking for shorts. In this case, the new electric fence can be run on fiber posts, with T-post corners.
Figure 4.10. Corner posts are important for sturdy fence construction, especially on permanent fences. These are the most common styles of corner bracing. (A.) T-post.
Minor shorts are most often the result of too much vegetation growing up around the fence. Keep an eye out for vegetation that looks “burned” from touching a wire.
Finding shorts can be a real challenge. One trick is to walk along the fence with a transistor radio tuned between stations. When you near the short, the radio will begin clicking as the pulses arc across the metal to ground.
Purchase a fence tester. This doesn’t have to be expensive or fancy; a tester that lights a bulb when one end is pushed into the soil and the other touches the wire will work, although a voltmeter works well also.
Finding a short requires a process of elimination, and designing your fencing system so that you can “drop” one portion of the fence at a time facilitates the process. This is accomplished by setting up branches. Drop one branch at a time to isolate which branch has the short on it. Then keep working down the branches, isolating sections of line until you find the short. Branches can be set up using insulated handles; also, some fencing manufacturers now offer a
style of disconnect that acts like a switch for just this purpose.
How to Run a Straight Fence
Most beginning farmers start building a fence by placing their first corner post, walking out so many feet to place their second post, then connecting the wire to it, then to the third post. When the fence is done, the posts zig and zag along the field, and beginners can’t understand why they didn’t get a nice straight fence. Our first couple of fences were done like this; then we learned how to run a straight fence. First, place the corner posts at both ends of the run; second, run one wire and attach it between the corners (don’t make it supertight; a little slack is okay). Now the wire will act as your guide for installing the T-posts in a nice straight line. Drive all the T-posts directly under the wire, then walk back down the line attaching the wire to the T-posts with plastic insulators. Attach any additional wires to the corners, and then connect them to the T-posts.
Multispecies Grazing
In nature, succession continually moves environments toward complexity. The industrial agriculture model has moved farmers away from complexity and toward specialization, but that move hasn’t helped either the farmers or the land. Small-scale farmers can reap tremendous benefits by moving toward complexity in their own operations.
One excellent method of moving a farm toward complexity is multispecies grazing. Consider these benefits:
1. The fact that different species prefer different plants can be used to your advantage. Grazing multiple species can actually increase the carrying capacity of your land. For example, sheep prefer forbs, goats prefer browse, and cattle prefer grasses, so they complement each other on pasture. When running complementary species on diverse pastures, you can almost double the total stocking rate of your land. If you ran ten cows before, for instance, you can now run ten cows and thirty or forty sheep!
2. By diversifying the species you run, you can effectively buffer your bank account. Different species’ markets run in different cycles. Typically, when the cattle market is strong and prices are good, the sheep market isn’t doing as well; when the sheep market is strong, cattle prices are down. For a small farmer, adding grazed poultry can be an excellent move, and pastured poultry is easily direct-marketed for top prices.
3. Disease and parasites are often reduced where multispecies grazing is taking place. The parasites that affect one species don’t usually affect another. Reducing parasites, flies, ticks, and mosquitoes can be accomplished by poultry (or fowl) following herds. In fact, after poultry roamed around our farm in Minnesota for a few years, the ticks virtually disappeared from our place. (If our dogs ran across the neighbor’s fields, though, they’d come home full of ticks.) Poultry break up manure piles and eat the larvae of many of these pests.
4. Meat production per species is higher where species graze together. University studies have shown that meat production per acre (hectare) can be increased by as much as 125 percent, due to the increased carrying capacity of the land and increased individual animal performance.
There are a few different strategies you can employ for multispecies grazing: mob grazing, leader/follower grazing, and alternate grazing. In mob grazing, all the animals are run as one group. In leader/follower grazing, one herd is run through a paddock first, than a second herd runs through the same paddock immediately after. Alternate grazing is a variation of leader/follower, with one type of animal run during one period over a group of paddocks, then some other type run at a later period. Another alternate-grazing scheme that some stocker operators are experimenting with is running stocker cattle one year, then stocker sheep the following year. Stocker operators purchase animals in spring (after they’re weaned) and graze them for the summer forage months, then they sell the animals in fall.
As we added different species to our mix in Minnesota, we initially ran them in an alternate-grazing system: one portion of the farm dedicated to horses, one portion to sheep, one portion to cattle. Then we moved into a leader/follower system. In the end, though, we ran a mob system most of the year. Managing one large herd instead of multiple herds was easy. These mixed groups are sometimes called “flerds” (a cross between a flock and a herd).
After we went to mob grazing, we learned to keep the equines out of the big herd when calves and lambs first started being born. Our young mules would try to steal newborn calves or lambs! They didn’t seem to want to hurt the babies, they just wanted to play Mom, but it was always quite a traumatic experience for the first couple of calves or lambs, as well as for their mothers. Once the bulk of the babies were born, we’d reintroduce the equines to the mob; by then, the mules seemed to have lost interest.
When you run a mob, remember that the animals must be familiar with each other before they begin having their babies. While we were still running leader/follower, we went to check on the cows one afternoon. Orphaned bottle lambs will follow you anywhere, and Junior was no exception; he followed us right out to the paddock where the cows were. At that time, the cows weren’t used to sheep, so they perceived Junior — all 10 pounds (4.5 kg) of him — as a big threat to their calves and chased him out of the paddock. If he hadn’t been able to run under the fence, I think they would have killed him. Once the cattle are used to the sheep, their maternal instincts help protect the lambs as well as their own calves from intruders. Our dogs always watch their backs in the paddocks when the babies are little.
FARMER PROFILE
David and Leianne Wright
“We’ve always grazed our dairy cattle. My dad always grazed his before me,” David tells me. “But about a decade ago, we began learning how to intensify our grazing.”
The Wrights own a 200-acre farm in Alabama and rent an additional 450 acres from his dad. “We do the milking here on our farm, and use Dad’s farm for raising our young stock.”
Over the years, David has dedicated a great deal of time to developing his grazing system. He has traveled to New Zealand, Ireland, and Africa to study grazing in those countries. “I’ve learned things in each place that, even if they didn’t apply directly to my operation, could be tweaked to work here.”
The Wrights have fenced the entire perimeter of their farm with permanent electric fence. They’ve also built internal roads and lanes, as well as bridges over the creeks, which are fenced off. The water system is made up primarily of garden hoses now — though David feels that a permanent water system will be the next improvement he’ll make to his grazing system. “We got a heck of a deal on the hoses. I went into a Wal-Mart near here at the end of the season, when they were trying to make room for the Christmas stuff. The manager really wanted to get rid of what he had left — so I bought the whole lot, by the foot.”
All subdivisions are created using polywire, a plastic wire that contains interwoven strands of conducting wire. “I’ve designed a cart that pulls behind a four-wheeler with all my fencing supplies on it. It carries 5 miles of polywire, posts, insulators; you name it and it’s on the cart. There’s a reel on it that can let polywire be drawn off, or returned to the reel quickly, by one person. With this system, I can run a mile of interior fence in about an hour — though usually it takes about 15 minutes after each milking to move the fences.”
Because the Wrights are trying to produce milk with as little purchased grain as they can, they need to manage their grass carefully. “We move the cows twice a day, after each milking. They only have access to as much grass as they’ll eat in an eight-hour grazing period.”
To improve the quality of their pastures, the Wrights use a variety of grasses and legumes. “We use lots of annual ryegrass, which works pretty well during our mild winters. The annual ryegrass is a cool-season grass that provides great grazing for us in fall, part of winter, and spring. Other cool-season grasses we use are the fescues and Matua bromegrass. For summer grazing, we use millet, Bermuda grass, and grazing alfalfas.”
For the Wrights, improving the management of their forage resource has allowed them to increase total animal numbers withou
t increasing acreage. It has resulted in healthy, happy cattle, and a healthier environment. “It’s paid off.”
Note: The Wrights are marketing their fencing cart and reel system (patent pending). See appendix E.
PART II
ANIMAL HUSBANDRY
CHAPTER 5
Genetics, Breeding, & Training
Animals are creatures of instinct. Do not think that what nature has taught them over the long, long centuries you can unteach in your puny little lifetime. Don’t try. Observe instinct instead and learn from it. There is a wisdom to it far beyond the ken of humans.
Animals are creatures of habit, too. Domesticated, they will tolerate being trained to a routine somewhat foreign to their instincts, but once that routine is established, they do not look kindly upon an abrupt change. Change only confuses and alarms them. You must be patient, or suffer the consequences.
— Gene Logsdon, Practical Skills
Nature teaches beasts to know their friends.
— Shakespeare, Coriolanus
SOME OF US ARE DRIVEN BY A NEED to have animals be a part of our lives. We are soothed by their presence, fascinated by their behavior, and amused by their antics. We relate to them as fellow creatures.
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