So, one of the benefits of moving from farm to farm is that J and I have just about perfected the art of building a good fence. Granted, I often complain about how anal J is about his fencing, but I am always pleased with the results.
I thought it might be helpful to those people out there just starting to build fences, if we gave them some step-by-step instructions for fence-building.
First Step - PLANNING
I cannot express how important it is to plan out your fencing. Fencing takes a lot of time and effort, so you want to make it exactly the way you want it to be FOREVER. Think about where you will be going to get feed. Think about access to each pen. Think about how you might want to move animals from pen to pen. Think about where you will be watering. Think about where you will put shelters - specifically which direction the wind blows so that you can orient the door on the opposite side. Think about how you will load and unload animals.
When we designed our pens at the new ranch, we had several things that we knew we wanted. We wanted to build a corridor that could be used for loading and unloading animals. We also wanted a corridor that could be used to move animals from pen to pen - for breeding, birthing, isolation, etc. We wanted to have access to all pens from the same side of the fence. We wanted to have easy access to feed OUTSIDE of the corridor/pen system (so that even if the animals got out, they couldn't get to the feed).
Our pen design ended up with two larger pens on the far side, and then a row of smaller pens paralleling the larger ones with a corridor running between the large and small pens. In addition, there is a corridor that "Ts" into the main corridor, running between two of the smaller pens and creating a chute for loading and unloading animals. We plan to use fence panels to cordon off sections of the corridor when moving animals around. We also made sure that the chute lined up with the driveway in such a manner that we could back a trailer up easily to it.
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