Fencing

The kind that keeps your goats on your property!         Sorry, just couldn't restrain myself.

This is one area where you just should not try to cut costs. Good fencing is critical, not only to keep your goats contained but to also keep undesirable critters away from your goats. We learned this lesson the hard way.

We use two strands of barbed wire on top of field wire. We augment that with electric wire in the pastures we use for our bucks. Without the electric fence, the bucks will go right through field fencing to get to a doe in estrus. A jolt of 10 joules of energy seems to have a rapid cooling effect on their ardor.


  
 

Field Wire

We have tried several different brands of field fencing over the years with varying degrees of success. The brands that proved to be less than desirable for the intended purpose shall remain unnamed, we don't want to get ourselves involved in a lawsuit. However, the two brands we have found to be very successful are Red Brand Sheep and Goat Fence (used primarily for perimeter fencing) and Stay-Tuff Fence (used primarily for cross fencing). Both brands are on the high end of the price range, but as stated above, fencing is not an area to to cut costs if you intend to raise goats.

Soil conditions and terrain will dictate fence post spacing and distances between anchor posts, even the configuration of anchor posts. What seems to work where we are located is spacing anchor posts every 100 feet and fence post spacing at ten to fifteen feet . There is one addition we highly recommend, regardless of where you may be, and that is running a single strand of barbed wire no more than one inch off of the ground. We pull this wire just a tight as possible, think banjo string tight, and then tie the bottom wire of the field wire to this barbed wire at least one time between each fence post. The purpose of this is to keep the goats or any undesireable critter from the other side of the fence from lifting the field wire and crawling under.

  

Electric Fencing

Because of our soil conditions we must run three strands of electric wire. The top and bottom wires are hot and the center wire is ground. We use the DE 4000 Energizer by Dare, it is their Enforcer Series, a 110 Volt Plug In Electric Fence Energizer with 10 Joule output.

This may sound cruel, but we train new animals to the electric fence. We stand outside the wire and offer food to them luring them to the fence until they get zapped. Normally, after just two jolts on the end of the nose, they will not come within three feet of the fence. But then, we run across some that just never learn. Oh well!

  


 



 





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