The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - e.48: Less Stressful Fencing

Episode Date: April 30, 2015

This episode, Wisconsin farmer and fencing wizard Randy Cutler joins me to dish on the finer points of fencing your livestock for less stress and happier animals. We cover some of the main considerations before buildilng your fence, and finish with species-by-species considerations for electric fencing. Randy will be giving a more in-depth, live webinar in May, 2015. You'll be able to ask him questions directly. Find out more here.  

This is the Ruminant Podcast and I'm Jordan Marr. The Ruminant is a website devoted to sharing good ideas for farmers and gardeners. On the site you can find all the past episodes of this podcast, various essays that I've written, the odd book review, and also submissions from other readers with their own farming ideas complete with pictures and videos. There's a ton on there that I think you'll like and I hope you'll check it out. That's at theruminant.ca. You can also chat with me, editor at theruminant.ca or at ruminantblog

on Twitter. You can also find us on Facebook. All right, let's do a show. Hi folks, it's going to be a quick intro this week because it's real busy on the farm. This week's guest is Randy Cutler, who is a gentleman that I encountered out at the Moses Organic Conference in Wisconsin. He's an expert on fencing and had given a presentation at the conference that I missed. But he sent me the presentation, I took a look, and used it to form the basis of an interview with him. So in our interview, Randy covers a bunch of quick-fire basics, basic considerations when you're thinking about fencing, mainly for livestock. We go through some of the main considerations when you're planning and placing your fence. And in the end, he kind of takes me through a number of different livestock species and

special considerations with each species with regards to electric fencing. He is super knowledgeable. I really enjoy talking to him and I think you're going to enjoy hearing from him. At the very end of the talk, he talks about a webinar he'll be giving in early May in which he'll go into way more depth. So this interview is really just a taste. And if you like what you hear and you want to learn more from Randy, you can attend the webinar. You'll get a lot more in-depth information, but you'll also be able to ask questions at the webinar. So right near the end of our conversation, he talks about how you can find that webinar. What else do I want to say? I did not receive any listener submissions this week.

I will remind you that I really, really want to hear from you with an idea or insight or piece of advice that you have for other farmers and gardeners, something you're doing within your own farm business or even your own home garden that you think other growers and farmers would appreciate knowing about. If you were going to speak at a conference, what would you speak about? That would be a good thing to submit to me. You can submit in a few different ways. You can text me at 250-767-6636 with a brief summary, like super brief, and I'll arrange to call you back and we can talk about it for a few minutes. You can leave a voicemail on my Skype number. It's an American number, 310-734-8426. You can email me, editor at theruminant.ca, and give me a summary, and then I'll call you back. You can email me, editor at theruminant.ca, and give me a summary, and then I'll call you back.

I really think these submissions are going to be appreciated by other listeners. I hope you'll consider doing that. That's about it. It is crazy on the farm right now, so I'm just going to shut up. And, well, here's the guy you're going to be hearing from today. Hello, I'm Randy Cutler from Melador, Wisconsin. I was born and raised on this farm. I was born in 1950.

I've been farming all my life. I have a degree in agriculture education. I started Cutler Fence LLC about 11 years ago. And then building fences for livestock all over the state of Wisconsin and some UP, Upper Peninsula. Randy Cutler, welcome to the Ruminant Podcast. Thanks so much for joining me. Thanks for having me. So I think I'll just start from a slide earlier in your presentation, Randy. I noticed that you bought your farm in about 1976, and on your presentation you mentioned you inherited bad fences. So what did you mean by that?

Well, this farm was established in about the 20s or 30s, and my father had farmed here, raised dairy cattle, but in 1956 they had an auction and quit raising dairy cattle. So the fences kind of deteriorated since then, and I took over, what, would that be, 20 years later. So I had to really start over, basically. And so did you figure out a good solution right away or did you make some mistakes as you tried to improve your fencing situation? No I made plenty of mistakes that's for sure. I used barbed wire and I used different types of tried to do some different types of electric fencing and I was introduced to a fence company and started using some of their products. I've been raising sheep here, and they're pretty difficult to control as far as contained in the fence.

So it makes a difference what products you use and how you establish a fence for them. So I learned a lot by making mistakes. how you establish a fence for them. I learned a lot by making mistakes. Okay, so Randy, years later after you improved your own fences, you kept farming, you eventually started a fence company. So you've come to be quite an expert in fencing. I think before I get you to take us through aspects of your presentation, I'm just wondering, are there any really common mistakes people make when it comes time to put in fencing or to solve their fencing problem? Yeah, I think the most common mistake people make is improper corners.

Not bracing their corners, not digging them in deep enough, not making a sturdy corner or braced corner. That's the first mistake. And then there's a couple other mistakes you make if you're using an electric fence by having things too rigid and having too many posts and using any steel product within an electric fence. That's the most common errors that I see people make. And why do people choose steel so often when doing electric? I don't know. There's a lot of good options.

Other than steel, I think mostly it's just not understanding how electric fences work and not realizing that a steel t-post really is a ground rod and and most of their troubles occur when the electricity goes through the steel t-post into the ground and then they get low voltage or no respect right right not much of a mental barrier at that point right so and it's just thinking about it it seems to me randy that um you know i can just see how how so many fencing projects go wrong both because there's there's seems to be a real knowledge and skill to putting in a fence properly and choosing the materials and all that but also it just seems to me like a real candidate for cheaping out on you know because there's so many options you must see lots of people who simply don't want to spend enough and ultimately

over time i would think spend a lot more dealing with all kinds of problems because they haven't put the right fencing in right Right, that's exactly right. There's a lot of different materials out there. When you purchase material for, especially for electric fencing and for physical barriers, you need to pick something that's going to last at least 10 years or longer. A post, a wood post that will last 20 to 30 years, a type of coating on the steel wire that will last up to 30 years, plastic insulators that won't break down from the sun and will last at least 5 to 10 years, and the type of wire you use and the coating on the wire makes a big difference in the length or the longevity of the materials.

And it's easy to work with as well. Alright, so I've thought of two follow-up questions after that. The first is, I'm asking you to generalize here, but if you're dealing with livestock, I'm asking you to generalize here, but is there like a price, if you're dealing with livestock, is there a price per foot of fencing below which you just would recommend people stay above? Just because, you know, what's the cheapest per foot price someone could spend because if you're fencing 160 acres square, it's going to be a lot less price per foot than if you have four or five acres in a long rectangle. But generally speaking, if you have a square 40, pricing by the foot for a four-wire high-tensile electric fence should cost you around $1 a foot or less.

If you're using barbed wire, it should be about $1.50 a foot. If you're using woven wire, it should be about $2.25 a foot. That's some typical costs for a square 40. Every time you put in a corner or you stop and you start, you're going to add about $100 to the cost of the fence, plus the gate. And I guess that's an important point. If someone has the option of the shape they ultimately choose for their fenced-in area, hey, the less corners and turns and everything, the cheaper it's going to be.

Exactly. People ask me all the time, what does it cost? How much will my fence cost? I have 10 acres or I have 20 acres. And I have to ask them, well, what's the design or what's the shape? If it's a square, I can calculate the number of feet around. But if it's a rectangle, I can't calculate until I see the design. So I request that the customer then sends me at least a drawing or a design of his fence

so that I can calculate where the corners are. And I also need to know where he's locating the gates so that I can then determine the stop and the start at each gate. And it makes a difference if the gate is in the corner or in the middle. And all that is essential in order to make an accurate estimate for the cost. Okay. And another question I thought of when you were talking about thinking about materials that will last over time. I'm a farmer who's currently farming on a lease. It's irrelevant because I'm certainly not livestock farming, but I know there are lots of farmers, young farmers, who are facing short-term tenure. They don't know if they're going to be on the land a long time.

I can even think of a couple of colleagues who want to raise livestock on a lease and they don't know if they're going to be on the land a long time. I can even think of a couple of colleagues who want to raise livestock on a lease and they don't have long-term security on the land. If they've got to do some fencing, what would you recommend to people like that where they're going to have to spend extra for those materials to last a long time and they may not be able to take the fence with them and therefore it may not be cost effective for them to invest? Are there fencing options for people like that? Yes, there are. I would recommend for someone who's starting out with some rented property to use some

portable fencing to start with. It's always nice to have some restricted area where you have hard fencing, physical barrier, a portion where you can lock them in a barn or a building or a yard. That's always really the best. But I find that those people who start out with polywire, portable fencing, teach their livestock the respect to portable fencing, they become a lot better at rotational grazing. They understand electric fence better, and they actually become a much better manager of the land if they learn how to properly use portable electric fencing.

That's really funny. This is a weird analogy, but when I was young, I did a lot of mountain biking. And back then, in the 90s, all you had was a rigid frame. You didn't have any suspension or shocks. And I'm convinced that taught me to be a way better mountain biker because I had to learn how to use my body to absorb shock. And once I got onto the nicer bikes, the newer bikes with suspension, I was a better cyclist for it.

It sounds like almost a similar situation when you're forced to use that portable electric fencing. Right. Once you learn how to use the portable electric fence, once you teach your animals respect with portable electric fencing, if you're going to rotational graze, you how to use the portable electric fence, once you teach your animals respect with portable electric fencing, if you're going to rotational graze, you have to use the portable fencing anyhow. So if you can get respect on the portable products, from the portable products, and move animals with that, then that's the to really us a good success in grazing

livestock the only trouble is here we have what's called the winter and doesn't work so well during the winter time although I do have some I do have some techniques in order to make even portable fencing work appropriately during the winter so could you talk about those? One of the problems with electric fencing is that the electricity comes from the fence charger and shoots down the line. Once the animal touches it, preferably with its wet nose, electricity then has to go down into the ground, through the ground, back to the ground rods, and then from the ground rod it travels to the negative post on the fence charger.

Once that circuit is complete, then the light bulb goes on, and then the animal feels the shock. So as long as that circuit can be completed, electric fences work. But when there's an inch of ice and four inches of snow above that, that's an insulator. So we can't get the electricity to go back from the electric line back to the fence charger. In order to make that work, we need two lines. One's hooked to the positive on your fence charger. One's hooked on the negative on the fence charger. So when the animal then touches both the positive and the negative line, then they can feel the charge.

I see. That's what we do a lot of times in the wintertime, especially where we have pre-placed round bales for beef cattle or sheep or even dairy cattle or horses, that works quite well. And fairly easy to set it up, that kind of setup? Right. You just need two wires and make sure that one wire goes back to the ground and the other wire goes back to the hot post on

our positive post on the fence charger and i suppose that i mean it makes me wonder like when you say teaching your animals to have respect you know for that mental barrier so that ideally they're not even trying the fence how long how long does that take for for an unconditioned animal on average like can it be done done in one spring and summer so that by the winter you're having less animal fence interactions in the first place or does it take longer than that? I'm not a livestock guy so I wouldn't know the answer. Basically it's just one incident. It's just like you. If you were to touch the electric fence and feel 4,000 volts through your body, you realize immediately that you don't want that pain again.

Like my nephew said one day, oh, grandpa or uncle, I just can't take the pain. I can't take the pain, he said, when he touched the fence. So, yeah, it's a jolt. It's a high voltage for a very short period of time, and it's something that you remember for a long time. So once a lamb touches it for the first time, it remembers that electric fence. We were taking a walk here two nights ago,

and my dog was walking along, and she hit the fence, and she won't go outside today we had a similar we do have a small electric fence for some horses on the farm and we had a similar incident with the dog is a puppy who has never gone back in the horse paddock since the time he got shot so there you go that animal's been trained now Now, some animals, like sheep, for example, have a small brain and it seems like they seldom use it. I have sheep myself. But they take a little more to train than other animals. Certain breeds of animals are more resistant to electric fencing, more apt to try to get under, over, or through than other breeds are.

And certain species are a lot easier to control than others. For example, horses have a really good big flat foot that sinks into the ground, so they don't need a very large shock in order to control them. You can get by with a lot lower voltage on your fence charger. Pigs are another one. They ground really easy, so they don't need a really high charge. You can use a smaller fence charger. Sheep, on the other hand, and boar goats or meat goats, they're probably one of the most difficult animals to control. You need higher voltage on your fence. You need more wires closer together.

Right. Well, Randy, before we move on, it's funny. We kind of meandered into this topic of portable electric fencing and then electric fencing in general. The reason we talked about it is because I asked you about people on leases who don't have long-term security and don't want to invest in more permanent fencing. But then you said, well, it anyway because it's you become a better farmer and a better you know husband husbandman uh or husband woman when you when you have to work with that kind of fencing why not why not recommend it to everyone then is it more expensive

to work with like like in what scenarios would you say no no go for the i guess what i'm just asking is if you're a landowner why not still recommend to them the portable electric fencing option i do in most cases uh but there's a lot of situations where um we don't have uh real good maintenance um abilities um where we have remote settings, where we aren't real knowledgeable about electricity, and where we need extreme situations where we're going to have animals that have restricted feed situations. In those cases, we're going to need physical barriers. Another situation where we get really big high pressure, buffalo for example, we expect electric fence a lot, but if they get pushed, they'll just run right through it. So we need some areas that have to have a physical barrier. You need to have someplace on your farm

where you can lock them in for the night. And I know they're safe. I know they're secure in this area. And in most cases, the best product for that is a netting or a woven wire fence. Right. And that's a really good point for both the landowner, but I think specifically for the leaseholder, is at least having one smaller area that can hold all the herd that is more sturdy, so you just don't have to worry when you need to know that they're not going to get out. One of the other situations sometimes arises with legality. Most townships, villages, counties, even states have different rules for fencing. And if your

livestock are on the road or get hit by a vehicle, sometimes lawsuits can occur if you don't have what's called a legal fence. So people need to look at what's a legal fence in their municipality. And some of them have really specific rules about what they are. And in a lot of cases, a legal fence is a physical barrier, a barbed wire fence or a woven wire fence at a certain height. All right. Okay, well, what I'd love to do is get you to zoom through, you know, some considerations when you're about to, when you want to put a fence in. some considerations when you're about to, when you want to put a fence in. So if I have you right, you break it down into three major areas,

planning, placement, and practicality. So with regards, so you really emphasize that you've got to plan the heck out of your fence before you actually go and put it in. So what are some things you need to think about when you're going to plan your fence? Okay, first of all, you have to consider the species. So what species are you going to keep? And are you thinking about multiple species? It's certainly a lot different fence for boar, goats than it is for pigs, or it is for poultry, or it is for horses.

So if you're going to keep horses, goats, sheep, and pigs, then you have to have the ultimate fence that has all of the things that meet the criteria to keep all those animals in. The other thing to consider is in some cases, and around here, you have predators that are going to maybe attack your livestock. So you may need to do something about protection for predators. So that's another thing to consider. The next thing to consider is the lay of the land, your topography, and where the water runs, where the dips and hills are, the contour, and how you want to maintain that fence on the contour, what kind of maintenance is going to be involved in a fence that maybe has a lot of ups and downs if you can kind of get on the ridge or in areas like that.

And then, of course, when you're along the road, you need to consider the legality of it. If you're along a county road and right-of-way, you need to make sure that you're away from the right-of-way and what your municipality's rules are as far as where a fence can be placed along the road. Also, how you're going to maintain the outside of the fence or the inside of the fence is something you need to consider. And where you're going to locate your gates. So many people are, in some cases, great gate crazy. They want to put a gate in just about every line. Do you really need a gate here or don't you need a gate?

Think about where your gates need to be and what do you want to use a gate for. If you're going to use a gate to move livestock, then you have to have that gate on a corner. So unless you've got an army of people to move animals through that gate, you don't want to put it in the middle of the fence because it takes a group to try to get them to convince them to go through that gate. If it's on the corner, they just flow like water right through. If you're going to have machinery, if you're going to drive machinery in there, if you need to make hay or rotate into some type of crop,

then you might need a fairly large gate, and that probably won't be practical to put that necessarily on a corner. So maybe in the middle of the, or off away from the corner would be the best place to locate that gate. Right. I saw in this section in your presentation a couple other stuff related to land. You were talking about nutrient management. Because it was just a point on your slide, I didn't know what you meant. Right. I'm kind of a stickler for nutrient management here. We're doing several things on our farm to try to contain nutrients here

on our farm and not let them run down to the creek and down through to the Mississippi. So as long as we're producing nutrients here, we want to try to keep them here and then use them for growing, going to feed for our livestock or food for people. We need to locate fences so that we can control the runoff of the manure, et cetera. If we've got barnyards or yarded areas, areas where we feed livestock, we need to have fences to protect the critical areas so that we can then keep the nutrients and then maybe move them to a different location on the farm. So nutrient management has some stuff to do with basically design of your farm and design according to the topography and the the way the land lays

it gets kind of complicated to describe i guess in that respect but basically just keeping the animals out of of areas that could be contaminated by manure of areas that could be contaminated by manure. And, okay, so it's great. I mean, you've kind of, Randy, you've kind of gone from planning and you've already touched on placement, which includes gate considerations and stuff like that. And we've even already talked about stuff in your third kind of consideration of practicality, fence types, mental versus

physical, that sort of thing. Um, I just, I noted, well, this is a good time to ask you. And, and, and, you know, you've already acknowledged that you own a fencing company. So, so, you know, people can, can, can consider what biases you may have, but, but it really, it, I got the sense in your, in your presentation that, well, I'll just ask you, do you recommend for a big fencing job to hire a company? I really got the sense that you do. I don't know about a big fencing company. There are some big fencing companies that probably aren't real good at making large

fencing., Randy. I didn't... Either I misspoke or you misunderstood. What I meant to say was if you have a big fencing job, do you recommend hiring a company, whether it's big or small, like getting professionals in?

I do. I do jobs for people or estimates for people who are going to make their own fence, and I advise them. I prepare estimates for them. I prepare builds and materials for them, and I sell the materials a lot of times. But a lot of these people are not experienced enough to make a fence in a short enough time to make it economically justify their time. In a lot of cases, people will say, I'm going to build my own fence,

and about two months later I get a phone call saying, I just haven't gotten it done. Can you come and help? So in that case, they're a lot better off. I could have done the fence two months ago, and they would have been grazing all summer. The other thing is that we pound our posts with a hydraulic post pounder. And as we drive our corner posts, I'm talking about 5-inch, 6-inch diameter posts for the corners and the braces, and we drive them in with a hydraulic post pounder, those posts stay put and they don't move around.

While if you auger a hole and then sink your post in and tamp it down, it just seems like every time you put a brace on, you do have some movement in a post like that. Every time you put a brace on, you do have some movement in a post like that. So if you can get a post pounder and drive those corners or wood posts in the ground, they stay a lot better, and they're more resistant to frost heaving as well. And as you just pointed out, something that maybe should have occurred to me, but it didn't. You don't have to go all the way. You can hire a company simply to do the estimate.

You can hire a company to do parts of the job, to just put in those crucial corner sections. That's correct. Whatever. So you can choose the amount that you want to spend on the professionals and then figure what you can do yourself and save money that way. I guess that depends on the professional. That's right. That is the case with our fence company, and we do do some situations where we just go and put the corners in, put some braces on, and then maybe the farmer has their own crew,

and they'll pull wire or they'll put in line posts or they'll put the clips in etc and um so i i say well you guys can do the dumb jobs well that's a good it's good good way to do it and i suppose another reason it doesn't hurt to to get an estimate anyway for for a job is because um i just get the sense with all the options you were that were covered in your presentation that there are probably many fencing options that a lot of people aren't even aware of when they're planning their fence, and that a professional can at least make them aware of some of those approaches.

Right. One example of that is the different types of woven wire. Woven wire is described by a series of numbers. The first number, for example, of a woven wire is a 9396. Those series of numbers mean the first number is 9, meaning the number of horizontal wires. So there's 9 horizontal wires, 9396. So there's nine horizontal wires. Nine, 39, six. So the second number is 39. That's the number of inches in height of the woven wire, 39 inches. Six, the last number, is the number of inches between vertical wires.

So you need to look at the woven wire to see what kind of product you have. Right, that's a great example. It's something I didn't know about. And then there's 12-gauge wire, there's 14-gauge wire, there's different gauges, different diameter. The lower the number of the gauge, the thicker the wire. And then there's the tensile strength. The higher the tensile strength, the harder it is for the wire to be pulled apart.

And most of the wire that most, just about all of the wire that we use today is what's called high tensile wire. The woven wire is high tensile, the barbed wire is high tensile, and the smooth electric wire is high tensile wire. The woven wire is high tensile, the barbed wire is high tensile, and the smooth electric wire is high tensile. And that wire is a lot stronger, lasts longer. Then the other thing is the coating on the wire. You need to make sure that the wire is coated, and I recommend a class 3 galvanized versus a Class I galvanized. And you can then look at those things, the coating on the wire,

the thickness of the wire, the number of strands, and all that's going to determine the cost of the wire itself. So some people say, oh, I went to the farm store, and that roll of wire is only like 125 and you're charging 200 so you got to compare apples to apples well generally speaking then where is a good place if it you know i imagine the best place is not the hardware store or the farm store or the farm store where where do people get you know a decent the best deal they're going to get on quality wire fencing and other types of fencing. I would recommend researching some of the, um, fence companies, the fence supply

companies. First of all, there's several good quality companies that have very good catalogs that are quite educational. Um, can I mention a few? Yeah, why not? Sure. Gallagher is probably one of the world's largest as far as electrical fence products go. They got a lot of experience with electric fence. So Gallagher, North America is a place to look for electric fence. Premier Fence Company out of Iowa has a wonderful catalog and very, very good descriptions of all of the different products that they sell. They're probably the premier company as far as netting goes, portable electric netting. And Ken Cove is another national company that has a real good catalog, does a good job of showing you different materials for building your own fences. So I'd

recommend looking at those websites to start with. The other one is PowerFlex Fence, also out of Missouri, has a lot of products, especially for rotational grazers and information. And they then evaluate those different products and tell you the differences in the products, what makes them different from each other and why they're priced the way they're priced. they're priced the way they're priced. And also, all those companies do have websites and information that you can look at in order to determine what kind of products are going to be best for you. Okay. So Randy, I'd like to finish off our conversation with just perhaps getting a few comments from

you on different species with regards to fencing. Does that sound all right yes okay so i'm just gonna start with sheep can you can you give like uh can you give some advice just some general advice that is well general advice about sheep but specific to sheep with regards to fencing okay let's start with sheep um i've raised sheep all my life here several different breeds of sheep. So some sheep are, like I said before, some sheep may be a little bit more difficult to control than others. But if you look at a sheep, while it walks through the pasture, its head is down. And as it walks, its head is down.

And when it gets to a fence, what it's going to do, it's going to go under. So we have to have our wires close to do, it's going to go under. So we have to have our wires close to the ground when we're talking about sheep. Two inches, three inches from the ground. Now, with a woven wire or a barbed wire. You can go with eight barbs or a woven wire. With electric fence, you need to be about 8 to 10 inches off the ground. Posts need to be fairly close together with electric fence in order to keep it 8 to 10 inches off the ground, probably 20 to 30 feet

apart with electric fence. With a high tensile woven wire or barbed wire, they need to be about 16 to 18 feet apart for sheep. And your top wire can be as low as 36 inches for sheep because generally they don't really jump over a lot. And if you have a sheep that jumps over 36 inches, it's probably going to jump over 42 and 48, so I'd recommend that you eat that one. It's the same situation with goats, only it's a little more critical. Goats are very intelligent, only it's a little more critical of goats are very intelligent and dairy goats are a little bit easier to make to take care of than than meat goats they respect the fence fairly well

especially your traditional dairy breeds but when it gets to your spanish goats or goats from the south or or boar goats, the meat-type goats, they're going to challenge the fence all the time. So if you have an electric fence, you need to have high voltage on that, and you need to have a fence that's not only 8 inches off the ground but 48 inches on the top. And if you have a woven wire, it's probably best to have an electric, an offset electric on the inside to keep them off from the fence. They'll try to even climb up the fence. So goats are the

biggest challenge. Horses are very easy. Horses can get by with one hot wire or two hot wires without any trouble. Some horses you can turn the fence off for half the year and they're not even going to bother it uh so you can kind of have an on your honor fence for a horse it seems they're about the simplest to uh to control as they get although the thing about horses is they move fast uh they don't think a lot before they get to a fence, so they do get in trouble a lot with an electric fence. And so most companies don't recommend a smooth, high-tensile wire. They recommend what's called a horse-safe fence or a netting fence where they can't get their foot stuck in between, or an electric fence that's much more visible.

or an electric fence that's much more visible. As far as beef cattle go, the best beef cattle fence is either a four or five barbed wire or a four-wire high tensile electric. The bottom wire needs to be as high as possible. If you've got cattle are controlled electrically by their chest height. Cattle are controlled electrically by their chest height. So wherever the height of their chest comes on the fence, that's where you need to have a hot wire. So basically somewhere between 18 and 24 inches could be the bottom wire. The top wire should be 48.

As far as dairy cattle goes, they're fairly easy to control as well. The thing about dairy cattle is you need a lane because you have to get them out and bring them back in twice a day. So you need a lane in that situation. But again, high tensile electric fences, three wires is quite adequate for dairy cattle. For all those species, I would again recommend some type of hardware, some type of physical barrier, some type of corral in an area where they can be contained in case you have some kind of trouble with electricity or whatever. I would also recommend a switch on your electric fences to be able to cut off the switch to turn the sections of your fence off. And what about the noble pig?

The noble pig is simple as can be. They need a wire dependent on their size. Again, they're controlled by their chest height. How high is the chest of a 40-pound pig? That's pretty darn close to the ground. chest of a 40-pound pig, that's pretty darn close to the ground. But if you got a big boar or a big sow, you know, they could be standing up 24 to 30 inches tall. So basically, one or two hot wires is really simple to control hogs. If you have permanent woven wire fencing 12 gauge woven wire fencing like i was describing before 9396 is a good product for them with an offset at about 10 inches electric fence on the

inside an offset is a bracket that's attached to the woven wire and has an insulator on the inside where you can attach an electric wire to that and keeps it off from the woven wire about up to a foot. In that case, if they're pigs that are in there a long time and they are rooting pigs and they root the soil and roots and stuff, material up against the fence, then you can keep that hot wire about 12 inches up and that keeps that material away from the woven wire so pigs are pretty easy to easy to control here on the farm we have a problem every year with bears getting into our orchard do you know of a cost-effective way to use electric to keep them out? Well, I would say if bears are your only problem, electricity works real well with bears because they're very well grounded.

They don't see very well, so a tape, like a half-inch tape, works pretty good for those. Around here, we've got a lot of apiaries, a lot of people with honey bees and they fence the bear out with two or three electric tapes, a half inch tape and a portable electric charger. More of a concern around our part of the world here is white-tailed deer, and they're really difficult to try to keep out of an orchard. We've got fences all the way to 8 foot tall with electricity on them or physical barriers up to 8 feet to keep them out of cranberries, keep them out of orchards, and that's pretty much what you need for that.

Well, this has all been really interesting randy thanks a lot for uh for joining me on the show here you're welcome anything uh any anything you want to point listeners to do you have a website or otherwise that you want to promote um i'm having a podcast here uh on the 20th if you're going to have your I mean a webcast a webinar on the 20th of May that's put on by the

Food Animal Concerns Trust FACT out of Chicago so if you want to tell your listeners about that if you want to tell your listeners about that, if you air this before then, then maybe they'd want to partake. What are you going to be talking about?

What's the focus with the webinar? Basically the same types of things, only you'll see my face. And look, I've seen your face in your presentation. It's a handsome face. But I imagine if you're giving your main presentation, it will also go into more depth. So if people...

Yeah, and I'll be able to show, I think I'll be able to show some things or make some gestures anyhow, at least to help people understand. And also it'll be live, so there'll be questions. People will be asking questions, I'm thinking, right? Okay, so what

should they google to find uh that webinar uh food animal concerns uh trust fact okay thanks again you're welcome thanks for having me all right so food animal concerns trust if you want to google this webinar that uh randy's going to be given giving later in may i hope you enjoyed that and i hope you'll consider beyond the ongoing request to send me submissions send me an email let me know what you think of the podcast it's uh i got a decent listenership going but it's still small enough that i don't hear from people very often and I sure would appreciate it

let me know what I'm doing right let me know what I'm doing wrong what you'd like to see done differently but you know I kind of am doing this because I really just want to be part of the larger farming community so if you have at all an inkling to reach out and say hi please do so, I'd love to hear from you

editor at theruminant.ca next week I'm going to be having a gentleman from Australia called Colin Seiss on the podcast. He presented some fascinating material at Permaculture Voices 2 in San Diego, all about a truly no-till system of agriculture that doesn't generally involve herbicides. He's got a really fascinating set of systems to do what he does on a multiple thousands of acre ranch in Australia. And it's a really cool story. So you can look forward to that. And thanks for listening, folks. Have a great week. Would we live in a place that don't want us? A place that is trying to bleed us dry.

We could be happy with life in the country. With salt on our skin and the dirt on our hands. I've been doing a lot of thinking, some real soul searching, and here's my final resolve. I don't need a big old house or some fancy car to keep my love going strong. So we'll run right out into the wilds and graces We'll keep close quarters with gentle faces And live next door to the birds and the bees And live life like it was meant to be Bye.