Building Fence

If you have ever seen a map of ESF you will most certainly notice the large amount of fence that is on the farm. Maintaining this much fence can be quite the job. The yellow is the property boundary and the red lines represent fence rows.

However, a few of these red lines no longer exist, or are in the incorrect place on the map. The fence line around field 69 is a good example. This is one of our hay fields and does not have any fence on the eastern edge of it along the woods. This is a field that we wanted to be able to stockpile fescue in after we made a first cutting of hay. That could only mean one thing, Greg and I have been building fence.

For this project we decided to just put up a 4 strand barbed wire fence through the woods. There was an old logging road in the general area that we wanted to fence so that allowed us to not have to do all that much clearing. The graphic below shows the new route through the woods.

It ended up being about 2,000 feet total, but this fence allowed us to graze another 24 acres. We also plan to put one of the tire waterers in this field as well, but that installation has not happened yet.

Here are a few pictures from our efforts.

The first pass through we cleared just enough to be able to drive the gator along side where the fence would be built. Then we used the gator to string 2 strands of barbed wire at a time, mainly using trees for our post.

The project turned out good and we are looking forward to having this additional grass to graze this fall. And of course, when you are working in the woods you never know what you might run across.

This deer rub was on a 5 inch diameter tree. Unfortunately we did not see the buck while we where building the fence, but I bet he was surprised to see 4 strands of barbed wire steepled to it the next time he came by!

We ended up having to use about 20 steel posts to fill in the gaps where there weren't any trees to steeple to. But I don't think that is too bad considering we put up 2,000 feet of fence.