posted 9 hours ago
So I’m trying a to make rotational grazing a little more efficient. I use electric fencing and give my 5 goats a fresh little paddock every day. I think it’s called “ladder fencing” though maybe I made that up. I keep the rails of the ladders up all grazing season and add/remove rungs every 1-2 days to keep the goats on fresh greens (see drawing). They seem healthiest when I do this, but it’s a bit of a time suck the way I’ve been doing it. The rails of my ladder are about 25 feet apart and to set the rungs I have to string up 4 strands of wire (my goats are jerks and escape if I only use three strands), not to mention weed whacking the grass down along so that the wire doesn’t ground out. To help make it a little faster I bought some cheap 30’ tape measures, taped them to my step in posts, wired the other ends to another step in post and now have a retractable fence segment for the rungs of the ladder.
They say that necessity is the mother of all invention. I don’t think this is a perfect setup because tape measures are pretty fragile. I’m worried that a big wind day is going to rip them up bad. But they do conduct the fence charge and they are retractable which makes them easy to move and set-up. Does anyone that practices rotational grazing have a better system for this that makes it faster? My ground is too brushy and uneven for poultry netting and I haven’t been too impressed with it in the past.i always get all tangled up in it.
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