Just a side note of an option for creative fencing... Back 30 some years ago I purchased our farm because of two reasons back then important to me. For one it was at the highest elevation,( so no one could be upstream), and the springs formed the headwaters to the two watersheds on opposite sides of our foothill along the Mason Dixon Line. For two the farm operation then was to become known as a concentrated animal feeding operation, C.A.F.O. or in other words back then called a caged layer operation under contract which I was very much against. My purpose was again two fold in acquiring the farm and making it home. One was to shut down the contract layer operation that I felt was destroying family farms and also to clean up the industrial mess. Second was to try to heal the land to do what I called then community farming. Thus for a few decades we ran again what became known as a C.S.A. ... anyways... my long story short was when I took a perfectly fine 11000 sq ft caged laying poultry building that was waiting for the next flock of hens to torture.... err lay eggs I instead gutted it for better use. Like a shop on one end and a community center with stage and dj booth on the other. Now if you can imagine when I gutted the building and emptied it out I was left with 16 rows of cages, each 250 feet long. The problem was I could pull the long rows of cages out with the tractor, one by one, yet what to do with it all once I did I was lost. Then one day after I piled one row on top of another, 250 feet long and now like 40 inches high, I thought DARN that looks like fencing!!!
... and well the rest in history. I went and pulled one row after another and line then up along and old perimeter fence of the farm, stacked two high for around 2000 linear feet. What this done was for me was... Yes you guess it ... two fold... again. One WaLa good strong fence and two since it was wide and vegetation grew up around it, it became perfect habitat for our smaller creatures like rabbits to seek refuge and nest which over the years our hawks loved... and of course in case I needed a meal or two. Now after thirty some years the fence/old chicken cages are working fine except when the deer have over time decided to beat it down crossing it over and over again at places is their naturally course up along our ridge. So it was just a few days ago we had to go up to our highest meadow and fix such a place along one of our deer highways that it had came down. This became urgent since we just had several dozen lambs born the last couple weeks and before we rotate the flock up there to graze it needed to be secure... if you wish to see how I took the cages and made the fence... here is a short video of us a couple days ago fixing our creative permaculture recycled rabbit habitat use to be torture chambers for chickens fence...
