Fencing and Water Systems for Rotational Grazing: Doug Peterson's Practical Guide

0:08 So talk about some common sense fencing. And as he said, you know, everybody has this conception that, oh, you know, it's going to be hard to move cows every day or four or five times a day, right? It's work, I don't want work. And I think that's why so many people do continuous grazing. Why they just say, oh, I'm gonna stick them out there in May and, you know, the Columbus method, then they're gonna go discover them about November. So you've got to have the right tools, right?

0:43 So all you row crop guys out there, how many you guys got a truck or a trailer with about fourteen toolboxes on it and welders and oil and air? Guess what? So here's my toolbox, you know, and it's got a lot of gizmos and gadgets in it. And we're going to go through those here in a little bit. But if you're going to do the kind of management that he was talking about, you got to have the right tools and you got to have the right equipment. So that's what we're going to talk about.

1:24 I'm just going to blast through a bunch of stuff here. You're gonna see some slides in it. I'm going to go through a bunch. I don't talk quite as fast as Paul Yassa did yesterday, but I do talk pretty fast. You know, the human brain can comprehend about 1200 words a minute. I'm going to talk about 400 words a minute, so you guys that talk really slow don't worry, you'll be able to understand it.

2:19 So water systems. And I'll make two statements. Water deficiency will cause more problems with livestock from a gain or a sickness or disease problem faster than anything else, right? How long will it take them to starve to death versus how long will it take them to die if they don't have any water, right? And you give them water away from a day. Keith, I was talking to him the other night, he had his little embarrassing moment with the video, right? Well, I had one. It wasn't on video, thank goodness. Had a field day this is probably twelve or fourteen years ago now. Had eighty people coming. I went out that morning and moved them, and we were going to move them that evening again. Went out there and there's two hundred and fifty cows and they are mad. They are walking the fences, they are bawling, and I'm going, what is the deal? So I go down and look at the water tank and it's bone-dry. So I go back and look at the water tank behind them, the next couple paddocks back, and it's dry. So you're standing there with hacked off cows and eighty people that you're trying to show something to, and what do you do? You just punt, right? So you take them across the road and you give them a big pasture and you say here you go. That wasn't the way it was supposed to go.

4:04 So you get humbled a little bit. So the next one then is water is also the most limiting factor in the flexibility and design of a system, okay? It just always is. It's the most expensive and it's the most limiting. So that's what we're going to spend a bit of time on here to start off with. So just some quick things on livestock behavior in water. And you're just gonna get enough here in the next couple of minutes to be dangerous. So what I want you to do is if you haven't designed a system before, go talk to your local NRCS folks. They've got all kinds of information on how much water and how much herds based on your herd size. So I'm not going to get into that too much. I'm just gonna give you some real simple stuff here.

4:54 Typically, cattle will come to water one to two times a day in a system where water is closed. They'll come to water a lot of times a day, four or five times a day, because it's simple and it's easy, right? Just like me and you, if it's easy, they're gonna go to water a lot of times a day. If they got to make a long track, it's going to be harder, so they're not going to do it as much. They'll drink for about one to four minutes at a time. They can drink about two gallons a minute. So if you've got a tank that can have four or five head at a time, and in our world we're not dealing with quite as big of herds as some of you guys may be, but four or five head at a time, if you've got four head drinking at a time and they're drinking two gallons a minute, you need at least an eight gallon a minute recharge, right, to keep that tank full all the time. And then you need to have enough tank space and rim space so that the herd, however big it is, can water in at some reasonable period of time.

6:00 Obviously, water consumption rates change based on type of livestock: beef cattle, milking cows, even beef cows that have higher lactation versus beef cows that have lower lactation, obviously takes more water, right? Sheep a lot less. Horses kind of in the middle. And then aged yearling cattle versus adult cows. Stage of production: are they lactating or not? Are they Brahma breeds versus English breeds? And then is it summer versus winter? Moisture content of the feed. I tell you, in our operation, because we've got water pretty close in most situations, you know, the farthest we are.

6:44 From water typically is less than a quarter of a mile. The biggest time I see cattle move to the water is in the winter when we're feeding hay. You know, you feed them, you feed the whole herd all at one time, right? And so they all take, they all eat a bunch of dry hay and then what do they do? They all go to water at the same time. We don't see that. We don't see that effect when we're grazing in the summer.

7:08 Travel distance to the water, and I understand you guys got way different stuff out here, but if we're talking crop fields, you know, maybe that's not as far of a distance. So cattle tend to drink individually, one at a time, two or three at a time when that travel distance is shorter. And there's been different studies. Missouri did a bunch of stuff. Jim Gary's did a bunch of stuff. Others did it in other areas. What we find is when stock density is higher—and that's not how many cows you have on the farm, but how concentrated they are—when you have them concentrated pretty close, they tend to go to water individually. You know, if you sit and watch our water tanks in the summer, there will be one or two cows, three or four cows at that water tank all day long, but it's different cows all day long.

8:01 Okay, now that will change a little bit when they've got farther to travel to a water tank or if a water tank is out of sight. If I've got paddocks where it's a whole hillside and the water tank is in one location and the whole paddock is visible, you never see them go to water as a herd. If that water tank is over the hill, they will tend to go more as a herd because they are herd animals. They do not like to be out of sight of the rest of the herd, okay? So those are all things to just think about.

8:41 You got to be able to deliver the right amount of water at the right time. I too have a good grazing system, whether you're talking perennials, whether you're talking providing water into a row crop situation where you're grazing cover crops, you know, after or even as a primary crop during the summer. So you got to have the right water, the right amount of water at the right time, otherwise it's going to cost you a lot of money.

9:10 So what do we start off with? Well, you start looking at water sources. And when I go on to a place to help a person evaluate it, you don't ever want to exclude anything right off the bat. You always want to evaluate all potential water sources: wells, ponds, springs, creeks, and even public water. You know, there's a lot of small places that way. Help with you know, pretty small tracts. And I've got one that I rent off of a lady that's 40 acres, okay? 40 acres. It's not very big. That's a good spot for 50 or 60 heifers. You know, we don't winter anything there, so the best water source is going to be the public water that she has in her house already. You know, I pay her a little something for the water and I don't have to worry about a pump. I don't have to worry about anything, right?

10:02 So don't automatically exclude any of those. So evaluate all of them, look at all of them, try to figure out which one's going to be the most economical over the course of the time you're going to be. So we got basically two. We got gravity systems or pressure systems, pump systems. You know, gravity systems in our part of the world—we have a lot of ponds, a lot of open stock water ponds. They'll almost always in our hilly country have a stock water pipe through the dam and then gravity feed it out to a different location. The system I talked about a while ago that quit on me—it's actually a pond. It's pretty high in the landscape. It's got about 3,500 feet of water line coming out from it feeding five different tire tanks. That is all gravity, okay? Now I learned a lot about air locks that summer when I put that system in for the first time, and that's a whole other discussion.

11:02 So gravity systems are pretty cheap because you don't have a pump, right? You don't have electricity. You don't have solar. But boy, they're it's pretty rare that they're going to serve a very large area. And long systems can have air locks, and that's a whole other thing to have a discussion with an engineer about. Pump systems, you know, we've got plugin or we've got solar systems. Solar has gotten a lot cheaper in recent years. There's no doubt about that. But there's still a lot of times I think people are putting in solar pumps when electricity's you know 300 yards away, and I think for many of us that plug-in system is going to be cheaper than solar. Not that solar is not a viable option. So you really need to look at that.

11:55 And so what the goal should be, you know, to me it's pretty simple. There's two things. Livestock should not travel any farther than needed for water. You know, how far is that going to be? That depends on a lot of things. Depends on the size of operation, depends on the herd size, depends on what kind of efficiency you're looking at. There's all kinds of research that shows that the closer they are to water, the higher the grazing efficiency is. Now, if that means you've got a small place, in my environment with our water availability, we try not to have anything more than a quarter mile from water. You know, out here in big landscapes, that's probably going to be a lot farther, okay? And I understand that. What we do find again is that as stock densities increase, that is less critical.

12:50 The bottom line when they're winter water, you know, I see a lot of operations putting in above-ground systems and they may put in you know one winter water or someplace and the rest of it is all above-ground, and that's okay. But I'm telling you, I like to put in at least one winter water source in every field or every pasture because there's going to be some point you're going to go, man, I wish I had water out here right now. I can graze this but you don't.

13:22 Because it's too cold or whatever reason, you don't have it out there. So I tend to invest quite a bit in water systems because it gives me a tremendous amount of flexibility. I can do so many things if I've got water there. Doesn't mean I have to use it and it also doesn't mean it's got to be a super expensive high-dollar tank. I don't spend a lot of money on tanks. I want ones that are functional and functional, and we'll get into that in a minute, but they don't cost a lot of money.

13:52 Then the last thing from a planning standpoint is location, location, location. Will a tank location allow for easy subdivision in the future? I'll show you a map here in a minute. Almost all of ours are set up with a tank and then a paddock with the ability to subdivide that in the future. Will that tank location allow for that? Will it help and enhance the ability to subdivide it in the future?

14:23 And then other things, you know, does it have good drainage from an animal health standpoint? The one with all the water standing on it, that's just a mess. So we need to really look at it. The one on the left there, we see a lot of that in Missouri, a tank right on the backside of a pond where the principle spillway or the emergency spillway dumps out and it turns into a wallow. So that concrete tank on the left, if it would have been a hundred yards further down away from there, would have been a way better option. I realize you've got flatter country down here, but wherever you're locating it, make sure you really evaluate those locations.

15:09 Another point: those water tanks are attractants. And what do those cows do? They bring nutrients. They will over time. That nutrients will gravitate toward that way. They can't help from it because they're coming back and forth through that. So if you have the opportunity to locate that tank, if you're putting in a pressure system or a pump system, put that tank as high in the landscape as possible so that nutrients that are deposited around that get time through gravity to work their way back. If you put a tank clear down low behind a pond next to the ditch, where's all the nutrients going to go? That's deposited around that tank. And forget the water quality issues. Think about the dollars that you're losing because those nutrients that got deposited there are twenty yards from a ditch. So think about it from a dollar standpoint. Get those nutrients. If you have the opportunity, put those tanks as high in the landscape as possible because they run downhill.

16:25 So how do you fence over and around those tanks? That becomes the next question. You can make a diamond like this one right here. You can put a fence around it. The problem is I've seen some that are huge, you know, 150, 200 feet around. And so that lot that you put around that tank is going to be bare regardless of how big it is. If it's an acre, it's going to be bare. If it's forty foot by forty foot, it's going to be bare. If it's got multiple tanks coming into it, so that's really not a favorite, although it does allow you the opportunity in some situations to water four or five or however many tanks or four or five paddocks off of one tank. But don't make it too big.

17:17 My favorite is to do something like this and put electric fence over the top of it. You put electric fence over the top of a tank and that eliminates the pushing, the fighting, the shoving. You put it over the middle of a tire tank and you've got five or six cows watering out of it and a boss cow or something shoving in from the middle and shoves cows out. Those outside cows back up. And if you don't believe me how effective that is, go stick put electric fence across your tank, stick your hand in the water and then lean your shoulder up against it. I have learned to be very careful when I'm working on a tank and that fence is right there. You either turn it off or you pay attention because it'll put you down.

18:17 So what kind of tanks? There's all kinds of things, from grain bin rings to big metal tanks. The bottom one is a picture I took years ago at Noble Foundation, you know, a bathtub. So you can use a lot of different things. The biggest thing is that in the top one it's got a way to keep them from getting in it, you know, protect the valves, protect that infrastructure in the tank. And again, that's why I like the electric fence over the top of it. It just eliminates that.

18:48 So what about pads in our environment? We've got mud. We can have mud around the tank that doesn't have a pad around it. It can get deep in the spring. And so most of them will have a gravel pad around it like the one on the top. I've started, and that's not mine on the top, but the one on the bottom is what we've started doing. If you put geotextile underneath it and then put something to hold that geotextile in place, I've started using tires. We cut the tops out of car tires, screw them together, line them around it about three tires deep, fill that full of gravel, and that gravel is not going to move. And you took a whole bunch of stuff out of the landfill too.

19:32 Concrete pads are okay, but I've seen so many mistakes on them. The first one up there on the top, they had a concrete tank and then they put another tank beside it, which is okay, but you're starting to see some pretty serious erosion. The bottom one right there, I had a place that I rented that had one exactly like this.

19:58 If you look at the bottom, there's no very top but if you look, the concrete is across here but those cattle, they hate to walk on concrete so they're going to walk in right here to get to that water. They can come in on the side of the tank and avoid the concrete, and after a year or two, what do you think is going to happen to that? It's going to be about four feet deep. I've got one on a place that I rent, it's that exact way. The landlord put it in and put a big pad out front but the cows avoid it and they come in from the side. So I've had to come in and add gravel to that side. Get it in the right place. It needs to be around all drinking edges, not just across the front.

20:54 Limited livestock access—these are really good. Come in with a big thick layer of geotextile and gravel on top of them. If they don't have a very variable water source, you can put posts in there like this one. If it's got a variable water source, I've seen floating PVC pipe so that it floats up and down with it. Those work fairly well.

21:19 This is my personal favorite right here—tire tanks. You'll notice these are not big heavy equipment tires, these are AG tires—30.5 by 32s, combine tires, the 600, the 710, or the 800s worked pretty well. They're about six feet in diameter and about thirty to thirty-four inches deep depending on which ones you get. Those work really well. Cut the top out of them. Even half of a tire tank will water four or five cows pretty easy. They don't have a lot of distance to travel. Will water 250 to 300 head of cows off of a half of a tire tank if they don't have a lot of distance to travel. I have seen a couple places where they put in two or three tire tanks for much bigger herds and still put the fence across the top of them so they're available all over and usable for the winter.

22:14 Here's a picture of a little Walters ice control valve. It's a thermal coupler and there's two or three different versions of these. There's gas in that copper coil. When the gas gets cold, it shrinks, allowing a plunger to open. When it warms up, it pushes the plunger back and shuts the water off. So it's a non-electric temperature control valve to let water trickle when it needs to be iced. In the picture there, you see that was about 20 below that morning and while it had some ice on the front there, there was still free water in there, open water.

22:56 So this one has a friend whose name shall remain anonymous. That's about a 450-pound calf in a tire tank, then cut the holes pretty small. But that calf got in there and guess what? He lived. He kicked the drain over so he didn't drown and they got him out. It's a crazy deal. He is wedged in there now.

23:26 This one, I won't show you very long, but this was one of mine. This was the concrete tank with the electric fence over it. I took the top off of it, the concrete off the top, so I could water from both sides and it worked great for several years. And I go out here and I got that—how did he get in there? That calf is stuffed in there. It's an open tank, it's not a very big tank. The only thing I can figure is the electricity and the water. The combination—remember that I told you about a while ago? Somehow he went underneath it and slipped into the water and raised up and got shocked enough times that it stunned him, that he went into the water. I don't know. So that is a concern. I'm just telling you, I have not changed. I still have electricity over all of my tire tanks, all tanks.

24:21 Just, you know, flexible systems. Adding flexibility with above-ground stuff allows some incredible stuff. You can subdivide stuff. You can increase utilization. But here's the downfall. Those above-ground systems with multiple tire tanks, multiple water tanks, you can put them all over. Guess what? I got multiple water points now. I can have multiple herds. So what does that do to utilization? That decreases it, right? So you got to pay attention to why you're using that.

25:05 But here's what I found: only the most serious grazers, only the people that are really serious about grazing, about improving their soil, about livestock management, are going to use those portable systems long term because what they require is work and effort and time. I know one grazer that has a portable system that uses it year-round and has for literally decades now—Denis McDonough, one of the best grazers I know in Missouri. He's got one on the right and that's what he waters out of year-round. Moves it every two days, moves the cattle every day, but the water gets moved every two days typically.

26:00 There's just a variety of things you can do. The one on the top left is Denis's and what's unique about that is you see it's got a fire hose and then a garden hose coming in. So the way he uses this year-round is that he's got quick couplers that are buried so he just snaps into a quick coupler in the ground and then the black hose brings the warm water in. Then it's got a trickler so that it runs all the time in the winter. And then the drain is back out the red pipe. So the incoming water, the warm incoming water, keeps the cold outgoing water thawed out so that he doesn't have a big pile of water or mud right around his tank. He puts the drain on the backside. You can see an electric fence across halfway across it so it keeps them from pushing on that tank. The one on the right is obviously just a big hay feeder that they converted into a water tank, sealed it up the bottom. The one on the bottom is just a little homemade trailer.

27:05 Bottom right there is another guy in Missouri, Lou Clean and Bringer, that's got a tank that he drags around on poly. So there's a lot of ways to do it. And we're a thing is touchy. Here's another one that's a little more elaborate, right? It's got its own hose reel on it. You know, probably take some maintenance, but boy it's gonna give you a lot of flexibility in it.

27:31 And here's Brad Young in Nebraska. He grazes a lot of corn fields and corn stalks. And so this one, it's actually hooked into a well. And he's got an electric fence. You can see an electric fence running right across the back of him. He sets those tanks strategically so that the overflow does not go away from where the cattle are so it's not slick and icy. And you know, to keep two tanks that open in cold Nebraska weather takes a lot of water flowing. Basically it's a full flow valve to keep it open. But he's only there for a couple of months in the winter.

28:16 So here's another one. Lou Clean and Bringer came up with this one three or four years ago. He does a lot of finishing in stalkers and he wanted a way to monitor their performance as he was trying different types of forages. And so he's got a little portable water wagon that's also a way wagon that also injects apple cider vinegar into it. And there's scales on the bottom right there. Now it only weighs their front, which is about 60% of their overall body weight. They've got RFID tags in their ears. There's a reader in the wall in the middle, but it'll only read one side. So the thing he found was he just got so much data it was hard to really use it very effectively because he got it. It showed how many times a day they came to water just over and over and over because he's very close. He's got water right in the strip.

29:24 So just showing you something else. This was the one I came across in Missouri a few years ago. It actually came from Montana. It's a wood-fired water heater for a big tank. It's a downdraft water heater or a downdraft firebox. Got to have quite a bit of weight to keep it sunk. I had never seen one of those in all my travels, so I had to take a picture of it. So I just threw it in for you guys.

29:48 And then you know, incorporating more technology into our water systems. So here's Ben Hartwell out on the East Coast. Doesn't have a big herd and it's not there all the time during the day, so he had to devise a way. He had this portable system of a water tank but they did knock it over sometimes. And so he needed to know, you know, did they have water all the time? So if you see on the right side over there, there's a little white post and a little black box that is a trail camera, a game camera. And now they have game cameras that don't just keep pictures on an SD card. They actually have trail cameras with cell phone technology so he can call it up and he can look at it real time 24 hours a day. So there's a lot of people starting to use technology like this that's fairly affordable if you've got cell phone technology in that area to monitor things.

30:42 So just some quick tips from a water standpoint. When you're installing, if it's a pump, install a manifold system so that when you run water lines out, don't run one water line out from the pond from the pump and then tee off of it. Run at least a couple out from the pump, maybe one goes north and one goes south, because if something happens on that water line and you have to work on it, which doesn't happen very often, right? I've got one that's been in for 18 years now and I've had one break in it. So it doesn't happen very often, but in case something does happen, do you want to have to shut the whole system down? What if you've got it on a manifold with two or three water lines going different directions? Oh hey, I turned this one off. I've still got half the farm. I still got half the ranch, right? Have it split up into a manifold system.

31:44 And then every tank, I don't care how long the water line is, put a shutoff from the main line to every single thing because I guarantee you at some point you will want to shut a tank off to do something to it and still have water to the rest of the system. I guarantee you that's what you're gonna want. So put spend the extra 75 or 100 bucks and put a shutoff. And what you want to put in, and these are small, what you want to put in is what's called a stop and waste valve, not just a curb stop valve. This one, if you look at it, it does not have a pee hole or a drain hole on either side, so when we turn it off the water stays in the line on both sides. This one has a little pee hole right here in the side. So when I turn it off, the water from the tank side can drain back and come out this hole so that that line from that tank drains down and won't freeze. So if I've got these on my tire tanks and I drain them for some reason in the summer I want to use them in the mill, the winter I come back, I turn it on, there's no water in it that's froze up.

32:57 Now you do have to pay attention when you put those in. When you put these in with tire tanks, I put the first system I put in on my own myself was about 18 years ago. You learned a lot of things working for NRCS, teaching, telling other people how to do it, but when you do it yourself, you really learn it. And I learned a lot on that first system. I did 11,000 feet of water line and nine tire tanks on my first system, and yeah, that was a pretty good learning experience. So on one of my tire tanks, I was you know, I had my valve setup off of every coming off of the main line for everyone I wanted the valves underneath the fence so that nothing messed with them. I didn't drive over them or anything. So I got it all set up well, I wasn't thinking, and it was a slight grade down a little bit.

33:53 Much they had the tire tank underneath there so the water line came in out for the main line and then it went from the valve down to the tire tank and it was just downhill a little bit. So guess what? When I turn this valve off the water doesn't come back to it. The water stays in the water line so that tire tank doesn't drain out. So I either have to blow it out or I have to leave it completely full all winter and let it freeze up.

34:23 Now I have you. I have winning and used it in the winter. If you let it completely leave it completely full and it freezes up it'll freeze from the top down about five or six inches, seven inches. There'll be a bubble of water in it that's still open and so all I have to do is take a chainsaw in it and cut out a hole in the top, free up the valve, hold the valve down for a 10 or 12 hours, let enough water come through to get it flowing and it's not a big deal. But stop and waste, not just the curb stop, stop and waste, okay?

34:57 The other and we'll get into this a second, okay? Make sure and use pressure fittings if you're using PVC. Make sure use pressure fittings, not lightweight drain fittings, okay? I sent my dad one time to town to get some fittings and I didn't have quite the right ones and so I sent into town and he comes back with a whole big tub of the right sizes but they were drain fittings. Drain fittings have a shorter glue joint than pressure fittings and so you do not want to use drain fittings on a pressure system. It's okay for the drainage part of it, for the outlet, but not for the pressure side of it.

35:42 Don't make that mistake, okay? And use those drain fittings that have a shorter glue surface. My environment our water tends to choose stuff up pretty fast. I'm going to sit acidity level. If it's not brass or plastic, don't put it in a tank. That's my rule. I am not going to use galvanized. I have spit. We've got, I don't know, probably 25 tire tanks that I've put in and probably another 8 or 10 concrete tanks that had galvanized stuff in them that I didn't necessarily put in and I spend more time working on those than I do the 20 tire tanks that I put in because galvanized does not work in a tank, okay?

36:30 And don't put anything that's threaded underneath the tire tank or where you're going to have a shut off. Those threaded connections just crack and break. So what I do, PVC is if you run along water lines, PVC pipe is way cheaper than the black poly pipe. So all my long runs are PVC, either glue joint or gasket and if I'm going big enough, inch and a half, I'll use the gasketed pipe. You just slip it together and then when I come to a valve I will convert three or four feet away from that valve to the black poly pipe.

37:07 Black poly pipe, because wherever that valve is, if I've got if I've got this and I put PVC into it and then I've got a I've got a handle and I'm twisting and turning on it, that that threaded is it's going to crack every time, okay? Guaranteed. So convert, convert to the three or four feet from your valve, convert from the PVC to the poly and then use a threaded or a barbed connector so that it has a little bit of give, okay?

37:39 Don't ask me how I know that. You go dig a couple of them up and you learn. So water systems, what the last thing here on the tire tanks that I'll talk about is this. I love these big oval mouth float valves. These are my favorite right now. They will flow a ton of water. There pretty much if you get any debris or anything in them they're pretty much self-cleaning. They're about 70 bucks but they are hands down right now my number one favorite. They will work on pressure systems as well if you have a big enough float on them.

38:18 We use big typically now we use big stainless steel and I didn't have one. We use big stainless steel floats. They work really well again and this is a stainless steel I bolt. It is not a galvanized I bolt, okay? No, the one thing I was telling Keith last night, the one thing I have found, this brass stuff has gotten expensive because they changed a couple years ago, four or five years ago now I guess. They changed the allowable lead content in potable water brass materials and that really started jacking with the price of brass fittings.

38:59 Some things aren't bad if it's something that like this that is never used in potable water but almost all your smaller valves and stuff like this, boy, they're going to be crazy expensive and it has to do with the amount of lead that it had to take the lead out of the brass and so that really jacked up the price, okay?

39:22 So water systems, that is that's the basis right? Getting those water systems right allows everything else to function right, function properly, okay? So that so that's got to be where you start. You can put fences and make fences do about anything you want to but getting that water right is job one.

39:40 So we'll switch the fences real quick here. So how do you decide what type of fence to use? You know, there's a whole bunch of questions to ask. You look at existing vines', you look at the livestock to be control. Cost, how much do you want to spend? He's the construction, you know, how intensive do you want to be? You know, do you want to strip graze? How flexible do you want to be? So those are all things you want to use or think about.

40:07 So the right fence is any fence it's going to keep the livestock where you want them to be right? If they keep getting out, somebody was talking about sheep and goats up here earlier. You know, you can you can get by with a lot of things. Most of our system is interior. I'll show you picture ever here in a minute. Most of the interior stuff is all single wire hot wire. You know, my my favorite, my basic way to set places up is about 20 paddocks of high-tensile electric and then go go from there. You know, I think that the Dr. Teague is exactly right at about eight or ten or twelve. You're just kind of just kind of limping along. You kick it up to twenty of a basic system. That's that's my most basic system is is 16 to 20 high tensile splitting all of.

40:56 That with a water source between all those and then use the poly wire to go from there to jump it to 50, 60, 80 or a hundred really fast and really economically. So you know you can have all kinds of livestock, you could have goats, sheep, and it's the defense—that the cost and the fence you're gonna pick and choose is going to be different for every one of those. You've got to decide that and figure that out.

41:22 So there's two kinds of fence basically: physical barrier fence—fence that actually has a physical barrier, woven wire, barbed wire, you know, piper board fence—fence that keeps them in regardless, right? It's some type of a physical barrier and I'm not going to get into that. I think most you guys understand what that is. Those fences do do the job for the most part. The barbed wire fence, after a while, I can't tell you how many times I've seen cows with their head through the fence eating the right away, right? You guys have seen that all the time. The fences get a little loose and the cows start pushing. When they start pushing it gets even a little worse, doesn't it?

42:06 Stand up a little more. So those new function, they are, they are, you don't have to worry about them for a long time. They're gonna be there, but they are very, very expensive. And so if we're putting in a system that's right off the bat I'm going to put 20 paddocks in, 20 pastures in, man, you're talking about some pretty big expense, right? I would prefer to spend my money on the water system and go a little more economical on the fence.

42:33 So what we're going to talk about is electric fence for the most part. We've got what we consider permanent electric fence on the left right there—a hedge post with high-tensile 12 and a half gauge high tensile wire, buried conduit underneath from one gate to the next. That's my idea of a permanent fence. It is there, it is not going to move. Now, in worst comes to worst, if I don't like that location and then 10 years down the road I want to move it, it's not that big a deal to move, right? I have done that. But the thing that really allows us to really ramp up that management and the utilization and all the things that Dr. Teague talked about is the temporary fence. That's a picture on the right there that I took a few years ago of a set of contract cows. Yes, that poly wire right there is laying on the ground.

43:28 Electric fence is not a physical barrier. Just like a while ago when I said you learn really quick not to get into the electric fence with your hand in the water, I don't make that mistake very many times anymore. You know those cows, you want, when they—and this was a set of contract cows that came to Kingdom, came to me new every year. I want a training pen. I want to pen close to the crowd. So when they go into that first pen and their first experience with electric fence, I don't want it to be like 'oh it's a little tingle.' I want it to be put them to their knees. You know what I'm saying?

44:13 So that's the respect that I demand out of the cows from an electric fence. It can be on the ground now. It, you know, they're not gonna stay behind that forever, right? But if I'm doing a good job with my forage allocation, I'm doing a good job giving them the amount of grass they need, and I don't know why I'd really remember why I went out there or why that fence was on the ground that day, you know? Who knows, deer probably. But it was on the ground and the cows were all exactly where they needed to be. A few hours later they probably wouldn't have been, but that's the respect you want out of your cows to make temporary electric fence work and work well.

44:58 And then there's fence that's kind of a combination. This is Harry Cope up near St. Louis. He's got sheep and so he uses this netting. It's electrified, but it's a sort of a physical barrier as well as an electric barrier. That's his winter food source—a cover crop and standing corn.

45:19 Why do people say I don't want to use electric fence? Because they've had a bad experience and that came from something that will happen 30 or 40 years ago, you know? The old fencing 40 or 50 years ago now, because honestly the really good fencing technology has been around for 30 years. So it's probably the most misunderstood. People don't understand how to make it work. It is a thinking man's fence. You have to understand electricity a little bit—you'll have to understand it a lot—but you got to understand some basics. And you got to continually check it and test it. It's not a build it and come back 30 years later deal. It's a build it and keep on it because you will train, and my dad, I have a real problem with my dad—and I love my dad, he's my biggest helper—but he doesn't check the fence as often as he should. If you have a problem and it gets weak or it gets short, so you'll start watching cows and they'll start walking up to the fence and sniffing it, checking it. If you don't check it and keep it hot all the time, you will train your cows to check the fence: 'oh hey, it's not hot today, I'm gonna get out.' And you can train cows to respect it and you can train cows to check and cheat on it too, okay? It is up to you.

46:43 So the pros: it is by far the least expensive, durable, lasts a long time. We'll go through some of this stuff. I've had this reel and this poly wire on here probably braid—I don't know, it's by ten years old. It's a little ratty but it still works good. It's the most flexible, it's the easiest to install. So here's how it works: the basic components of a fence of electric fence, you've got a charger, a fence, and a ground rod. So for electricity to work, for the electricity in this light right here to work, what's it do? It comes in, it goes to the light, it goes back to a switch, and if that switch is open the electricity—

54:30 Get to these in a minute. What he's asking, that one, the six eyes. This one is just a six. The six eyes actually come with a fence tester, that's a remote as well. You can put it on, you can be out on the fence someplace, you can put it on there, hit the off switch, it'll send a signal back to the finch charger and turn the finch charger off. Really cool. Now sometimes if you've got a lot of connections or things that weaken the signal, sometimes if it's a really big system, it won't send enough of a signal back to turn it off.

55:05 Wire, high tensile wire. If you're going to put in a system that's going to be permanent, twelve and a half gauge high tensile wire. A minimum of 110,000. I really prefer the 180,000. If the 200,000 is too hard to work with, the 110, 170—it's called 170, but really it's 110 minimum, 180,000 is a minimum. And that's really confusing, but that's what I would get. Get class three galvanization. They will last forever, really it will. Much longer than typical barbed wire. It's three galvanization treatments, not a single galvanization treatment.

55:50 Yes, if you're going to do much of it, get a spinning jenny. That's the little gizmo to pay the wire out. They're 150 bucks. It'll be the best 150 bucks you ever spent. Do not try to unroll a big roll of high tensile wire without one. You'll waste the cost of the wire and you'll really just frustrate yourself. I'm just telling you.

56:24 So any questions about that? Buy good wind post. You know a good one? What is that going to be? I don't know. You've got to decide. It depends on your terrain. My train, we're up and down, we hardly ever go more than about 50 feet between posts, line posts. I use for the most part fiberglass for my line post. This is a 5/8, this is an inch and a quarter sucker rod. I think down here in oil country, you guys probably got the market on that, so that's what we always use for line post. Hedge I will use, but I much prefer fiberglass. Highs and lows, I'll use a hedge post or I've got some big fiberglass pipe I'm using now which they don't even have a picture of.

57:23 Spacing again, you know. Electric fence is not a physical barrier, it's a psychological barrier. So I don't care if my electric fence sags. You know, if you look at mine, it's got loops in it. I've got places where the high tensile wire is this high off the ground, and if the cow stay in, I don't care. Because we've got so many deer, I know it gets hit by deer a lot, although they learn where it's at. So if you've got loops in it, guess what? All those loops act as shock absorbers. Something hits it, you know? If you accidentally drive through it on a four-wheeler—did that—put in a new system years ago. I put in a new system and I always had a four-wheeler with an ATV seeder on it, and I was putting some clover out and I was clipping along about 20 mile an hour. New fence, right? New place to me, new fence in there. I was clipping along about 20 mile an hour. I saw 12 or 14 deer. One's got horns. Luckily didn't kill me. The wire came across the handlebars, caught me across the chest, came up, didn't catch me there, came up, slammed me into the cedar, and of course, the four-wheeler—luckily my hands came off and it pinned me there. I rolled down to the ground, head swimming from a concussion, and that was the end of the seeding that day. So those loops in the wire are great shock absorbers.

59:04 So you can use knee braces. This is used a ton in New Zealand and hardly ever used in the US. You know, putting a knee brace in there to pull against for single wires. Floating angle braces—that's kind of my favorite. If it's someplace that I have a lot of pull, it's a brace post that sits on top of a piece of concrete or something. So when it pulls, then you put a wire from the end of the brace post around the bottom of the corner post, and you put a tightener in it. So if you shorten this wire, it pulls the brace up. So you can take a corner post that's bent and put a brace on it with a wire around it, and over time you can pull it back straight. Those floating angle braces are by far the cheapest bracing you can do.

1:00:07 There's a lot of other things. There's little floating ones that people make for T posts. I've done some of that a little bit. Steel pipe in your area down here, right? A lot of different things out there. You know, typical H brace. This is a good one right here. You guys see anything wrong with this one? Just the H brace corner post on a barbed wire brick brace. Brace wires wrong. It's all that. When driving down the road, that's not a very old picture. Driving down the road the other day, a couple neighbors down. Go figure, must have hired somebody to do it.

1:00:51 So insulators, you know, black obviously is preferred. Almost all of them anymore are UV stabilized, so that's not a big issue. I don't really care for the porcelain ones. So you got pin locks. I really like pin locks as opposed to the ones that turn in. If you've got an existing fence, these offsets work really good. I've got a couple of places where I had existing fence that wasn't very good. Come in with an offset on it. You can extend the life of an existing fence by a long time because that electric fence, there's no pushing, there's no shoving, is there?

1:01:36 So poly wire will get into this real quick. There's a ton of different products out there. You know, it started out years ago with just little cheap reels. This is just a one-to-one gear. There's no gear in it, one handle around.

1:02:07 They first came out with it's just a spiral wound. You want to make sure that they have at least six strands of electrical conduit in it. It's plastic and steel thread, steel filament. So this one is really little thing—you've got tape and tape is very visible. And we started out with some tape, but because it's wide it flutters in the wind and it breaks down a little quicker and it is way more expensive and you can't get near as much of it on a reel.

1:02:41 So we've got these little cheap ones that we use for across gates or down in a ditch or someplace that we don't need a long stretch. They're just really cheap and easy to use from that standpoint. And then we got our workhorses. So this one is actually a—there you go, see right there. And that's what gets when you haul it in—it's not tight. These will hold a fourteen, fifteen hundred feet of this poly braid, and instead of twisted it's braided and it's much, much stronger. Although this one you can see has got a bunch of splices in it that comes from hanging the reel on the back rack of the four-wheeler with the exhaust right here. Plastic and exhaust heat don't work very good.

1:03:48 So they would—I prefer now is they make a mega reel. It's wider and then will put the same amount of twine on it, will put about fourteen or fifteen hundred feet on it, and then it doesn't come out as far to the edge so you're less likely to have it come off. They do, and I had it laid out and it just didn't get loaded for some reason. This is an end that's all plastic. My favorite now is one that's called the zapper. It's plastic but then it has a metal rod running through it that you can tie the poly braid to the metal rod, and then the other end has a plastic hook and then a metal hook so you can hook it on it and make it hot or you can hook it on it and make it cold, whichever way you want to do it.

1:04:37 So these are geared reels. If you'll watch this, the handle goes around once—it's like a fishing reel, the handle goes around once the bobbin goes around three times. This is called a three to one geared reel. So if you're rolling up, you want to roll up a six or eight hundred feet or a quarter mile of wire, you got to have a pretty stout arm, but you can roll up a quarter mile in a couple of minutes.

1:05:02 So those are really good. There's other things here. Before they came out with the little zapper, the little handle to connect, they made these things just a little jumper al—get her clip jumpers so you can hook to a hook to a high tensile wire to make it electric. And then you can hook on—you can either hook on to the wire like this or they make a little thing right here you can hook on to to jump the electricity from one to the other. The problem with these is that after a little while they end up like these because that coated wire doesn't conduct electricity. All your little calves come over and say hey, what's that little bright red thing hanging there? And so they grab on to it. So we don't use those anymore except in special circumstances.

1:05:52 If we want to make a fence hot with one of these, we'll hook the fence and then you come to the other end where you're going to hang it on your high tensile wire and you just wrap it a couple times, hook it on your high tensile wire and makes it hot. The less craft you have to carry with you the better. So I carry posts and reels and a fence checker and that's about it, but I carry with me on a daily basis. Handles spring gates where we add honor.

1:06:43 Handles and posts and stuff. Spring gates—these are really cool. And you know I got a friend that I've known for thirty years and he came up deer hunting this year and he's got a handful of cows. He's not a full time guy, but he's got a handful of cows. He saw these spring gates. He's like man, I never I've never seen that before. You know where do you get those? Well, at the gate in store, write it, find you a good dealer. You can see the difference right here with the handles—how much slip they have. So a lot of difference there. I like spring gates. I like the white ones because they're really visible.

1:07:23 There's tons and tons of different kinds of step in post. You got the old standard here—the used to be O'Brien's, although they got bought out now, yellow and blue. There they also make quite—I think. But these were kind of the standard for a long time on what for electric fence that needed multi wire. These were and probably still are they're standard. I've got some of these for weaning calves and different things. So you like them, right? There's a lot of others you can buy. You can buy the brands that come from the thanks guys. You can buy the ones that come from the local farm supply store that end up breaking off like that. They'll break here or they'll break right here. They have too big of a foot, you can't stick them in the ground, or they break off too easy. So those are junk.

1:08:21 You also got to have a few junk ones around anyway. There's different ones out there. I've tried over the last twenty years—I've tried virtually every brand out there. Some of these have no tensile strength. You bend them and then they stay bent. You want ones that have good tensile strength that don't do all that. These, for years these were my favorite. These were a pal and these were my favorite, but they quit manufacture. Over here they don't have for the U.S. anymore. There were a New Zealand company. These were my favorite. They were indestructible. That this little deal was the deal my dad came up with. We needed a second wire to keep some calves from getting out in one place, and so he just took an old rebar post insulator and stuck on it. He'll weave right around there. So get ones with good tensile strength to them.

1:09:27 Newest favorite is the coil on it doesn't get tangled as easy. It's really stout, got a good foot. These are my new favorite right now.

1:09:57 There's all kinds of ways to make temporary fence. I've seen people use steel post with different little braces on them, gizmos and gadgets, little hat posts to hang reels off of, hooks on them. I've got some I had something made, some little steel ones to hang. But that's why I like it—because of our situation, it's got to be fast and easy. It's not going to get done in our operation. So I don't move water and any fencing stuff that we do has got to be a real and post. I'm not going to schlep a big old metal thing out there and stick up. That's why I like a 15 to 20 paddock high tensile system with high tensile wire split, and everything. So all I have to do to subdivide it infinitely is a real and compost and I'm good to go.

1:10:56 I've seen people use these. I've even had one or two of them. The problem with these electric fence cord reels is for the most part they're not UV stabilized. So you have them outside in the sun for a summer too and they break down. They also don't have a latch, they don't have a lock on them to keep them from unwinding. So they've got to have a latch and those don't have them. They're easy for different things, but for the most part, you spend your money on good stuff. Grounding systems are the biggest problem that most people have. Have good ground rods. You want it says three and a half feet for Jewell—that's going to be a minimum, I think, particularly in drier country like you guys have got down here. Some of your country even requires probably a hot wire and a ground wire return wire. Don't mix metals. Don't mix copper and galvanized or copper and stainless steel. You'll get electrolysis, you get corrosion between mixed metals.

1:12:05 Arresters. I don't have one of those in here, maybe I do. A lightning choke or a lightning arrester—this little thing right here. Put one of those on there, it'll save you a lot of dollars from lightning hitting it. I'll show you how that works here. It's just gonna sit right here. So that's lightning arrester. If you look here, you got your fencer and then the ground rod for the fencer is over here, and then this is the ground array for the lightning choke. So if I back up here, the fence charger is back this way, the fence is this way. So if lightning strikes out here on my fence, lightning comes down the fence, it hits that coil right there. It goes right into here and it tries to go through that coil to reach the ground rods to make the circuit. But the lightning is so powerful it can't go around that coil, so it backs up. It's a resistance to it, so it jumps and it arcs across this thing. It comes down over here into this ground wire that has more ground rods on it than my fence charger does. So the strongest ground is not the fence charger. The strongest ground is this lightning arrester rods. The lightning is always looking for the best ground, the fastest way to the ground. So it saves your $500 fence charger. And you think it won't do it? I've seen electric fences where people called me. They'll be there, five or six fence insulators melted and there, fence chargers laying in pieces. Lightning is very powerful.

1:13:58 I got to blow through some of this. Handles—we talked about handles already. These are those gates. Try to make your truck—don't carry electricity through a gate. Put an under gate cable so that when the gates open, the fence on the other side is hot. If you've got cattle in it, again, that's a way. If it's cold and you leave the gate open for some reason, you're gonna start training them to check fences and you don't want to do that.

1:14:26 Switches and volt meters—we talked about switches. There's all kinds of them out here. There's little ones, there's big ones, there's red ones, there's green ones. Spend some money on two or three of them. Get them. We've got like, because you're gonna plant one here and there, they don't grow worth of crap. Lost two in one summer. My hard guy lost one. My dad lost one. Hundred bucks apiece. You don't go without one though.

1:14:55 There's all kinds of other little gizmos and gadgets in here. This is for a gripple tightener for gripple. We've also got clamps here for force splices, just all kinds of stuff out there. Again, just like if you've got equipment, if you've got row-crop stuff and you've got the right tools to fix that, guess what? I can take this bucket right here. I can take this bucket and I can go build any kind of fence I want with the stuff in this bucket. I got everything in here that I need.

1:15:30 Flood gaps. If you've got water gap, right there the little thing in red is something that's called an energy limiter. So if you've got electricity to the wires or to the things hanging down into the ditch, if water comes up it's going to short your fence out, right? They've got little gizmos that are called energy limiters, current limiters. It senses flow going to that and it throws an internal switch so it doesn't short the rest of your fence out. When the water goes down and there's no short anymore, it kicks it back on and electrifies it again. Pretty cool.

1:16:11 So just a couple things to wrap up here. How shape is gonna affect utilization and trampling and which one takes less feet of fence. You got four, three squares there. Which one, if you look at the red—which one do you got four paddocks in each of those—which one of them takes less fence? The one on the left, right? Takes less fence. It also is more square, it's a little more uniform.

1:16:45 I'm coming back just to subdivide it. It's going to be easy to subdivide, although the one in the middle is going to be really easy to subdivide. It's just going to be a long narrow strip in it. Okay, so here's a picture of one place that we run and you can kind of see all the yellow. The outside is obviously a perimeter fence for the most part. It's barbed wire or woven wire. When we do build barbed wire fences for perimeter fences now, we do two barbs, a smooth steel hot in the middle and two barbs on the bottom so that way we've got electricity anyplace we want it. Also keeps them from pushing and shoving at all on that fence. Okay, so that's my perimeter fence from now on.

1:17:32 And then all the interior fence, all the yellow is all single wire high tensile electric, twelve and a half gauge high tensile electric. So we'll zoom in a little bit and so you can see here most of these paddocks, with the exception of the one up here in the top left, and that thing is touchy. This is about a twenty acre paddock. All the rest of these are about twelve or fourteen acres, fifteen acres. And so the water tank, this is the long gravity line that locked up on me. It's a that pond up at the top. There's a water line that runs from it all the way down through to all these. What I like to do is, depending on herd size, come in, push them down to the strip closest to the water tank. If you look closer to the water tank, they'd get that strip. And then depending on herd size, I can adjust based on herd size how big of a strip I want to give them.

1:18:38 So we grazed the first strip off and then we don't ever put up a back fence in this on this place. We put up a fence, they've got this strip. We leapfrog, we put another fence up, we pull this fence. They have access to the whole thing, but they stay basically on the new strip. They don't go back at all. And so that's kind of what I like to do. It gives me a basic paddock, and if I want to go on vacation and guess what, they get a whole paddock and I don't have to mess with it. But if I have two hundred cows in there, I can adjust it to a certain size. If I've got one hundred cows in there, I can adjust it again. I can make it as big or small as I want. And these principles that we're talking about right here, this is grazing. It doesn't matter if you're talking perennials or if you're talking annuals in a crop field. The same principles apply to all this.

1:19:37 Okay, some equipment. This was Neil Dennis, was mentioned earlier. Neil was probably the first person that I really knew years ago that just got fanatical about having the right tools and the right equipment to do the job. You know, the first time or two I went up to visit him, man, he had drills and racks on his Kubota. And he had it down. He timed himself. He knew exactly how long it would take. And so we all learned a lot of things from Neil. A lot of people did, and he was a great teacher. He really was. So get a system, get it figured out what works for you. It's gonna be different. The one on the left there is my rig. It's a simple rack. The rack on the back is actually a mesh rack, but it's a rack made for the front of a full wheeler, but I didn't want a great big one. I want a small one, so I put it on the back. Welded a couple of rods on there to stack post on, hang a reel on there. You do. When it's full though, you need to have a tarp strap to put over top of it or those posts will bounce off. I keep finding posts that we've planted all the time. The reels again, they just hang on there and put a tarp strap over them and hold it in place. Here's one on the right that I think was Jimmy Elizondo's, if I remember. A lot of different people have got all kinds of different racks out there, different things. Garth Lloyd, you don't even need gates anymore. A lot of people are using posts to hold the wire up, train your cows to do it, and they'll go right through there.

1:21:21 Okay, then we've got a couple different ones here. Portable mineral feeders, the one on the four wheeler with everything, including a rear view mirror from a guy out in the Dakotas. Okay, he can set up a lot of stuff from that. And then the last thing to think about is livestock handling. You know, I think particularly if you're a person that maybe hadn't had cattle in the past, you know, I've got a lot of row crop guys are starting to add cattle here and there. You need to understand some basic stockmanship skills. Spend some money, go to a stockmanship skill. And heck, maybe you've had cows your whole life. Maybe you need to go to a stockmanship school worse than anybody else. It's been some time. There's a lot of good ones out there. We learned a lot from Bud Williams, who's gone now. His daughter and Richard McConnell are doing a lot of good schools, and there's others out there. So spend some time, go learn some good stockmanship skills. You know, we get contract cows in and we do a lot of crazy stuff. This is a set of cows that got moved two miles down a road across a couple fields, two hundred fifty pair, and it was me and my dad. You know, and so you got to learn good stock. These cows, once you were rotating them, it's a different herd. Okay, it changes their behavior. You can do things like this because they know, hey, it's lunchtime, let's go over here, right.

1:22:57 And so just in a summary, you know, look around, learn from others. There's a boatload of people out there too that will teach. You know, the one thing I found about grazers in particular is, man, they are so willing to help. You know, you go to any grazer and they're gonna spend all day and they'll tell you every trick and every idea that they ever thought up. They'll share it with you. So spend some time and learn some of that stuff and you'll short-circuit that learning curve a long way because there are a lot of things you have to learn. Okay, that's why people don't do it. That's this whole grazing thing. It's easy, but it's not simple. Okay, and you need to understand that you need to have the right equipment, the right tool.