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Good fencing is essential to a cattle operation, more important even than shelter. Poor fencing makes for bad neighbors and sleepless nights. If your cattle are constantly in the neighbor’s cornfield or causing a traffic hazard on your road, your neighbor and the local sheriff are going to be upset. So you’ll need to make sure that your fences are heifer high and bull tight.

Well-fed and calm cattle are about the easiest farm animals to fence. Hungry and scared cattle—and those in heat—will jump, break, or trample a weak fence. The fence around your property boundary should hold your cattle no matter what mood they’re in. You also need a fence that will discourage them from reaching over or under for a taste of some fragrant plant on the far side and from using the fence as a scratching post. Those sorts of activities break wires and let the herd out for an unscheduled field trip.

Whether building a new fence or rebuilding an existing one, you’ll need to pay close attention to the wire gauges, post spacing, and bracing. General guidelines and options for cattle fencing follow. For more detailed fence-building instructions, find a do-it-yourself book or a neighbor who can show you how to build it right. Fencing projects are best scheduled for early spring while the ground is still soft and the air is cool.

Out with the Old

Most small cattle operations are started on old farms, and old farms generally come with old fences. If the old fence is still in somewhat good condition, you may be able to get a few more years out of it by running a single electric wire along the inside of the fence to keep the cattle from scratching and leaning on it. If the old fence is half-buried in weeds and strung on rotted or rusted posts, the sooner you can take it down and replace it with something new and tight, the better. Otherwise, you’ll be lying awake all night wondering if this is the night that the cows will make a break for it.

Taking down old fencing is a slow job best done in cool weather, when it’s comfortable to wear the heavier clothing you’ll need to protect yourself against those sharp wire ends and barbs. First, clear away as much brush and as many weeds as necessary to uncover the fence, and then you can start on the fence itself. Take along a bucket, fencing pliers, and heavy leather gloves. You’ll also need a post puller, a handy device that looks like a tall jack, which you can borrow from a neighbor or pick up at a farm-supply store.

To disassemble a basic barbed-wire fence, start at a corner. With the fencing pliers, remove the metal clip holding the bottom wire to the post and throw it in the bucket. Continue removing all of the clips along a couple hundred feet of fence. Go back to the corner and spool up the wire in a big doughnut shape. When the doughnut gets heavy, cut the wire with the fencing pliers and lean the doughnut against a fence post for later pickup. Then go back to the corner and do the same with the other wires, working from the bottom up.

After you’ve removed all the wire, use the post puller to yank out the metal posts. (If they are U-posts instead of T-posts, you may have to rig a wire loop on the puller to make it work.) To pull wooden posts, you can pound a long nail into each, leaving a couple of inches sticking out, then rig a rope or wire loop under the nail and around the post to pull it out with the post puller. Even better, if you can get a four-wheeler, tractor, or vehicle with a trailer hitch close to the post, you can put a loop of chain around the post and then run the chain over the top of a tall board stood on end (next to the post) and down to the trailer hitch. Drive away slowly, and the board will tip over and pull the post up and out.

Immediately fill any holes left by pulled posts to prevent animals and humans from stepping in them and twisting an ankle or breaking a leg. Whichever pulling technique you use, be aware that rotted wooden posts will often break off at ground level, which will save you the trouble of filling the hole, although you may have to do so later when the remaining wood rots. For expediency, I have even sawed off posts at ground level instead of pulling them out.

You can burn old wooden posts, but save any usable metal posts for the new fence. Load up the bent and rusted metal posts and the old wire, and haul them to a junk dealer or a recycler.

Have a fenced area ready for your

In with the New

The two most practical options for a new cattle perimeter fence are high tension and barbed wire. A high-tension fence is the Cadillac of fences, long lasting and presenting a significant physical barrier even to a half-ton cow. It is also more costly than barbed wire. However, even though barbed wire is the cheapest type of fence to build, it will still cost some real money for posts, wire, clips, braces, and a few tools. Your agricultural extension office or fence dealers should be able to give you information on costs so you can budget for your fencing project.

High-tension fence works best where you have long, straight stretches to fence and a decent budget. Because the wire is heavy and stretched very tightly, it requires excellent corner braces and some expertise to install. The wire, made extra strong for these fences, is stretched so tightly and anchored so well that tree branches and even cows bounce off after hitting the fence.

If you have lots of curves and corners to fence, old-fashioned barbed wire works fine for cattle, although it’s not usually recommended for any other type of livestock. For a perimeter fence, use a minimum of four wires.

High-tension fences are often electrified, adding a psychological barrier to the physical barrier of the wire. An electric fence, on the other hand, creates a purely psychological, rather than a physical, barrier for cattle. An electric fence power unit pulses a static charge through the fence wire. When a cow touches the fence, the charge flows through her to the ground and back to the ground rods attached to the power unit, completing the circuit and giving her a healthy jolt. When done correctly and well maintained, electric fencing is extremely effective for subdividing pastures and keeping groups of cattle separate.

Always use smooth wire for electric fences; it is illegal in many areas to electrify barbed wire. To augment your barbed wire with an electric barrier, you can use offset insulators to mount a smooth electric wire along a barbed wire fence. This is a good combination, especially if you’re keeping a bull separate from heifers.

The standard low-tension, soft-wire permanent electric fence uses permanent posts and works well with three wires. The top and bottom wires carry the charge, and the middle wire is a grounded wire. This is necessary for those times when the ground is covered with snow or is very dry and acts as an insulator rather than the receiving end of the circuit. A cow sticking her head through the fence will connect a hot wire with a ground wire and get a jolt.

Portable electric fencing, built with lightweight step-in posts and usually a single strand of plastic wire, is used during the grazing season to temporarily subdivide pastures into paddocks. This fence technology is slowly revolutionizing grazing in this country. For relatively little time and money, livestock owners can subdivide pastures into paddocks to manage their grazing, which improves pasture growth. You can set up and take down portable electric fencing almost as fast as you can walk because all it requires is stepping a line of posts into the ground, then unreeling the wire and popping it into the clips on the posts; some even come with the wire already attached.

Cattle are quick to figure out when an electric fence is not working and will walk through it if the grazing looks better on the other side, so check electric fencing often. It’s also critical to exactly follow instructions for sizing and installing the power unit and for grounding it properly with a series of copper rods.

If your cattle are unfamiliar with electric fencing, you’ll need to train them to recognize and respect it. To introduce them to the concept, run a temporary electric wire along the inside of a wooden corral or a holding pen fence. Out of curiosity, the cattle will see the wire and sniff it, giving themselves a jolt on the most sensitive part of their anatomy—the nose. Because the solid fence is in front of them, they’ll back away rather than jump forward at the shock. Once they’ve figured out what the wire means, take it down. You don’t want it there when you’re working cattle because if one should touch it accidentally, you’d have some upset cattle on your hands in uncomfortably close quarters. If you have cows that know about electric fences with new calves that don’t, you needn’t worry. The calves will learn without any special training.

Any fences enclosing a confined area where cattle might be crowded or stressed from handling—such as corrals and holding pens—should be made of heavy-duty wood or metal. These fences should be high enough that cattle won’t even think about jumping them: at least 5½ feet for small, calm cattle and 6 feet or higher for large cattle or cattle unaccustomed to people or to being handled. Build these fences low to the ground, too, so your cattle won’t try to scramble underneath. It’s amazing how small an opening a cow will try to get through when she’s frantic.

All pasture fences should be at least 4 feet high and have a wire close enough to the ground to keep calves from scrambling underneath but not so low that you can’t trim the grass under the wire. (I put the bottom wire a foot off the ground.) When building a new fence, make sure to leave enough room to use a brush mower or weed trimmer on both sides, and avoid installing the fence on steep banks and close to rock piles and big trees. Keeping fences clear of vegetation at least doubles their lifespans and makes the inevitable repairs much easier to do.

Gates

All fences need gates for moving cattle, people, and equipment in and out of pastures and pens. In your corral and handling facility area, gates should be solid metal or wood and bolted on so a steer can’t stick his nose under the bottom rail and flip it off the hinges. Metal and wooden gates are wonderful in perimeter fences, too, but if your budget doesn’t allow for as many nice gates as you would like, you can build a “poor man’s gate” by extending the fence wires across the gate opening. Instead of attaching them to the post at the far side, attach them to a 4-foot stick. Put a wire loop at the top and bottom of the gatepost. To close the gate, insert the ends of the stick into the wire loops.

Did You Know? Lay out your fences and gates for ease in moving your cattle. It’s much easier to move cattle through a gate in a corner than through one in the middle of a long, straight stretch of fence. Field gates are usually best located in the corner nearest the watering or grain-feeding area because your cattle will be moving back and forth between water and pasture regularly.