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. |
Feeding Beef Cattle
Cattle Biology
Cattle are ruminants, members of a class of grazing animals with four-chambered stomachs adapted to digesting coarse forages that other animals cannot utilize. Consequently, cattle—as well as sheep and goats—can make use of land too rough, rocky, dry, or wet to grow crops for humans.
Cattle pick their meals by smell and taste, and then they graze until the first chamber of the stomach, the rumen, is full. Because they have no front upper teeth, just a hard pad, they tear the grass instead of biting it. (This is also why cows don’t normally bite people.) Watch a cow grazing, and you’ll see it grip a bite of grass between the pad and the lower front incisors and then swing its head a little to rip it off.
The long muscular tongue, as rough as sandpaper, is useful in quickly conveying grass back to the throat. The tongue is also used for grabbing grass, for licking up those last bits of grain, and for a little personal grooming (although cows aren’t flexible enough to reach around too far). Copious amounts of saliva—up to fifteen gallons a day for a mature cow—moisten the grass so it slides easily down the throat.
Once the rumen is full of pasture grass or hay, the cow will lie down in a comfortable spot and, mouthful by mouthful, burp it all back up again. Because it initially swallowed without chewing, the cow now brings those huge rear molars into play and takes the time to grind up the grass into a slimy pulp before swallowing it again, this time into the second stomach chamber, the reticulum. Chewing cud, as this process is called, takes eight to ten hours each day and involves up to forty thousand jaw movements.
From the reticulum, the cud moves into the omasum and next to the abomasum, the true stomach, then down the intestines. What’s not absorbed comes out the back end. Because a cow’s diet is high in fiber and fairly low in nutrients, an awful lot comes out the back end, ten or twelve times a day, for a grand total of up to 50 pounds of manure every twenty-four hours.
Along with all undigested organic matter and dead gut bacteria, cow manure often carries the eggs of internal parasites, or “worms,” as most people call them. Cows won’t graze near their own manure, an evolutionary response to the parasite problem. But cattle show no discretion as to where they poop, so pastures need to be large enough or rotated often