Generally speaking, I'm not an electric fence guy. But they do have their place. When in need of a quick fence on a temporary bases, electric can be a good way to go.
Wanting to graze our pasture back home, but not having a north fence in place, we set up about a 500' line of two strand electric fence.
Our freshly planted field of pasture grass is coming along. Depending upon what time of day you look at it and from what angle, it is either encouraging or discouraging. To be expected, many weeds came up with the grass. What also came up voluntarily, is last crop's barley. All that being said, grazing it off this fall and early winter sounds like a good idea.
We plan to put Uncle Chris' sheep in here, so we went with two strand fence. Typical farmers, we work with what we got. Old barbwire can shock a sheep just as easy as smooth electric fence wire. You can also use T-posts and just connect the wire to them with insulators of various sorts. One good thing about electric fence is you can space your posts further apart. We went about 30'.
The charged wire needs to be free of any material the will ground it out. Beings we are running steel brace posts, we had to insulate the wire from the post we were stretching from. Baling twine works well.
Because we are working with sheep, we put the wire down low. It's best if grass isn't touching the wire. For, if it is gets wet it can ground out your charge. So we just ran a trimmer through where the grass was tall.
Chargers come in many shapes and sizes. We find the solar ones to work the best. They take two wire to connect, a hot and a ground. We pounded a ground rod in the ground and attached the negative side of the charger to it. Then attached the positive terminal to both wires that we want hot. Should work.
Usually critters get one taste of a hot charge on their nose and they stay clear of the fence altogether. But if the grass is greener on the other side, they can push an electric fence's limits. We'll see how well this works. One thing we have in our corner is that there is green grass on only one side. They would have to be pretty ambitious to going venturing into the neighbors pasture. Time will tell.
In the distant past when I still had spare time, I'd take an electric fence of the tape type up with me if I was in bear country. Based on experience, it is startling to the bear and can turn them around, at least in the dark of night.
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