The Corral

On all but the stoutest built farms (such as 21^st century dairy farms, for those of you in Wisconsin), livestock control is more of a suggestion than a compulsion. A negotiation, maybe. The livestock will go to or stay where you ask of them, but only if you ask in a certain way and only if you cater to their preferences.

For example, in a pasture setting with laying hens, we can keep the hens where we want with relatively lightweight 48” tall electrified netting. A hen can easily fly 10 feet in the air, so the net is nothing but a suggestion, but it's a suggestion that they comply with nearly all the time. We're not asking too much - we provide shelter and shade, protection from predators, plenty of foraging, fresh water and feed. The ask gets bigger if the grass is overwhelmingly lush and verdant across the fence ("greener on the other side"), and bigger yet if they ever run out of feed. Rarely, but on occasion, the ask is to big, and the hens will demonstrate to us that all along the fence was nothing but a suggestion and their cooperation is conditional - first one hen, then one hen after the next will adventure up and over the fence to explore the other side.

Pigs are similar, in that if we cater to their preferences, they will pretty well stay put where we suggest and will even move to where we ask. Unlike a chicken or laying hen, we can’t physically force them to do anything. At night you can just walk up to a hen and pick it up. During the day, you can usually catch it and put it where you want. Not so with a pig – even a 50 pound pig is almost too much for a single adult human to control, and good luck catching it out on pasture. Since we can’t physically control any but the smallest piglets, it is even more imperative than with hens that we negotiate wisely to control the pigs – make a reasonable request, give the pigs what the pigs want, and provide reasonable encouragement to do what the farmer wants.

At Farmcraft, we don’t have the infrastructure to compel them to do anything. Instead, we use the fact that "pig" or "piggy" is basically synonymous with "strongly food motivated". We encourage pigs to load a trailer by putting some feed on the trailer floor. We call or lead pigs to a new paddock by showing them fresh forage and feed. We get them to stay in their paddock by making sure there is plenty of forage and daily or twice-daily feedings. The suggestion of their paddock (the fence) is defined by a single polyester 3/16” electrified string. If they aren’t happy they can and will leave the “fence”/string.

I once spent the better part of a day pleading with a particular pig to please load onto the trailer. Usually we just chuck a scoop of feed on the trailer floor and the pig(s) come scurrying in. This pig wasn’t so easily persuaded, and when we walked physically closer (moving into his “bubble” or “flight zone”) to encourage him to move forward onto the trailer, he turned to the side and deftly hurdled over the single strand of electro-polywire that had previously contained him, without fail, for 9 months. It was a clear demonstration that the fence, even electrified, is nothing but a suggestion. Put stress into a pig’s life and it will go right through, or even become the impossible flying pig, and go clear over your suggestion.

Cattle are bigger yet. Adults are 800, 1000, even 1500 pounds. Obviously, unless equipped with the heaviest and most robust of confinement infrastructure, fencing and handling of cattle is a suggestion, a cooperative effort between human and cow.

Our farm’s interior fence (the fence that separates one field from another, or today’s grazing paddock from tomorrow’s grazing paddock, or that defines a cattle and equipment lane) is a glorified white string. It is electrified, but it is far from surefire containment. If you put pressure on the cattle, or if they put pressure on each other when playing for fun or dominance, someone will get pushed through, under or over the polywire string. It happens. Our exterior fence, on the other hand, the fence that separates our farm from the neighbor’s farm, is more stout – 3 strands of 12½ gauge high tensile steel wire, pulled pretty tight and electrified. Everybody knock on wood, please – to date, the cattle have respected the exterior fence suggestion and have stayed on our side of this fence.

Below: Interior polywire single strand fence

Below: Exterior 12-1/2 gauge high tensile fence (and a broken insulator)

We don’t have a way to compel the cattle to do anything, and since cattle are not nearly as food motivated as pigs, the lack of cattle handling infrastructure is somewhat of a problem. Some of our cattle are halter trained – they’ll follow you on a lead rope looped around their face and over their ears. A couple others are so friendly they can be grabbed by the head or pushed on the rump and they’ll go where you want them. But the rest are not so easily handled, and this is a problem for loading trailers, doing artificial insemination, separating cows and calves, separating bulls and heifers, etc. During the grazing season, we move the cattle every 24 hours. This is easy – they’re happy to move from the old patch of grass to a new paddock of fresh pasture. They’ll follow me across the whole farm, accustomed to having me lead them to fresh food in open paddocks. To get them to go into a more confined space, like a 12’ wide alley, is a bigger ask, into a trailer is a huge ask, and to separate a single animal away from the herd and into the trailer is like asking water to flow upstream – just ain’t gonna happen. That is, unless you’ve got a submersible pump and poly pipe, or a ram pump, or at least a bucket.

We’re getting some new cattle, and if the occasion arises that we need to move some water uphill, we would do well to at least have a bucket on hand. So we finally bought some physical fencing infrastructure – medium-heavy built “paddock panels” or “round pen panels”, made of 1 ¾” tubular steel, each 12’ long, 5’ high and about 100 pounds. Some portable panels pinned together won’t amount to much persuasion, compared to the stoutness of a confinement dairy or a major beef operation, but it’s tremendously exciting to me that, hopefully, we will have more control and ability to persuade our cattle to stay put, stand still or load up.

Here is a picture of our new cattle handling infrastructure. In the picture, it is set up as a round pen, to receive the cattle immediately after unloading from the trailer, where they will settle down before going onto the rest of the farm. We can also configure the panels to make a workable sorting pen or trailer loading pen.

Thanks for reading! Pictures of our new cattle coming soon.