Fences for Goats and Chickens

Barbed wire criss-crossed our Tennessee farm when we moved here four decades ago. Some of the wire was wrapped around or stapled to rickety fence posts. But most of it was nailed or stapled to trees — not a safe or sensible practice. And then one of our Nubian dairy goats got her udder tangled in it. So our first major project was to remove all that barbed wire and replace it with suitable fences for goats and chickens. But what kind of fences?

As we soon learned, installing a fence is a major investment in time and money. But buying materials and putting up a fence is only the second half of building a fence. The first half is researching and planning to make sure you’re building the right fence for the job.

The more we looked into the subject, the more discouraged we became about selecting just the right fence for our purposes, our terrain, our climate, and our budget. Each system has its own inherent strengths and weaknesses. As we learned, there’s no such thing as the “right” fence, only the right fence for its purpose.

High Tensile Fence

Eventually we settled on high tensile electrified smooth wire for fences that define the pastures shared by our goats and chickens. High tensile wire has built-in springiness that allows it to be mechanically stretched until it’s quite taut. The wire’s strength provides a physical barrier, while electrification provides a psychological barrier — nobody wants to get zapped!

The goats steer clear of the fence, so they stay put. But the chickens sometimes duck under the fence to visit our orchard. That’s okay, because they eat bugs in the orchard and scurry back home if they sense danger. And, so far, predators haven’t been eager to follow them through the electric fence.

While we were happily building high tensile fences all around our various pastures, a well-meaning and fence-knowledgeable acquaintance insisted it was absolutely the wrong kind of fence. High tensile, he said, is suitable only for vast expanses of flat land out west. It definitely is not, he insisted, suitable for Tennessee’s hill-and-holler terrain. He convinced us that our fences for goats and chickens should be electric net fence or line wires made of polywire — plastic “string” shot with steel threads.

Polywire Fence

An electric polywire net fence is cheaper than high tensile and much easier to install. So it sounds great in principle. But in practice it turns out to be less than ideal. At least for us. Other people highly recommend the stuff, but we had nothing but trouble with it from the get-go.

For one thing, it needs constant electricity so poultry, pets, baby goats, and predators won’t tangle in the net. If you live where power outages are frequent, as we do, you must take great pains to ensure the fences are always fully functional.

But even when the fence is fully electrified with the best energizer, chickens tangle in the polywire net, getting zapped by energy pulses, meanwhile tearing holes in the net. Plus we’ve found plenty of dead turtles and bullfrogs trapped in the fence, hot or not.

Other issues include the difficulty of keeping the net from sagging, even with extra posts added. Problems getting the posts into our rocky soil and drought-ridden clay. The inconvenient corner guy wires that are easy to trip over but difficult to mow around.

Before long we tossed out the multiple electric net fences we had so enthusiastically acquired.

But we continued to use single strand poly line wire to cross-fence our pastures into smaller paddocks. We also used it to extend the high tensile fences we hadn’t finished building. That, too, turned out to be a big mistake.

Deer that seem to believe our goat pastures are for their benefit constantly break the polywire. And baby goats just ignore the wire and walk right through it. And the mower persists in snagging and snapping the wire. Plus polywire eventually degrades, anyway. So besides needing constant repair, it needs frequent replacement.

Meanwhile, the portions of high tensile fence we originally installed decades ago have remained functional with little input from us, other than occasionally mowing along the fence line. So, as time allows, we have been gradually replacing all the polywire with high tensile wire. And berating ourselves for not having done that in the first place.

Fence Connection Tool

An indispensable method of connecting two ends of tensioned wire is a little thing called a Gripple. It’s basically a small metal rectangle with two parallel tubular holes running through it. You insert the two wires you want to join into opposite ends, and interior serrated rollers lock them in place. You then pull the wire tight with a Gripple tension tool.

Our old Gripple tool, which we have heavily relied on since we acquired it around 1990, recently decided to give up the ghost. I contacted the Gripple company about getting repair parts, but learned that parts are no longer available.

Not only that, but our old tool is now a “piece of Gripple history” and is “truly an antique.” Imagine that!

To make a short story shorter, we sent our old broken “antique” tool for display at Gripple’s North American office in Aurora, Illinois. And we now use a brand new, updated version of the Gripple tension tool so we can continue building the high tensile fences we started so many decades ago.

Not All Is High Tensile

To be clear, not all of our fences for goats and chickens are smooth high tensile electrified wire. In a some places we put up post and plank fence, both because it looks picturesque and because a few areas are just too confining to safely use electric fence.

Chain link fence surrounds our garden and our two smaller poultry yards. We also have field fence in some areas, as a less expensive alternative to chain link. Both of those types of fence include electric offset wires to prevent climbing predators from gaining access.

But to define the pastures shared by our goats and chickens, we still find nothing beats the high tensile electric fence. It’s easy to mow around, easy to maintain, and so far has done a terrific job of keeping critters in and predators out.