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Barbed Wire vs. High Tensile Electric

B

Ben H

Well-known member
Joined
Mar 20, 2006
Messages
1,738
Location
Gorham, ME
Could someone explain to me why barbed wire is still installed? After working with high tensile the last 15+ years and having to remove old barbed wire fences, I just can't understand why it's still used???
 
Out here electric fences only work in really temporary situations. Like on pivot "corners" and pasture grazing. Our allotment fences are often 15 miles and longer. They are 4 wire, barb fences and we spend a lot of spring days riding fence. The cost to trim lanes for electric fence would be pretty high. Plus, on public lands it would have to be done by hand. Wildlife don't respect electric fence too well. They just blast on through and tear it up. Atleast they sure did on my garden fence. :roll: Our mountain terrain poses problems too. In order to build a good fence you need lots of strain braces to hold the fence through elevation changes. You'd need all those with electric fence too. My guess is short lengths and flat country would work better. But i am wrong a lot! :D :wink:
 
Because it would be near impossible to keep up with electric fence all over the county. A good barb wire fence maintained will last quite a few years. If cow's have grass in front of them they don't normally crowd fences that much. I absolutly hate electric fence it's a pain in the rear. I'm sure it's fine for the hobby type's but we got plenty to do other than maintain electric every day after the deer run thru it.

For the life of me I cant see why anyone would use electric high tensil. Differing opionion's on it I'm sure.
 
Neighbour of mine runs about 1000 head on about 5000 acres, all of which is fenced using electric, 3 strand. The big trick is a good grounding system and large capacity quality fencers. Very few deer in his neck of the woods, even though we are only about 6 miles away and are flooded with them. When deer hit his fence with their back feet, it makes them ache for a fair while.

I can only guess that he has probably spent about $15,000 in heavy duty energizers to power the fence.

I am going totally electric slowly. I can't begin to pencil new barbed wire fence into our operation. Perimeter fences will be the last to go electric, but everything in the interior is nearly all electric.
 
i whole heartedly agree with leanin H and denny i have a neghbor who preaches electric smooth wire ,but i just don't see their practicality in large land base situations.with wildlife and under brush to deal with they don't work well at all
 
I'll try to post some pics of a typical fence in this country and you'll see why we use barded wire. You'll also see why I laugh when people start talking about making fences arrow straight. In a few years you're hard pressed to see the fence at all.
 
Around us you will mostly see the hobby farmer with barb wire. It will be rusted out and will have a patch every 10 feet.

We use high tensile 5 wire on our interior and 7 wire on the exterior fencing. We mostly have deer as far as wild life goes and they jump ours not plow thought it. The 2 problems I see with it are when the power goes out and keeping it grounded. Send out the "ground" on the non hot wires and drive ground rod every mile and at the corners of the fence and won't have any issues where I'm at. I found I can use a battery operated fence charger with 3 batteries keeping the batter charger plugged in and I can make it through 2 weeks with no power.

Our biggest problem is our fences getting hit by lightning. But we found grounding the top wire and installing a few spark gap lightning protectors' help to limit the damage we get.
 
As far as power going out, I have a Gallagher smart charger, (MBX 2500) you can hook up a deep cycle battery to it as a backup, it has a trickle charger built in to keep it charged. You could also add a solar panel and be off the grid with it. It's called a smart charger because it will only output the joules you need up to 25. New Zealand and Australia sell the MBX 1500 which is up to 15 joules. It comes with a remote to shut the fencer off anywhere on the fenceline by sending a signal through the wire. It has a low voltage alarm and a high voltage alarm for the ground system. Lastly it has a port (that I don't use) to hook up a siren and light to go off if one of the alarms activate, I'm pretty sure you can also hook up a dialer to call your phone or pager if the voltage alarm goes off.

Jim Gerish talks about his experience moving to Idaho and dealing with the elk herds, it is elk right? Anyway, he learned to lower the top wire on the fence so they kind of go over it instead of through it.

I can go through some pretty rough terrain and pull in different directions. I've had to get created sometimes going through the woods over rough terrain. The big thing I like is when we get a storm and a tree comes down, I cut the tree and the fence pops back up. I think over 90% of our state is covered with trees, there's certainly no shortage.
 
When you are near ' civilization' and elec current and short fence distances it's OK.

But on those western deals where fences can go for miles, no elec hook- up, solar is a joke for a fence that long... "bob" wire is the best.


Here in GA we had hi-tensile on all the bull pens, show pens, turnouts etc., but got to be a pain in the azz and it's all gone now replaced with 2x6, treated ,5 board fences.
 
We only have one mile of high tensile electric fence left. I truly hate dealing with a broken wire and put moose, bear and extreme temp variations together and something breaks. Lots of 3 and 4 barb wire fence here as well as many miles of electric fence. Easy to roll barb wire up and it doesn't spring back at you. Would never have a need to make high tensile if they were counting on me to buy it.
 
With the cattle that are run around here high tensile would be too costly. You would have to put up the wire up 4 inches apart to keep the cattle from pushing through it. Then electric fences would be hard to maintain because of brush that growing on the fences, Plus the way the wild hogs are if you was to put up electric fence they would take it down the first time they hit it. Most of the ranchers around here are putting up high tensile net wire to keep the hogs out of the hay fields.
 
I'm with the original poster on this one - not much time for barb wire on our place. When we took over it had a perimiter 4 strand barb and a few cross fences, now it must have over 30 miles of single strand high tensile creating the permanent field divisions. Cheap, simple and a revolution in cattle and grass management. Admittedly electric is a pain where you have bush growing through it - we try to go around these areas rather than through them. As for powering them that's no problem - plug it into a wall socket but if we couldn't do that we could use solar powered. Lots of deer, moose, snowmobiler traffic go over/through/under our fences every winter but a couple of days tidying up in the spring repairs any damage. I don't mind high tensile electric wire - that single strand high tensile type barb should be banned though it is horrible to work with. Had a friend install new 5 strand barb around one quarter last summer to keep in a few hereford cows - it probably took him more hours and certainly more money than it took me to put 30 miles of electric in.
 
We had about 80 miles of fence on our eastern Colorado ranch. All of it was 4 or five strand barb wire. A few summers ago, we used some CRP ground and put an electic fence around it.

Turned out to be a huge problem. First, the cattle have to be used to an electric fence and know enough to stay away from it. Then, they learn to stay back and the weeds and grass grow up around it and it shorts out. The weeds get high enough to hide the wire and the cattle wander through it.

In our country a good barbed wire fence properly installed will last 40 or 50 years. The only thing that hurts them is bulls fighting and antelope crawling under.

However, about the time we finished redoing our fences (some dating back to the 1930s), the price of steel went way up and it costs $5-6000 a mile now. We paid about a third of that. And the railroad and highway department paid for a lot of it.

We did use a solar powered charger which worked well - still use it around our garden.
 
Barb wire is still the permanent fencing solution. It takes longer to install initially and cost more per mile but divide your costs over 30 years and your talking pennies per foot. It's been mentioned before but maintenance is always a big issue with any fence but especially for electric.

That being said, I really like using electric in rotational grazing on irrigated meadows or on pivot irrigated quarter sections; where you may not wish to install a permanent fence.
 
Just a point, long stretches in rough country can work very well with electric if done right. Use 1 wire, unless along a major highway I suppose, but keep it loose. Why does it have to be fiddle string tight? As long as it is taut enough to stay out of the grass, it's good enough. That way when the wildlife hits it, it springs with them instead of snapping. Same for temp fluctuations or snow drifting. I've seen folks string it from tree to tree through brush country, using a big enough energizer and not too tight, works great.

Thousands of miles of it are used in Aus/NZ in rough country too. Can't be all bad. As for the cattle needing to be trained to it, is that their fault, or management? :wink:
 
Thousands of miles of it are used in Aus/NZ in rough country too. Can't be all bad. As for the cattle needing to be trained to it, is that their fault, or management[/quote?]


Got your drift PC. We were in a drought situation and put about 400 head out of 1500 on the CRP ground. The water was strange as well. They figured it out in a couple of days. That was the only time we ever used electric fence. We put permanent fence on all the pastures. Of course, the highway people and railroad build their fence. all 4 wire barbed wire.

We bought about 150 replacement one year that came from the mountains. They had never seen or heard a train. When the first coal train came by, they left - through some brand new barbed wire fence. In a week, they paid no attention to the train. We should have put them in a pasture a ways from the tracks, I guess. We get smarter every year.
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Just got in from doing a little temporary electric fence project on a new quarter we are renting this year. It has quite a few areas of willow bush on it plus some decent open flats and a river. Used some of the light weight 17 gauge wire for the first time - 1/4 mile for $15. I set up three short fences going in different directions all connected to an old solar charger I got free from an oil lease fence. Materials total $60 for wire, posts and insulators etc. Time to complete 1.5 hours. Estimated benefit through controlled grazing extra 5 AUDs/ acre worth 70 cents/AUD - total $500+ in year one. Where else can you get that type of return on investment in agriculture? If I am not grazing there next year I can pull the materials and use them elsewhere.
Our cows all know what electric is and if they forget there is a 6300v reminder right there. I have never seen cattle that can't be contained with a single wire electric. Sure they might need trained first but that's a 2 day project shutting them in a small field/corral with an offset electric wire from the barb fence.
 
We have a neighbour that uses electric where he grazes old hay land and I have to admit it works well there. My pet peeve about it is that my cows don't know anything about electric fences until they get in with his cows. By that time they are 'educated' and won't leave..... even through the open gate. It can turn into a real gong show trying to convince these 'educated' cows that that spot is now safe. :?
 
Silver said:
We have a neighbour that uses electric where he grazes old hay land and I have to admit it works well there. My pet peeve about it is that my cows don't know anything about electric fences until they get in with his cows. By that time they are 'educated' and won't leave..... even through the open gate. It can turn into a real gong show trying to convince these 'educated' cows that that spot is now safe. :?
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I've got a rented pasture that has a overhead electric wire at a gate and one cow won't ever cross into the other pasture.
 
Just got in from doing a little temporary electric fence project on a new quarter we are renting this year. It has quite a few areas of willow bush on it plus some decent open flats and a river. Used some of the light weight 17 gauge wire for the first time - 1/4 mile for $15. I set up three short fences going in different directions all connected to an old solar charger I got free from an oil lease fence. Materials total $60 for wire, posts and insulators etc. Time to complete 1.5 hours. Estimated benefit through controlled grazing extra 5 AUDs/ acre worth 70 cents/AUD - total $500+ in year one. Where else can you get that type of return on investment in agriculture? If I am not grazing there next year I can pull the materials and use them elsewhere.
Our cows all know what electric is and if they forget there is a 6300v reminder right there. I have never seen cattle that can't be contained with a single wire electric. Sure they might need trained first but that's a 2 day project shutting them in a small field/corral with an offset electric wire from the barb fence.
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Out here water is too scarce to do any rotational grazing on 80% of summer pastures so we just put 4 barbs around the whole works.
 

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