GM88 said:
RSL How do you roll up the high tensile wire. Do you put a drag on it. The 1/16 inch cable was quoted to me for 125.00$ for a 4000 foot roll. Does it work well for you.
We generally unroll in the fall, and roll up in the spring, and only use 1 roll of high tensile. We have a hydraulic pump for the wire roller, but have not got it hooked up yet (one of those later, never kind of jobs). a bit of weight helps at the end, but 3/4 of a mile of wire dragging on the ground has a lot of resistance in itself.
The cable rolls really nicely since it is highly flexible. I plan to build an extended 9/16" bit for the drill to fit into our 7L to roll cable, but we are usually only rolling out/up 100 to 200' at a time. We have a permanent fence running north/south with the 7L on the north end of the fence about 20' to the east of the permanent fence. We pull the cable out to an anchor post at X distance, creating an alley that runs north/south. Then we run a speedrite reel due east from the south end of the 7L cable. We run another speedrite reel south of that headed due east from the permanent fence to create a paddock that is oriented east/west with a north/south alley out of the NW corner. When it is time to move cows we then leapfrog the 7L cable to the south speedrite reel and spool the next south reel from the permanent fence.
The 7L reel was pricey but it has doubled our grazing days in the first year on the acreage we use it on. I expect to see that double again over the next 2 years.
For our swath grazing we split the field with high tensile (once a year) and then leapfrog reels down the field. With so many reels I can set up enough that I can go away for 2 weeks and not have to worry about chores at all. We will do the same with our bale grazing. Average chore time spent feeding in winter for 200 cows and 200 feeder calves is right around 1/2 hour a week, although we will still check calves every day.