Fencing

Good day,

We are looking to expand our goat herd and to add a horse to the pack. Looking at the price of no-climb or woven horse fence has me wondering what other solutions might be out there. Ideally we shall rotate the animals perhaps every month or seasonally. That all depends on quickly they be grazing our pasture and woods.

We shall run the hens after the hooved creatures. We have electric poultry netting for them. Perhaps they could hooves and feathers live joyously together?

what are your thoughts? what has worked for you?

thanks for reading.

As an owner of 2 horses I would encourage you to put a lot of research into this. The amount of grass they eat combined with how low they cut it to the ground can be counter to your goals.

As far as fencing, it was recommended that the fencing holes be small. I think the reasoning was to keep the holes smaller than their feet in case they bucked and foot hit the fence. I have not had anything like that happen. If not small, then big, like pipe fencing. But that doesn't help with smaller animals like chickens, sheep, etc.

Fencing overall is a fairly cheap way to protect your animals.  Don't get lured into a false economy of cheaper alternatives.  Cheapest is rarely the least expensive.

Good fencing will not only keep your horses on your property, it will keep other people's animals off, and will prevent injury to your animal.  Inappropriate fencing can lead to direct injury to your animals (e.g. hoof getting caught), or indirect injury (e.g. allowing predators in, or not effectively containing your animal thereby exposing them to being hit by vehicles, shot by neighbors, accessing hazardous terrain, etc).

I've not tried to run my chickens with hooved animals, so no idea if that would work OK or not.  If your fencing will contain chickens along with the horses you can give a go, but be prepared to separate them if the horses either purposely or accidentally start killing the chickens.

just happened to see rolls of red top goat fence at store a week or so ago. $229/330ft, its an investment, that's for sure

We’d much rather get the fencing right the first time. :) we are able to rotate the Hooved creatures between a few pastures of about an acre a each. There’s places to ride near us too.
The fencing we are most considering is no climb horse fence of about 5ft. With 2 strands of wire up top to make it 6ft in height total. It’s about $200/100ft. Not cheap but it’ll keep our goats and horse in. Mesh is small so no horns or hooves can get stuck.
Is that the sort of fencing you have?

If woven mesh fence isn’t also protected by a hot wire, the goats can and will sometimes climb on it. My Lamancha billy would stand on it then force it down so he could climb over it.

ohhh goats are so curious...we do have electric poultry netting. Perhaps we should be considering this for our other creatures...

Sena Kassim wrote:ohhh goats are so curious...we do have electric poultry netting. Perhaps we should be considering this for our other creatures...

You'll need to train the goats to the electric netting.  Otherwise they'll just run through it.  DAMHIK.