I need help with rotational grazing setup

[texascockatoos]

I've had my dutch belted for over 10 years but recently moved to 58 acres, where the grass grows (when it rains), no cactus and no rocks. My girls are in heaven even with the sparse vegetation they have access to right now. The 58 acres was covered in pine trees. Spring 2021 the forestry people cleared out 15 acres for a pasture and thinned the pine trees in the rest of the property. I currently am not able to get in among the trees with a mower but the cows do get in there for days at a time. So the pasture area will be expanding each year.

I want to have a way to allow the girls a way to the barn daily for milking then allow them to return back to the paddock for grazing. How do I do this with temporary electrical fencing?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[josiegirl]

Depending on how hard the ground is you could set up tposts and step in posts with the polywire, my husband actually build a super simple fence with a few wooden posts we had lying around, a few tposts and step in posts with scrap polywire. It has held up incredibly well over like three years now. We had no idea what we were doing when we build it. We now have high tensile electric around our pasture and plan on using step in posts and polywire to rotationally graze. We're gonna need a couple different paddocks so should be interesting to figure everything out next year! Hoping were able to figure it out!!

[texascockatoos]

My ground is a sandy loam, step in post work great.
My perimeter fence is a 5 strand barbed wire.


If the cows are in a paddock across the pasture area from the milking barn, how do I get them from the paddock to the barn and back? Do I run an alley lane down the middle of the pasture? Then run the rotational grazing paddocks off to the sides? If I do that, how do I electrify the alley lane?

[treatlisa]

It sounds like an alley is the way to go but over time you can keep working out what works best for your setup. We keep several chargers around so that we have options for charging the lone fence here and there. Also, there are short jumper wires with clips available to attach to an existing hot fence to light up one that is close.

58 acres sounds great! I wrangle just 4 here so I can only dream of 58! Nice.

[rosalind]

You don't necessarily have to electrify the alley... If your cows are pretty respectful of electric in general.

Our alley is just part of the whole electric fence setup, so it's hot. We have gates into each pen and as you open a gate, it's just the same distance as the alley, so we can hook the gate latch on the alley fence.

Here's a picture of my field: spiritedrose.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/pasturepens.png

Or if that link doesn't work, it's on this page: spiritedrose.wordpress.com/jersey-cattle/2b-feeds/rotational-grazing-pastures/

I find the aerial photograph (snapshot from a Google Map) to be helpful in deciding where to put fences.

Oh, and for temporary, step in posts with an occasion T or wood post are easy to set up. I'd recommend starting there, then if you like the design, you csn slowly put in more permanent fencing or at least a permanent alley with temporary paddocks.

[Kelsey]

Sorry, not much help on the fencing, but just wanted to give a warning about pines if you didn't know already.
Certain pine species (Ponderosa for sure, can't remember the others) will cause abortion in cattle if they eat the needles.