More trouble with sheep and fences

9/27/2022

“Babette, the sheep are out again! Can you check if the ram is out?!” an urgent call from Mark, who has ensconced himself inside the straw bale studio. It was not the first or the last time the sheep were out (although it was the only time someone hid in the straw bale studio). We have had more sheep escapes than we can count. What is going on? We use electric fence netting to keep our sheep in the pasture. Electric fence netting is the enclosure of choice for literally thousands (tens of thousands?) of shepherds who are practicing rotational grazing like we do. Why can’t we get the sheep to stay put like everyone else?

Before we tell this story, two bits of background information to help the reader understand what we're doing.

First, rotational grazing 101. This is when you move the animals around frequently (every day or 2-3 days), mimicking natural grazing behavior. A short, quick graze induces grass to send out more roots (putting more carbon in the soil) before growing back using the fertilizer left by the animals. Moving the animals also reduces the ability of poop parasites to spread (since poop can’t move and follow the sheep to their next paddock) keeping animals healthier. Farm luminaries like Allan Savory, Joel Salatin, and Gabe Brown (Dirt to Soil) practice it as a key to habitat restoration, carbon sequestration, improving soil, plant, and animal health, and with all that, the financial bottom line. We are really excited to try it and have sheep mainly with the intention to work with them to improve our sandy soils so we can grow big healthy nut trees and get CO2 out of the air.

Second, electronics 101 (thanks to Mark). To get an electric current that will give a shock if an animal touches your fence, the electricity must be able to run in a circle. A common system is to have a solar charger with a positive and a negative pole, a fence with positive netting, and 1 to 3 metal grounding rods set 3-6’ into the ground. You connect the positive pole on the charger to a positive fence wire, and the negative pole to the metal rod. When nothing touches the fence, there is no current, because the electricity can’t run around. But, when an animal touches a positive wire, suddenly electric current can travel from the positive pole in the solar charger to the wire, through the animal, down its feet into the ground, through the ground back to the metal rod, and from there back to the negative pole. And voila, we have made a circle, or in electronic parlance, a circuit, which gives the animal a shock. Who knew earth can conduct an electric current?

With that basic knowledge in hand, all you need is to learn how to set up and move the electric fence system around and how to get the sheep to go to the paddocks. Since I hadn’t the foggiest notion of either of these things, in 2021 I acquired a small library of sheep books and watched a couple zillion hours of you-tube videos on moving sheep and fences. Steve Gabriel (Silvopasture) had warned that there was a steep learning curve for putting up the netting without getting tangled, but we soon mastered it all and had our workaway guests doing it too.

Starting in May 2021, we moved the fence, the solar charger, we pulled out the ground rod and reinstalled it near the new fence location each day. Moving ground rod was the biggest pain in the whole routine, which nobody ever mentions. More on that later. We moved our small herd of five sheep from the barn to the paddock and back each day by taking along a bucket of grain, which they followed, and giving it to them at the destination. Many farmers leave their sheep in the fields overnight, but we bring ours back to the barn for safety, hence the daily back and forth.

For a while, it worked like a charm. I felt like such a pro shepherdess!

Then one day in June, I got a call from Cori, who was staying with us and looking after the sheep while I was away for a few days. “The sheep are out!” She tried to catch them and chase them back to the barn, but sheep run faster than humans and it only resulted in very frustrated humans and totally panicked sheep. We later learned it works better just to let them do their thing for a while and eventually lure them home with some grain and a bucket. But from that time on, sheep escapes became a regular occurrence.

We found out the sheep were escaping because there was no current in the electric fence, despite the charger, the ground rod and new fencing. We were stumped. Eventually, we learned that dry and/or sandy soil can’t conduct electricity to complete the circuit, and since we have sandy soil and were experiencing a drought, this was the likely cause. The solution is a positive-negative (PosNeg) fence. This is a fence that has both positive and negative strands, so that an electric circuit can be completed within the fence, bypassing the route via the earth and the ground rod. Mark jerry-rigged two of our fences into PosNeg ones and they served us well the rest of the summer. Another benefit was that we didn’t have to use the darn ground rods anymore either.

Except for the crazy adventures when we added three new sheep to our flock (recounted here), all went well until in November, when the grazing was skimpy in the paddocks. Hungry, the sheep learned that at the end of the jerry-rigged PosNeg fence was a section that had no charge at all. Being clever sheep, they were soon leaving the paddock pretty much right after I had brought them there. Sigh! Well it was time to keep them in the barn on hay for the Winter anyway, so we let the fences rest for some months.

The next Spring, with the ground still pretty wet, we decided to use our Positive fences with the ground rods again since these did not have the charge-less section. To keep the system going, we decided to use three ground rods, and we dealt with the daily hassle of putting them into the ground and pulling them out again. One solution proposed by Dougherty’s (The Independent Farmstead) is to have lots of ground rods all over the place, although you have to be careful with placement so they don’t interfere with each other and it’s a big investment. Sigh. We tried something else suggested in the literature, which to keep the ground rods in one place and use a long wire to connect them to the fence as it moves around. This resulted in a tripping hazard in the field and huge tangles of wires. So we went back to moving the ground rods with the fence (grr). Then, as July came around with another drought, the ground became drier. Sure enough, the sheep started to escape again, and that was when Mark called for help from inside the straw bale studio.

This led to a little cascade of changes again. We thought we would purchase a new PosNeg fence which didn’t have the shock-free zone. We also thought maybe we would live with possible sheep escapes, but we would reduce their potential for danger by removing the ram from the flock. Removing the ram required us to make a small barn, which we attached to a permanent pasture that we had put up for Winter roaming. In the meantime, we kept all the sheep in their bigger barn, and for a few weeks, we scythed and weed-wacked greens for them every day. We would fill our 4x6 cart with a pile about 4 feet high and this disappeared in no time. Sheep eat a lot! We were glad when the little barn was finished so we could move the ram with a ewe he especially likes and her lamb, and start using the new PosNeg fence for the other sheep.

We had almost solved our problems. We love the PosNeg fence with its lack of ground rods. And, after the ram was gone, the remaining flock became completely attached to me. They followed me wherever I went, so it was super-easy to bring them to the paddock and back to the barn. But then, I noticed the grass in the paddocks was a little dry and wouldn’t it be nice to give this lovely, docile flock some free-roaming time at the end of the afternoon? With that thought, I let them out at 4 PM and they all got to wander about, until I called them around 6 to go back into the barn. It took them about two days to figure out that free roaming was much nicer than following me to the paddock. As I said, sheep are clever. It was my fault: I had created the monster. At this point, I sat down in the grass and had a little cry. Maybe I would sell all the sheep – I just could not manage this rotational grazing thing.

I realized it would be pretty sad to sell all the sheep. What we needed to do was to reduce their degrees of freedom. Rather than having the sheep go through an open field to the paddocks as we had been doing, we set up a flexible system of chutes, or runways. The chutes take up quite a lot of netted fencing, which is expensive, but we happen to have a lot of extras because of all our trials and errors, so this solution works us. We have one main chute with netted fencing that goes from the barn and runs up the side of our large field about 10 feet from the dense forest edge. From the main run, we use two netted fences to build out chutes going across the field. On day 1, there is no side chute; the paddock just starts at the end of the main run. On day 2, we build out the side chute just long enough so we can set up the new paddock next to yesterday’s - this uses up only part of the 164’ fence so we carefully lay the remainder off to the side. On day 3, the side chute is one paddock width longer, etc.. With our paddock sizes one netted fence is long enough to accommodate five paddocks in a row. The main run can go up four rows, so altogether this system gives us 20 days of paddocks. In the morning, the sheep run out of the barn and just follow the chute to the paddock, and in the evening, they run back – if they dawdle or look to the side, I can just shoo them up the chute. Very satisfying. I am the shepherdess again, goddess of sheep. For now.

Below a little video of letting out the sheep with chutes.