Fencing Tips To Make Your Life Easier

When I started using electric fence back in 1997, I knew so little that I wasn’t even sure which questions to ask. I remember spending a lot of time on the phone with a Kencove salesman asking questions, not understanding his answers, ordering things anyway just to see if looking at them would help me make sense of them, and then working through problems a little bit at a time. Maybe this is how everyone starts, but at the time I thought that most ag folks grew up with this knowledge, and my project partner and I started making a list of things we learned called “Stuff Farmers Never Tell You.” Later I learned that fencing is a life-long learning project. So, with that in mind, here are some tips and hints you might find helpful.

Here’s how to tie your wire electric fence to end poles.  Ralph Harris of NRCS Arkansas demonstrates how to tie a sliding knot that allows maximum flexibility.  What I really liked is his demonstration of breaking the wire off easily so you don’t need a cutter.

In this second part, Ralph shows how you add an insulator to the piece he just made. His wrapping method is something I wish I’d known back when.  And it’s a way of making parts ahead of time, say on a rainy day when you don’t want to be in the pasture. A bonus is that using these sliding knots, your fence is adjustable enough that you can use the same fence for a cow, then adjust it for goats or sheep.

Last but not least, Ralph shows how he ties the fence to the insulator. What I like is how he adds flexibility by leaving a wire “tail” that can be used as a jumper to tie the wires together, just like Wayne R talked about last week, or for a gate, or for anything else you might need down the road.

Thanks to the Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture in Oklahoma for making these videos possible and available.