Fencing for Goats

October 13, 2014 by IH Farm

There’s a saying that if a fence won’t hold water, it won’t hold a goat. After having goats for a few months, I can see the wisdom there. We have had many incidents such as this:

Hi guys! We thought we’d hang out on the front porch.

Luckily the goats will go anywhere for a cup of feed, so getting them to come back into a pen is easy.

Following the feed!

The issue is that goats are smart. Once they know how to escape a pen, they remember. We were using goat panels that we were moving through the woods in order to have the goats clear out the underbrush. Here is an article and video we posted previously of the goats in this pen setup.

The goat panel pen in the woods.

We didn’t use any posts to support the panels because posts would have made moving the pen too cumbersome. As it was, the goats were clearing a pen size area on a daily basis, so moving the panels every day was already a lot. The lack of posts meant the goats could move the panels, though, and they figured out how to get out. Namely, Ash figured out how he could climb up the panels because they’d angle out, creating a climbable incline for a goat!

I’m just trying to get those really juicy leaves out there..

We went back to the drawing board to figure out the best pen that we could rotate through woods, and that would hold the goats. A lot of people use electronet fencing, such as the types sold by Premier1, and that stuff seems to work great. The issue is that it’s a pain to move. It’s heavy, and can easily get tangled. Plus it’s not cheap! Knowing that there are some downsides to electronet, and that the cost for it could be high, we looked in to what kind of portable electric fencing setup we could create that would be easier to move and less expensive. We’ve enjoyed working with polywire so far: it’s inexpensive, flexible, and easy to tie pieces together. We decided to try making a portable electric fencing setup with polywire and step-in posts. We decided to create 100 ft lengths that we could attach together to create larger pens as needed. We put posts on each end, and then every 10 feet. We didn’t tie the polywire to the posts to maintain exactly that distance; we figured we’d want flexibility to move the posts a bit in either direction to work around rocks, roots, etc. We also tied a couple vertical pieces of polywire, connecting all the horizontal fence strands so that electricity would be transferred between them at multiple points along the fence.

In addition to creating the fencing, we had to clear a path for the fenceline. Harley went through with a chainsaw and cut branches, etc. so that we had a clear path to set the fence in. This took less than half an hour, and it was worth it in order to have the goats clear the land in the pen for us.

Clearing land!

Then we gathered up each 100 foot portable fencing section, and took it to the woods! We walked along and stuck the posts in the ground, pulling the last post so that the polywire strands were tight. At one end of each fencing section we attached handles that slide over the polywire tied to the end of the next section. We used two 100 ft long sections, creating a pen that’s roughly 2500 square feet in size.

The goats in their new portable electric fencing pen

Once the fence was up, we had to give it some juice! We pounded a t-post in and set a solar fence energizer on top. It’s important not to pound the t-post in too much, since it’ll need to be pulled up and moved when we rotate the pen. Then we pounded in a grounding rod, too. Again, we made sure it wasn’t in so far that it’d be hard to move later. We then hooked up the energizer and grounding rod to the fence.