Step 3: Portable Fencing Equipment for horse pastures
Hi there!
You are now committed to looking into what you will need for portable pastures. Pat yourself on the back! You are on your way to implementing your adaptive grazing plan.
You can purchase the equipment needed for adaptive grazing for less than $500. You can have adaptive grazing spaces around your farm and get your horses out on a paddock within a week.
Here is the list:
Polywire/Poly Tape - $50-$100
Step in posts ($152/50 posts)
Energizer (solar or Energizer+battery) ($250)
Shade (optional)- FREE (TREES)!
1. Poly Wire/Poly Tape: You first need to decide if you want to use, Polytape or Polywire. These products are equally effective, but the polytape will take up more room on your reel than polywire. Some horse owners feel their horses can see the polytape better than polywire, so they naturally want to use something more visible. In our experience, if you move the horses during the day when they can see the new space, it doesn’t matter either way. We feel the poly wire is easier to roll up and put into the stakes than poly tape. It also doesn’t sag much since it isn’t as heavy as the tape strands.
2. Step-in posts are essential to your adaptive grazing plan. We are currently using plastic step in posts. The downside to these posts is that they break with excessive force during significantly colder weather. We now use a rubber mallet to pound them in because it has become very dry in our region over the summer. The “step in” option wasn’t effective, and the mallet has been a game changer. When you are pulling them out, they may feel stuck. If you gently kick the bottom of the post to loosen the stake, it will pull up easily. If you carefully put them in and pull them up, they will last many seasons.
3. Fence Chargers: Thank goodness for technology and the many options on the market for electrifying portable fencing. We have used many options, and they all tend to work well. We may prefer one option over the other depending on equipment cost to animal ratio or portability of equipment.
Solar Chargers: Solar chargers work great when you are moving animals daily. This solar charger will work great for you if you have a lot of sunshine, as we do here in South Carolina. They are light, durable, and generally dependable throughout the year. Our favorite solar charger is the Gallagher series solar charger. It has withstood many moves, and the parts have not broken on the device. It offers a consistent charge and continues to work after over two years of constant use. Another option is to use an energizer plus a marine deep-cycle battery. You will need two batteries so that one can be charged and ready at all times. We like the Speedright 1000 plus a 12 V battery for our horse paddocks. This way, the weather will rarely be an issue affecting fence performance.
4. Shade- Depending on where you are and your land, you may or may not have available shade. We are in South Carolina, where it gets sweltering during the summer months. Horses can and do often go without shade, but we know that given a preference, they would always prefer to have shade available. We have constructed a shade mobile out of an old hay wagon. It now has adjustable “wings” that expand during implementation and fold up during moves. A great option with adaptive grazing is that you can easily incorporate shade into your daily pasture plan if you have trees near your grazing areas. A couple of ideas include:
Make a set of trees or barn your central point to your pasture rotation. You can rotate circularly if a bunch of trees is in the middle, or you can make a path back to the shade, as I did here in this video.
Use a mobile shade device- If you are handy and willing to test out your engineering skills, building a shade mobile will unleash all sorts of possibilities on your farm. With shade options, your animals will be more comfortable and peaceful, grazing on your pastures. A shade device can be as simple as a big frame with a tarp covering. Be creative, and it will blow you may blow yourself away!
If you enjoyed this content, consider buying me a cup of coffee to keep me focused on writing great content for all you go-getters out there!
Step 2: Plan your Pasture Spaces
Hi there!
So you are considering taking the following steps with adaptive grazing. Please note that I will discuss techniques for the southeast, which is considered a nonbrittle environment per Allan Savory’s Holistic Management. Brittle and nonbrittle environments refer to how much rainfall occurs in a region and the humidity levels. Where we are, we have significant rainfall and constant humidity throughout the growing seasons. I thought Allan summed it up perfectly when he stated a nonbrittle environment is like a “huge coiled spring.” This refers to areas that have been overgrazed. The first step in bringing vegetation back to these areas is to take the pressure off. The vegetation will come back every time, just like a spring. Once that occurs, you use herbivores for grazing areas on a rotational basis. They will prune the desirable vegetation, stomp out the unwanted weeds, and then fertilize the ground with their manure.
So that’s the overview in a nutshell. But how do you make it work on your farm? First off, you will need to assess areas on your land where you have grass or that you can graze. Many horse owners worry when they don’t have a pretty field ready to put horses on. I tell them all the time not to worry and to just start grazing those areas, and slowly but surely, the grass will get better and better with each rotation.
You can ask yourself the following questions to help determine which areas you will use:
Do you have areas you constantly have to mow?
Do you have areas that are overrun with weeds?
Do you have forests with thick vegetation?
Supplies: The main supplies you will need to be successful will be addressed in the following article. The list is very short and straightforward. You may have to train your horses to Polywire, and this can be done quickly by just putting up a simple one-line fence in their current paddock. To ensure horses respect the poly wire from here on out, you must ensure the wire is hot AT.ALL. TIMES. Polywire will be a psychological fence. For horses to respect it, they will most likely touch it when they see it first, and it will need to shock them. It does not hurt them, but it will ensure that they stay away from it from here on out.
So to sum it up, the second step to adaptive grazing is to pick out areas that need to be mowed, are thick with weedy vegetation, or are neglected areas of your farm. If you do not have a bunch of trees throughout your property, in the beginning (especially during the hotter months), you can use a shaded area as the base point of your rotation.
If you are ready to learn how to set up paddocks, read the next article on the Portable Pasture Equipment