Teach me about running a single hot wire for cattle

[petebert]

Been up and running for about 2 months now, here's what I've figured out. Polywire is **** near invisible, sometimes I do a double take because I don't see it and think it broke. Polyrope can be seen from a couple hundred yards away. For trained cows 1 strand will work. I ran 2 strands, thought I might have to run 3. When I first let them onto the field the older cows saw the strands and walked in an arc to avoid them. The 6 month old steers on the other hand... Went up sniffed at it, got shocked of course but instead of backing up they jumped either over or under the bottom strand depending on the height and got loose. Two of them did this within the first 5 minutes. I got them back in and they spent the next 30 minutes getting shocked before figuring it out. Now that everybodys trained a single strand will contain them. I know this because when I moved into a new area I was short on rope and ran a single strand for about 100 yards without any problems. I did up another roll and am sticking with 2 strands just to be safe.

I did 3 t posts in each corner, this is plenty strong enough, no issues there. Like a regular fence I tightened each straight line individually. I'd pull the rope tight, wrap it around the corner insulator and continue down the next straight line. I put white ribbons along the line and it looks like I only had one deer incident. Nothing major but went out one morning to find a fiberglass pole smashed into multiple pieces.

 

[M5farms]

looks good but I would recommend getting the battery elevated , the ground will draw the current from it

 

[farmer2009]

Looks like you've figured out a lot. Good job. Just a couple things I think are worth mentioning.

One thing I see is that as those insulators sit in the sun they'll start to break. Will probably take a couple of years. To avoid this problem I use the round porcelain insulators tied onto post with smooth electric fence wire. Those plastic insulators are made to hold vertical weight not side tension.
The photo below is how I use t-post on problematic corners. Most corners I drive my post at about a 30* angle then let the fence pull it straight. Most places this has held up well, some stay to wet to hold without a brace.

 

[rlneal]

My neighbor says that you cannot build a fence strong enough to keep hungry cattle in. On the other hand, if that cattle are content and have enough grass to eat, it doesn't take much to keep them in. We use a single strand electric string for our pasture rotations and it works well, the cows are trained to it. We had a pole barn built a few years ago, the cows got out because I left a gate open. The cows were eating the grass near where the contractor had his yellow measurement strings set up but they never went near the "yellow wires".

Sometimes we put the cows & bull into a pasture with a woven wire fence on one side. The bull will hop over the woven wire fence to go visit the neighbors cows, knocking the fence down, of course. But he will always leave the electric wire fence alone. I have also seen him jump the cattle guard when we are herding him back home.