You sure did not want to accidentally touch it. The charger put out 8,000 volts, and some days, with low vegetative load, we would hit 10,000 volts. We kept a back fence and started with 3 strands of polybraid electric wire powered by a Stafix 36 Joule charger. We started at our water source within each large paddock and made wheel spoke shaped paddocks. Jacob, our ranch manager at the time decided that he would like to try strip grazing the sheep flock with daily moves using polybraid. The sheep ate the best plants into the ground which weakened their root systems. Overgrazing was another issue I had with this kind of rotation. This was not a good management practice, but at the time it was the best we could do. It is amazing how much manure can build up in a campsite area in 7 days, and the sheep are getting constant parasite pressure through exposure to their own manure. ![]() This constant camping out on one site for 7 nights is a perfect environment for infecting sheep with parasites. (Of course with our guardian dogs, predators have never been an issue.) The sheep always picked out a campsite for the night, usually up on top of a hill where they could easily see predators approaching. It always bothered me, though, to see the effects of leaving a sheep flock for 7 days in one 5-10 acre paddock. So the permanent paddocks were a great compromise for our sheep operation at the time. I physically did not have time to be moving sheep every day as well. I was still working in town at the time and moving 3 herds of cattle morning and night. It was 16 weeks before we returned to the first paddock – enough time to allow the plants to fully recover from grazing and ensure parasites were not there to re-infect the sheep. But once it was completed, all we had to do was open a gate once per week to move them. It was a ton of work to put in that much fencing to hold the sheep. We had 16 weeks of paddocks that we could rotate the sheep through with their guardian dogs. In this case, we put in permanent electric hi-tensile 4-wire fence on part of this farm to hold our sheep. Since we will have this farm lease for the rest of our lives, we can make some capital improvements that we normally would not make on leased land. How in the world could I affordable fence 12 leased farms to keep sheep in? We brainstormed a plan to start our sheep operation on part of our lifetime-lease farm. My biggest concern with bringing sheep onto our farms was the fencing. The cattle would eat some of these undesirable plants but we needed more pressure put on them. ![]() When we bought our first flock of sheep 16 years ago we had 12 leased farms and were being overrun with sprouts and weeds.
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