New Post

What every Porcine enthusiast needs.  Compliments of my Son in Law..






New posts are indeed going in.  About enough for an acre.  With the advent of more pigs we want to get them out to pasture.  To frolic in the sunshine ( as if..) wallow in the pig wallow, eat the lusious grasses.  Root the Rooties.  We are also thinking of using the unused horse barn to shelter an increased herd as we are hoping our Yorkshire gilt and one of the Berkshire / wild boar crosses can work their magic.  A nice addition to the barn will be water and power & light and perhaps heat.  A later project.

But first things first, I need to keep the pigs inside the one acre lot and the bears outside.  Not to mention the occasional cougar.  So we're surrounding the place with a five wire barb wire and five wire electric fence.  Yup, that's ten strands in all.  Two electric strands on the inside, three on the outside with the  five barbwire strands.  This requires repairs to existing fence lines which were in poor shape.  Strong arms too long and broken.  Posts badly out of whack.




We shortened the strong arm spans to ten feet and used 7 inch posts for the upright posts and 3 inch strong arms on top.  A way strong line for barbwire fencing, and too short for electric which will only connect via stand offs  to every second post.


Not having a fence post pounder we had to improvise.  Brother Tom made a metal toothpick, about three inches in diameter with a hook welded on and a holder so that the holder guy ( the brave one ) can get out of the way:




Takes a bit to get the post vertical, but close enough for our work.  This part of the fence will be used for a holding pen prior to butchering.

Seeing that we are going to be using electric fencing in addition to barbwire I now have a new part of the yard to run the week whacker through. Our outside construction schedule has certainly be slowed by incessant rains.  Its a rare sunny day so hopefully when the chores are done I can get the straight wire on the strong arm hold backs.


The Chicks are growing well and I will soon have to build some nests for them.



Hope your day is just clucking along nicely..

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hello Arthur....did you notice the weather eport for the next few weeks......maybe summer has arrived
About time you got back to work ...on your blog. Missed you.

So sorry you have to work so much harder to keep your piggies safe. We use just one electric wire for our adult hogs. We charge $2.50 a pound for our hogs, I believe you should get at least $22.50 a pound for all your investments !!
Art Blomquist said…
Anon: Hope springs eternal

Donna: Is that 2.50 on the hoof. Here we get about a $1.00 a pound live weight.

I could get away with one wire I suppose but it would have to be a big one!
Yes, we get $2.50 a pound "hanging weight" as we call it here plus a $25 delivery charge. Our restaurants pay that for a 200 pound hog and are happy to do it because they hate the confinemnt hogs even though they can get them for about .75 cents a pound.. They love the taste of pasture raised pork and we love them for loving it !

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