And no I don't mean the sport fencing. Although I sometimes wish I was. I mean the posting digging and wire stretching kind of fencing. Ah!
Early on we decide that we were going to run an all natural as close to nature operation on our farm. Oh boy, did we know what was in store for us.
Since we prefer not to feed our animals with any store bought products or feed we are having to section off areas of our farm for them to graze. We had no idea at first what this meant. But we do now. It means lots and lots of work. But hard work never hurt anyone right... I beg to differ!
Our farm started out completley fenced in. However we had fenced in the land with barb wire. This only works to keep goats in.... well I should say sometimes keeps the goats in. There were numerous occasions that we were called by a fellow neighbor or even the local police letting us know that once again our lovely goats had escaped. I remember the last call a little to well. Back about a year and a half ago we were leaving my parents house heading home after a wonderful meal prepared by my mother. I was about six months pregnant and stuffed to the gill with food and a baby. It was around 11:30 p.m. and my husband's phone rang. We have a 24 hour fire, water, and storm emergency service business so at that time of night it usually means a job. My husband answered the phone with excitement only to hear it was the local sheriff calling to let us know our famous goats were in someone's garden. AH!!! So at mid-night I had my big pregnant belly out in a field chasing our goats home yelling at them as loud as I could with my husband in the truck with the headlight shining on me leading the way. Before you say anything about my husband not being in the field running them down please understand something. He is a man's man and a country boy at heart. Country boys don't drive anything but big loud diesel trucks that must be stick-sifts. And as you can guess I can't drive a stick shift. So there I was stuck chasing the goats home.
If questions I get when I tell this story is... How did they know they were your goats? Funny, it's not like they have collars or anything. Let's just say we have famous goats... famous for getting out of our fences.
So enough about the goats and on to the fencing again. In a nut shell we are re-fencing in the entire farm to house all of farm animals and proper rotate them to graze. This will give us happy health animals that do not need any additional food resources, saving us money as well as keeping the animals in a nature state instead of how commercial farms grow them.
