Portable Fencing Facilitates Rotational Grazing
Grazing
Rotational grazing makes better use of pastures than season-long grazing, and allows plants time to recover and produce more forage. Many marginal pastures have seen great improvement—in yield and stocking rate—by conscientious rotation. The more segments you can divide a pasture into, the more time for regrowth/recovery on the pieces you are not currently grazing.
The ultimate is mob grazing (which today is often called adaptive multi-paddock grazing), making cattle use very small pieces and moving them daily or even several times a day, which adds a lot of manure and organic matter (litter from trampling the uneaten portions of the plants) to the soil. This is a great tool for people interested in regenerative agriculture, because it adds fertility to the soil and facilitates greater forage production. Temporary electric fencing makes the rotations quick and easy.
Many people who rotational graze create permanent paddocks using traditional fencing or electric hard wire, and then divide those paddocks with portable hot wire (such as poly wire), that can be moved as often as needed to strip graze or mob graze. Portable fencing is also handy for strip grazing in winter—for stockpiled pastures, windrows or bale grazing. Portable fence is a must on rented pastures where a person can’t afford to invest in permanent fences.
Some producers who do intensive rotational grazing use semi-permanent fence for paddocks that may be only 500 feet wide by 1 or 2 miles long, and put a short, temporary fence across those long strips. One rancher in north central Nebraska has 5000 acres and pastures all of it with about 1000 cattle. He uses hill ground during winter when the grass is dormant, then takes the cattle off and lets it recover all through the growing season. In spring and summer he mob grazes all the meadows, dividing them into long narrow strips, and further divides them with temporary electric fence into paddocks less than an acre in size. During the growing season he moves the cattle 5 or more times each day and only grazes each small piece once and then gives it a year to recover.
Fencing
With portable fencing, you can let cattle eat a segment of the pasture, then move them over to the next piece and move the fence along with them. Many grazing systems today utilize frequent moves for cattle, from paddock to paddock or strip grazing fields and pastures with portable electric fencing.
Jim Gerrish, American Grazinglands Services (May, Idaho) has been involved with innovative grazing systems for many years, first as a grazing specialist at the University at Missouri and now as a stockman and consultant in eastern central Idaho. His ranch has very little permanent fence. He runs 500 pairs and moves them daily, sometimes twice daily. “To walk out of the house, go to the pasture, move the fence, and get back to the house takes me about 45 minutes. If I ride the ATV it takes about 25 minutes,” he says.
It’s not very time-consuming if you plan it right. “Each time I move cattle, I’m moving about 1000 feet of poly wire.” He uses 2 fences, putting the next one up before he takes the one in front of the cows down.
“We lay everything out in strips. On a center pivot, these are round strips. On square fields we lay out parallel strips,” says Gerrish. He likes working with strips 600 to 800 feet wide, up to a mile long. A strip 660 feet wide and a mile long is 80 acres.
If the cattle need 20 acres per day, it would take 4 days to get across one of those strips. “You might graze it in 4 or 5-acre pieces by making several moves per day.” This gives flexibility to increase or decrease the number of moves per day.
“If you had a square section laid out in eight 80-acre strips, you’d be moving the same length of fence every day. It would probably take about 12 minutes to make the 660 foot shift,” he says. This makes the system very efficient.
He recommends avoiding designs where you’d have to move more than a quarter mile of poly wire; a standard fence reel holds a quarter mile. The number of step-in posts for that length of fence is easy to carry. “If you go longer distances you need a bigger reel, and more posts. It’s harder to get the job done quickly,” explains Gerrish.
If you have electric fence dividing a paddock and want to move cattle and leave the wire in place—and don’t have an electric gate handle—he suggests using a piece of PVC pipe (8 or 10 feet long) to lift up the wire and let the cattle walk under it. Once they learn they can go under the wire when you lift and prop it up, it’s easy to move the herd.
His son Ian Gerrish (Cobb Creek Farm, in Hillsboro, Texas) has been using portable fences since he was a kid helping his father move fences. He uses a braid poly wire because he feels it’s more durable, as well as being easy to handle. He puts it on a geared reel for unrolling and rolling back up.
When moving fence he generally takes posts out first, unhooks the wire, and then reels it in like a fishing line. “This is not recommended because they say it will shorten the lifespan of the poly wire, but I have some I’ve been using 5 years and it’s still not showing much wear. By contrast, I’ve used other types of wire that would completely fray out if you did this. Reeling it in this way saves time,” says Ian.
He uses O’Brien step-in posts because they are easy to put in without pounding, unless ground is really hard. There are also metal pigtail posts with a metal foot. “If the ground gets hard you can use a hammer to tap them in. With metal posts you can put more curve in your fence than you can with step-in posts; the metal posts hold better.”
If he has to make a curve or corner with step-in posts he has a unique way of bracing, using two posts facing opposite ways, and then an angle brace with another post. “I’ve pulled quarter-mile runs from that pull point with no problems,” he says.
Joey Bootsman has a cow-calf operation northwest of Brandon, Manitoba, and for several years made arrangements with farming neighbors to graze some of their fields, so he uses a lot of temporary fencing.
“We fence some areas as small as quarters, and sometimes three quarter-sections at a time. We use aircraft cable for electric fence and roll it up on big reels. A local business supplies the reels (3000 and 5000-foot capacity), and we use drills for rolling up the cable. We use the 3000-foot length because the aircraft cable is heavy. Typically we unroll and roll it up using quads (4-wheelers). We pound wood posts on corners to hold it, then go along and put step-in posts in between,” says Bootsman.
Rotational Grazing
For successful rotational grazing, cattle must have training with hot wire (calves that grow up with it respect it for the rest of their life), and it takes a good fence charger. In remote areas, far from an electrical source, battery and solar power can work. A 12-volt battery has more power/output than a 6-volt. What you need depends on length of fence, and whether vegetation is growing in the fence. Weeds or grass can short it out if there’s not enough power. The 12-volt is more expensive, but has more power–to handle longer fences and vegetation growing up against the fence.
There are many good solar energizers; some are contained units with an energizer and battery that’s easy to move around. “It fits on top of a T-post and all you need to do is ground it,” says Gerrish. “The solar systems today are very reliable, and you don’t need to worry about power going out or a battery running down,” he says.
You need to check an electric fence now and then, to make sure it’s working. It’s easy to carry a tester; every time you go to the field you can check the fence. Solar chargers are dependable even during long periods of cloudy weather, with the right size battery. “Most of the recommended sizes have a 10-day to 2-week window. It would take that long without sunshine to kill the battery,” Gerrish says. Most of the time you’d have intermittent sunshine to keep the battery going.
Brian Chrisp (a Charolais breeder in Alberta) has been using electric fencing for about 35 years. Many of the materials for portable fencing have improved greatly during that time. “Some of the energizing units are better now, and more portable. When we first started, we were using 110-volt plug-in units, serviced from the ranch yard. We’d run the electric wires on existing barbed-wire fences—sometimes as far as a couple miles from the source—to where we needed the electric fencing to dividing pastures,” he says.
Where the electric wire had to go across a road or gateway, this was accomplished with insulated cables under the road, driveway or gate. “The electric fences have been very reliable. Some people say you need to have the 110 plug-in unit to get the necessary voltage, but I found that the portable units that run off a 12-volt battery or solar power are just as good,” says Chrisp. Once the cattle know about the “hot” wire and are trained to respect it, just about any kind of electric fence will hold them; it doesn’t take much to deter them from trying to go through it.
In recent years the ranch has been using small solar units with a small enclosed battery. The 12-volt batteries were always a worry because of the risk for lead poisoning if cattle gain access to them. “We’d generally put batteries in plywood boxes or have some other type of protective covering but the solar units today are worry-free and low cost,” he says. Today if he has a gate or alleyway the fence has to cross, he just uses a small portable unit on each side of it, rather than having to use an underground cable to span the gap.
For portable fencing he’s used insulated posts, insulators, etc. but has also had good luck running electric wires on barbed wire stapled to posts most of the time. “One thing that really helps now, for maintaining electric fences, is the fence testers that find the shorts. You can quickly narrow down and zero in on the area where your problem is. It might be a wire touching something that shorts it out, or an insulator that’s not insulating. You can check a couple miles of fence very quickly with a fence tester and find where it’s shorting out,” he says.
Today there are many products on the market for temporary fences, with different kinds of wire, tapes, cords, etc. “Some years ago we switched to using 1/16th inch steel cable. It’s light and flexible and you can easily roll and unroll off reels. Durable, tough and flexible; it doesn’t coil like a high-tensile wire does. It’s almost like a light steel string and is very versatile—very easy to put up and take down.”
He uses a lot of that wire on rebar posts—steel rebar cut into post length—with any kind of insulators on them. Those are very easy to pound into hard ground or frozen ground, compared to portable plastic posts that break readily. “We can drive the rebar posts into frozen ground and take them out again. We just give the post a couple twists with a set of vice grips and they come out readily,” he explains.
“Most types of portable posts/stakes that are put in during summer can be difficult to take out in the winter, but anything you pound into frozen ground will come out easily,” says Chrisp.
A few years ago he started building his own spools and winder for putting up and taking down wire. “I was using plastic rollers and rolling the wire up with a power drill, and some of those rollers didn’t last very long. Now with the lightweight steel wire, our reels are simple. We use a piece of fence post for the core, with round plywood ends on it and a bolt through it. This enables us to put it on a ¾ inch rod—either hand held or on the back of a quad or side-by-side—and use a portable electric drill to wind it up again.”
He doesn’t have to do very much walking, with this system and can use a quad in winter or summer. “We are not hand-rolling and walking; we are just zipping it in from the back of the quad.” For dividing a paddock, some stretches are up to half a mile, or even a mile when he partitions off stubble fields for grazing in the fall.
A few years ago he had to move cattle across a quarter section that he didn’t want them on, and move them by himself. He was able to build a half mile of portable fence and move the cows in one hour. This made it very easy to move the cattle across the field through the half mile alleyway to where he wanted them. Having cattle training with a hot wire makes moving and managing them very simple.
“One of the unforeseen advantages of using electric fencing and having the cattle trained to respect it is during the winter months. Winter facilities can be built or changed easily, at low cost with electric fence, compared with having to build permanent pens or fences. When wintering 65 young bulls for a sale, they might be out on 80 acres with just a barbed wire fence. If we want to make the 80 acres into 40 or 20, or 5, we can do it quickly, and create alleyways up to the corrals. They don’t have to be steel planks or something durable to keep the bulls confined,” he says.
“Around water sources in earlier years we used a lot of steel panels and portable panels to keep separate groups of cattle split at the water source. With a lot of bulls, this can be challenging. Bulls are always fighting and pushing each other against the fences. We were having to deal with that, but now we use a single strand of electrified wire coming to the water. Even when the bulls are fighting, they move away from that hot wire,” he says.
Bulls seem to respect an electric fence even more than cows or calves do. They don’t want to feel the shock. “I don’t know whether they ground better or whether they are wimpy, but they want to stay away from electricity. In May when we are calving out on grass and rotating cattle to new areas every few days or every week, we often hear a young calf letting out a bellow, and know the calves are beginning to learn about the fence!” Calves are curious and generally walk up and smell it, and get a shock on the nose, and learn to stay away from it.
Trained cattle will respect anything that even looks like an electric fence. “If we are moving cattle along a road and there are gaps or gates, we can just use bale twine across the gateways and they won’t even think about trying to go through it. You don’t need extra people or vehicles to block a driveway or intersection, and the twine actually works better.”
If people are there, cattle may be curious or balk, but if there’s just a single strand of baling twine they respect it and go on their way, assuming it’s an electric fence. “We have to move cattle past a couple of acreages that have open fronts, but it’s no problem when we put twine across those openings,” he says.
When he sorts cattle, there might be three bulls he wants to sort out of a group of 30 bulls in a 40-acre paddock, and he can convince them to come down into a corner with what he calls a dummy wire. He can then move around within the group confined in the corner, and sort off the ones he wants. The dummy wire could be regular wire with no juice, or just a plastic twine. The cattle don’t question it, once they respect electric fence.
In the spring, if he is still feeding cattle, he often puts up a single strand in the middle of a pasture, and places feed along it with the processor. “This saves on feed, with less waste, especially in the spring when everything is muddy. We can put the electric wire along a hilltop and feed along it with the processor or silage wagon, and the cattle eat along that line and don’t tramp the feed into the mud.” They have a boundary and can’t just walk through all the feed.
On a slab or plank fence that has a lot of pressure, a single electric strand can protect the fence and it will last a lot longer than if the cattle press or rub on it. Electric fencing can extend the life of corrals and facilities.
Some people have problems with deer, moose or elk tearing down the electric fences, but wildlife can also be trained to it. “We don’t have moose or elk here, but we have plenty of deer. After a time they seem to respect a single wire in the middle of nowhere.” Naïve ones coming through may tear it down, but the resident deer learn to respect it, just as the cattle do.
“Years ago I taught at the local college. Later, someone asked me, ‘After being exposed to all that modern technology, what did you gain from the most?’ I told them that for my operation, it was electric fences. It wasn’t big motors or fancy equipment. Being able to use electric fences for rotational grazing was the biggest gain,” says Chrisp.
By Heather Smith Thomas
September 2025
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