What Kind Of Fence Is The Best?

A couple of weeks ago when we had some nasty weather we had a large tree get knocked over.  It lifted up my electric fence which was attached to the tree and pulled a few T-posts out of the ground.  I have been working on the sudden influx of firewood, clearing it out. 

I am writing this as a way to, sort of, explain another of the many benefits to electric fence.  I didn't take pictures so I will try to explain the best I can.  The tree fell and tangled the three strands of wire around the root ball.  The tension it caused made a couple of posts shoot out of the ground, landing a few feet away from where they were.  That means there was a lot of added tension.  However, the wire did not break.  It was stretched about to it's limits and in other places was laying flat on the ground, but it didn't break.  I had to cut it just to get it unstuck from the root ball, but was easily repaired in a few minutes with splicers and a wrench.

I cut the tree out of the fence line, had a friend come over with a tractor and pull the jumbo trunk out of the way and repaired the fence.  The fence repair took about an hour-having to re-establish the fence line and drive the T-posts, splice the wire back together and re-attach it to the posts, then crank out the slack on the daisy wheels. 

Most of the tree is still waiting for me to cut it up, but the fence was fixed in short order and the bull placed back in his pasture (yes, I had a nice shock when I went out to feed him the next day and stared him in the eyes by the barn an hour before daylight., WAY out of where he was supposed to be!  It seems he had been out most of the night.)

In the end, I love electric fence.  It is incredibly versatile, easy to install, can be adapted for pasture rotation very easily, has much more "give" when something falls on it, and is easily repaired when something does happen.  Not to mention you can build electric fence for a fraction of the cost of traditional barbed wire or woven wire.  Yup, going electric was one shinning moment of good decision in my homesteading life.