My lease is SW of Ozona. The ground is all limestone. How do you guys anchor a fence around your feeders? You can't dig a hole or drive t-posts in the limestone.

Thanks

Neil

If u have or can rent a compressor a hammer drill works great ! U can drill 2" hole and use t-post add water to the millings and it will set up tight .

Hadn't thought of that.
Thanks

Neil

I prefer not to have feeder pens. If you have a hog problem then just start some population control. I find that most deer will not go in to a pen. On our lease we have about 1/2 the feeders with pens and half without. At the ones with pens there seems to be one deer, normally a young buck, that goes in to the pen.

More than likely your pins are too small.

Shooting or trapping to keep the numbers down is kinda pointless unless you live on or very close to the place. No way you can make a big enough impact with a trip once or twice a month to keep the hogs under controll.

matt

I live on my ranch and it's hard keeping up with them dang hogs. I have 2 feeders at each location. This year I will be putting a hog panel pen around 1 at each location. Your right Red, Pen has got to be good size for the deer to be comfortable. Mine will probably be around 50' pens.

X2. I have 6 of them at my ranch and they are 60 by 60......

Try this....

Electric hammer drill works great. I have a big model for the rocky ground out at my place between Brackett and Rock Springs. Feed pens are definitely the way to go in hog country. Eight 34" hog panels work great in a circle, with 1' overlaps. Fasten together with wire rope clips (U-bolt looking things used as cable ties) and it will be really stable and only need one post per panel. I use a 1-3/8" bit that sinks holes about 16" for t-posts that are 1.5" and they drive in snug as can be. If your drill is smaller and won't go that big, use a smaller bit and rebar instead of t-posts.

I like this idea... and i bet if u wanted too, u could drill some holes in the bottom board to hammer some pieces of rebar in to keep the cows from pushing it around.

I find the opposite. If there are hogs at a feeder the deer stay away.

X2 - Before I put up a number of pens, the hogs could dominate the feed. Now I have a lot more deer able to get a share. Huge improvement in deer numbers and quality. If the pen is big enough, the deer will hop right in. I do keep some feeders un-penned as well cuz we hunt hog too.

If you're looking for inexpensive, the hammer drill/rebar way works well. I also hunt in the transition area between Rocksprings and Bracketville and there's a reason it's not called Dirtsprings. I bought masonry bits from Lowes big enough to accomodate a 1/2" piece of rebar and used it to anchor my 6' tower blinds. I drilled a hole in a bid of exposed rock, poured a little cement in the hole, and then tapped the rebar in with a sledge. So far so good.

We also bought some panels from a guy in Boerne who welded angle iron frames to 8' pieces of hog panel. The frames are hinged so that you can tap a metal rod beween them to hold the frames together. Once the frames are all hinged together, the fence is too heavy for most hogs to lift. The nice thing about this option is that you can add, subtract, or relocate pens without much work and without having to anchor them too much. 2 of us set up a 10 panel pen in about 20 minutes.

At our place if you don't fence it you're just feeding pigs. Size matters. If it's too small deer don't like it. Ours range from 30' x 30' to 60' x 60'.

I find all kinds of deer, bucks, does, young and old in my feed pen and when the feeder goes off, they make no bones about jumping in. Population control on the hogs is necessary, but impossible to do in some situations, so you better have another way of keeping them at bay.

Our pens are too small. They were there when I got on the lease. I tried to tell the guys this and some listened some did not. I am on the Colorado river just above Tow so we have problems driving posts too. I think this is the main reason for the smaller pens. I am going to try to talks everyone in to building larger ones. Hog panels are not cheap.

We use 12 panels to make our pens and use a combonation of 6 of the higher cattle panels and 6 of the lower hog pnaels. We also find that most of the deer going into the pen are the bucks and not the does. For what ever reason.
We usually have a spin feeder with no pen within 50 yds of the feeder pen where we can shoot off the hogs.
here are a few pictures from last year showing large groups of bucks feeding inside the pen all at once. Big bucks rright along with smaller, younger bucks.

Nice looking pen! Mind if I come take a look in December?

Thanks everyone for the replies.

Neil

awesome pics dude you are lucky to have that many bucks!

That is pretty much what I have seen also as bucks dominate the feeding in the pens from around an hour or so after dark until about 5 a.m. in the mornings. Doe will come in during the early morning to late evening from the pics I have seen on 24 hr trail cams. Biggest bucks are usually around midnight till 4 a.m. Nice group of bucks. Like the pen build also.

Nice pics.

Could you post some pics of the pen from a regular camera?

Thanks

Excellent choice in feeders too.

How far SW of Ozona? No tellin' which direction it will go when the next front blows through sometime on Sunday. Supposedly there is a chance of rain Sunday and Monday.