We have cows on the lease and they have been there for years without a problem. Now, perhaps due to no grass they are getting into the feeder pens. Saw one jump in the pen like it was not there. Pen is made from hog panels. Put barb wire up and that seemed to help...wrong a week later they had pushed a Tpost over that enabled them to get in the pen. The second time they wiped out the cottonseed. nother hunters pen and feeder had more damage. Will try to cut back on corn and cottonseed to see if that helps. maybe a hot wire.

Once they get in they'll be trouble always. My pens look like prison fences now! The barbed wire must be taut to deter them.

I agree with what Jimbo said. Had cows for years with no issues with our 4 wire fence. This year some new cows were on the lease and snapped our strands of wire on one feeder and smashed it. Next week they did the same to our other feeder. Fence was tight and had extra strands. Hard to confirm if it was the same cow on camera, but looked very similar. Ended up just putting TPost around feeder on all sides, and putting barbwire around that protecting spinner plate.

If they push on something and it moves, they keep pushing.

Square pens or round pens?

Look on the bright side. LO could have Spanish goats. There's no keeping them out...of anything.

We rarely had any problems over many years with cows at the lease. Just when they would come too close to the feeder area and spook our deer. No pens or any fence. However, this year they figured out how to push up the feeder box with their nose and get enough tilt on the spinner plate to dump corn. Easy fix by wrapping a field type fence around the lower part of the barrel and feeder. Everyone is hungry!

All pens are round.

You can't tighten barb wire on a round pen. We were fortunate to have built six square pens with either 3 inch pipe or cedar for corner posts. You can tighten barb wire pretty good on those.


This past year we had a lil' issue with cows getting in. Made somes on THF smile quite broadly. The tightened barb wire only made them jump higher. Klappenbach and I went to electric fence top wire and that has worked quite well. Not 100% but worth it. Some of my buds on the lease went to four foot cattle panels at $90 apiece and have had spotty results -

My buddy didn't have any trouble with cows until he put the cotton seed feeder he built to close to the edge of the pin.

Cottonseed was the attractant without a doubt.

Round pens just need more t-posts to have tight barb wire. My pens are round with 16 full hog panels, t-posts about every 6ft with 2 strands of barb wire on top. I just kept adding t-posts as necessary until the cows were finally deterred.

Replace hog panel with cattle panel, when the cows go away because there is grass, replace every other panel with hog panel that you already have sitting at camp!

At the ranch we have good fences around our food plots to keep the cattle out and inside that we have panels around the feeders to keep the hogs out.

At the farm I have one pizzant hot wire going around my feeder.....that's it. Knock on wood it has been doing the job for the last 8 years.

There is a 90 acre area of my lease across a road from our main lease that I hunt. It has only had cows two or three years out of twenty hunting there. Of course the first time they put them in there was right after I put in a small food plot near my stand. The cows were living on it to the point it was not huntable. I did T posts and rebar posts as well as using existing trees to put in an electric fence around about a hundred square yard area. I used a 12 volt unit and deep cycle battery. I ran a single hot wire on top and a second ground wire below it so there would be no delay if they pushed up against it. Various insulators used. Nail on for trees, clamp on for rebar, and T post insulators, and tensioners. Cows never got into my food plot after that. Rolled up the wire and removed the insulators after season and keep it stored as a kit for whenever the rancher plagues me with cows again.

We run hog panels with a hot wire about 2 inches above it in our alfalfa and protein pens and haven’t had a cow in one since.

Yes we do. Just a cost of doin' business.

Yup

I agree with that. There is an old saying amongst ranchers that if you throw a glass of water at a fence and it goes through, so will a goat!! And I can attest to that.........


Frio

Very true, but these goats bring in more money than cows or hunting combined..

Yup

I've yet to see any kind of netting or wire fence that will stop a bull if he wants through it and that is why I run a hot wire midway up on mine. My bull absolutely demolished a brand new gate into the neighbors pasture because he put it up and didn't tell me and give me a chance to put up a hot wire in front of it!

Once a cow, calf, or bull gets stung hard by a good hot shot they damn sure respect it and will not mess with it!

might try the 4' tall cattle panels, with a couple of narrow notches cut out of the top down to ~36" with t-post on each side for the deer to jump in.

The deer have no problem clearing the hog panel with hot wire around the top. Haven’t had a cow in a pen since we started doing it and they were constantly in them before that.

I had a lease near Priddy that had 20+ free range Nubian Ibex on it for 4-5 years. Owner said not to shoot them. They were 10x worse than any cow I ever had on a lease. I could get out of my blind and run them off and they would be back in less than 15 minutes. They finally had someone trap them and take them somewhere else. The high fence ranch (Schuster's) that they came from didn`t want them back. They said they ate way more protein feed than they could recoup selling hunts. They ended up shooting all of them one year just so they weren`t eating their protein feed for their deer.