Fencing In Feeder

Planning on fencing in our feeders real soon with cattle panel and t-post. How do you guys go about making a gate or something to get your truck through to fill up the feeder?

Electric fence wire to tie the panels to the post and leave two t-post far enough apart to back between when you open up the panels

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Use a cattle panel or put a gate there. If a gate is used, do not place it on the side facing the blind.

yep, on the side I access with the truck or RTV, I put t-post at each end and offset the middle post a couple of feet to one side or the other to give about 10' opening on one side, then have one end pretty hard wired and the other with a couple of doubled electric fence wire that is easily accessed to untwist to open panel as a gate.

Thanks fellas.

You can also use a couple of screen door type springs to secure one end of the panel you're using as the gate. Just overlap that panel a foot or two onto the next panel and use the springs to keep it snug. It's much easier than tying and untying the wire each time.

Issue we are having at the moment is installing the t-post in caliche. Tried with just a t-post driver and could only get them down maybe 6" at most before they bottomed out. Tried using a piece of rebar with a sledge hammer to break it up and no luck. Would a 1-1/2" dia masonry drill bit with a SDS max hammer drill work to drill holes through that stuff to drive the t-post in?

yep, hammer drill and a little elbow grease ... depending on what you are trying to keep out, 6 inches deep might be enough. That about all I can get on 2 of my pens in Crockett county and another that 3 inches deep is all I could get, so I piled up large rocks around each post and along the inside and out of the hog panels. There are feral cattle, horses and a few hogs that haven't damaged any of those even being that shallow.

Just FYI, if you get the posts in, and go to make a gate, you have to be aware of what you are fencing out, cattle or hogs. Electric fencing will keep cattle out for the most part, but the hogs will slip right under the electric fence and get in there easily.

If you are trying to keep hogs out, make a true gate with a piece of panel and I use carabineers on the ends to allow easy opening and closing. Keep the panel less than 10 feet in length to keep it from "sagging" too much in the middle. Also, making two sides that open like French doors outward with a 5-6 foot section of fence hard wired into a post and then using carabineers for the middle connection works really well.

Fencing out cattle and hogs. I couldn't see 6" being enough for a sturdy fence but I may be wrong. For now we plan on using one of the cattle panels as a gate with an opening of about 9'. I do like the idea of using a true gate though and will probably do that later down the road.

Sine we're using cattle panels what height do you guys recommend to cut a couple of openings down to so that they can jump in easily? Would two openings be enough and if so how wide should we make them? The pen will be round.

Cut opening down to 32" and make the opening 8' wide. My opinion, however on mine, I only have one section cut down and that is facing the stand. That way a deer has to walk in front of the feeder pen before it can jump in. Oh, and several will jump your cattle panels where ever they want to get into the pen.

a section of hog panel tie wire it to tee post and tie wire to panel on other end..whenever you drive a vehicle inside..just clip the tie wire and open hog panel..you can buy pigtail and 100 tie wire for about 10 bucks..eeezy peeezy

We changed all of our square barbwire pens to circle pens with hog panel. The cows won’t jump over a circle pen for some reason.

That's what I do, however I put a t-post every 8 feet except for the panel that I'm making the gate at. I put one at 6 feet, that way I have a 10 foot opening to drive through.