PROTECTING THE FIELDS
the fence odyssey
Over the years, I’ve grown vegetables commercially with fences of all sorts as the barrier between hard work and income, and the ever persistent appetite of the four legged vagabonds of the apocalypse known as deer.
Alex and I are at the end of our fence installation odyssey at Northwoods, and I want to share a bit about the type of fence we chose, what it cost, and what it took to execute the build.
I’ve been growing inside many different fence types over the years. From five strand electric around 20 acres, and all the headaches that brings with constant maintenance (re the need to keep the bottom line perpetually string trimmed to prevent shorting), to smaller electro net style around much smaller parcels that offer little to no resistance to a deer’s ability to make a five foot obstacle seem like nothing more than you or I stepping over a pebble.
With the five strand configuration, you use one offset strand, which is supposed to confuse a deer’s depth perception. At scale it was horribly ineffective. More than a few times I lost three to four hundred heads of lettuce overnight.
We wanted something that would actually work…. an 8 to 10 foot fence that was more cost effective than timber posts with galvanized welded wire and something the two of us could install ourselves.
We went with a Critterfence deer fence kit system. This included galvanized steel posts with 2.5 foot deep ground sleeves, 8.5 foot poly 2” mesh fencing graded for 25 year use life and 950lb breaking strength, 3.5 foot PVC coated metal wire for the lower no-dig overlap layer, the tension kit… (a PVC coated braided steel cable that runs from post to post - meant for keeping the poly fence taut and supported so there is no sagging), and three tractor sized gates positioned where we needed them. This gave us the height we were looking for and when paired with the shorter PVC coated metal material, the system addresses both the digging problem and the jumping problem in one install. We had already ordered some material samples straight from the company so we were able to handle the materials before we committed. Ordering the samples also gave us returning customer status and when purchasing qualified us for a return customer discount.
The fence runs about 1,800 linear feet and encloses roughly 4.5 acres. The Critterfence order for our farm came to:
