My Favorite Rotational Grazing Tools
Our flagship ranch, Pajarito, near Pandora, Texas, is not an easy place to graze. There are long runs to make, brush to avoid, and a diverse list of plant communities to manage. Some of the rotational grazing tools we use are essential. We literally could not pull off multiple moves per week on a brushy ranch without them. There are others we could live without, but I wouldn’t want to. Sometimes I envy the graziers that can pull off multiple moves per day, build a new paddock in 10 minutes, and see all their livestock at one time. However, if this nut was easy to crack, I wouldn’t be having so much fun figuring it out. This environment is hard on our tools and equipment, we demand a lot from them, so quality is essential. Ranchers are prone to spend a dollar to save a nickel. I’m here to tell you from experience: buy the good stuff the first time! The price difference between the junk at the big chain farm store and the good, well made equipment, seems like nothing when you compare the two side by side.
Water
Water is the most common limiting factor keeping folks from grazing better, so let’s start there. Getting the infrastructure in place is the first step, but I don’t have time to go into detail on that here. If you want help setting up a grazing and/or infrastructure plan, my contact info will be listed below. I’d be happy to help you get started. At Pajarito, we have underground 2” HDPE pipe with Ts, risers, and valves strategically placed (0.25-ish miles apart). At each riser is a valve and a quick connect coupler (see below) or camlock fitting. We can then connect to these risers using a 1” radiator hose to fill our portable troughs. We leapfrog these troughs ahead of the cattle as we move through the ranch.
Here are the key components of our portable water system:
350 gallon blue poly trough- The brand doesn’t matter, I have used several and all have been satisfactory. The key here is the weight. No other material will allow one person to load a 350 gallon trough on the back of a pickup to move it. There are more durable troughs out there but none can be moved as easily as a poly trough.
Banjo 2” bulkhead- Those blue troughs are so easy to move, the time consuming part becomes waiting for them to drain. Their factory drain plugs are too small and easy to damage. For these reasons I like putting in a 2” bulkhead fitting. You can then thread in a 2” male camlock to put a camlock cap on.
Jobe Megaflow Float Valve- Don’t bother with the typical rectangular farm store floats that mount on top of the trough. The Jobe float valve is the only way to go. It fills MUCH faster, and mounts at the bottom, protected from curious livestock.
EPDM Hose 1”- There are lots of other hose options that I have seen people use with success. I like this hose because they can handle being stepped on by livestock, driven over, and take the beating of the South Texas sun really well. A radiator hose is about the same thing, and can be picked up at your local auto parts store.
Quick Coupler- These things are very cool. They have a spring loaded gasket so connecting your hose turns the water on and disconnecting it turns the water off. These are threaded into the valve on every one of our risers, and the male side is attached to the hose.
Camlock hose connection- Slightly less convenient, and a lot less cool than the quick coupler, the camlock offers a cheaper option, with fewer moving parts. This also threads into the valve at our connection points and is connected to the hose with a female camlock.
Fencing
I am fortunate to have always grazed places that were previously cross-fenced so the vast majority of the fencing I do is temporary electric. Here are a couple quick pointers I have learned from the small amount of permanent electric fencing I have done.
Electric fences are way cheaper than barbed wire. I’m talking about $2-$3 per foot cheaper. It almost never makes economic sense to build a barbed wire fence.
Timeless posts are the best permanent electric fence posts on the market. They make a PVC T-post that is non-conductive and UV resistant. You shouldn’t bother with steel T-posts and insulators, but if you can’t help yourself, the best T-post insulator is the LockJawz.
Powerflex makes the best spinning jenny on the market.
If you’re building a multi-strand fence, build it so every wire could be hot. That way, if you change your mind about which wires you want to be hot, you can fix it.
If you’re building a single-strand, interior fence for cattle, a 2 ⅞” steel pipe, driven 4-5’ in the ground is a good corner to pull from. You don’t need an h-brace.
Temporary Posts
There is no end to the options for electric fence posts, and I have yet to find one that is perfect. They all have pros and cons, and while I have not tried every one on the market, I have gone through my fair share. I have settled on a couple good options that make me cuss the least. We exclusively graze cattle (for now) so I don’t have a recommendation for multi-wire posts, however Powerflex Fence has several options to choose from.
Gallagher pig tail post- These have a stout step, great for hard ground. I’ve even used a hammer on the step to drive them during severe drought. The pig tail comes in handy for a couple of reasons. 1.)They make it easier to brace them on each other (see photos), 2.) You can use them to creatively wrap polywire to hold tension. Ring tops (without the pig tail) are nice because they don’t get tangled up with each other like the pig-tails do, but I’ll take the tangling to get the benefits of a pig-tail post.
⅜” fiberglass rods- Those pig tails can get a little spendy, especially when you have a few miles of fence put up at a time. Also, when things get dry, they can be a pain to get into soils with high clay content. These fiberglass rods solve both of these problems. I wouldn’t put too much tension on them, but for long straight runs, nothing is better. They are cheap, easy to handle, and last a long time. I’m still using the first set I bought eight years ago and they still look new. They come with a black plastic cap so that you don’t tear up the top of the post with a metal hammer. Throw that cap away as soon as the posts come in. Get the mallet linked below. You’ll have one less step, and the mallet will not damage your posts. Make sure you order the right size clips when you order your posts as they do not come with the post. I like the ones with a little tail on them (linked in the previous sentence). DO NOT get the clips without a tail, they are terrible.
12oz soft-face mallet- This thing is great! Fighting the little plastic cap that comes with the fiberglass rods is a waste of time. You can drive them as hard as you want with this mallet and not damage the post at all. These mallets have lasted me about three years before they need to be replaced.
Temporary Wire
There is no doubt, the very best polybraid is made by Powerflex Fence. They call it Super 9 Polybraid and it is excellent. I’ve had some out in the sun for most of the last 8 years and it is still strong, pliable, and conductive. There are other polybraids on the market that are good-enough, the Powerflex product is just better. If you do get another product, make sure that you get polyBRAID, not polyWIRE. There is a lot of junky stuff sold at big chain farm stores.
There are circumstances where I like the Power Braid product from Range Ward. It’s a lot bigger in diameter than the polybraid and is more reflective. I use this stuff for training new cattle, building lanes to a trap or pens, and for crossing heavily traveled ranch roads. The visibility is great, but we make a lot of long runs, and I can fit a lot more polybraid on a spool than I can Power Braid. Once the cattle are well trained, the polybraid is more than visible enough to keep them in.
Reels
There aren’t quite as many reel options as there are post options, but it’s close. I’m not picky on hand reels, I’ve tried all the popular brands and I like them all. I will make the same suggestion every experienced grazier makes: “Get a geared reel!” I will also say that I like to spend a little extra and get ½ mile reels over the more typical ¼ mile. The ½ mile reels have multiple hooks so they hang balanced on a fence a lot better than the single-hook ¼ mile reels. We rarely have the luxury of building less than ¼ mile at a time anyway so the extra capacity is nice. You should only spool 90% of what a reel says it can hold. If you max it out, it will be prone to tangle and give you all kinds of trouble. Here are a few options: Gallagher (my preference), Powerflex (cheapest option, and good enough. I have several.), Teragate and O’briens are very popular reels but don’t come in ½ mile so I don’t use them anymore.
These hand reels are great, but at Pajarito we are often building temporary fence stretches much longer than ½ mile. In these cases we use Range Ward reels. They are easy to handle and cheap. Range Ward also sells a reel stand to be used for spooling and unspooling. We own a Razer Grazer, which comes with a Power Arm, so we don’t have to burn our rotator cuffs up using just the reel stand. Now that Range Ward is coming out with their Power Reel, we will soon be transferring all of our wire to the smaller reels to be used with this new product. More about the Power Reel below.
Energizers
In addition to the Razer Grazer, which powers our long runs, we use Speedrite S500 and S1000 solar energizers. The S500 has no problem energizing a couple miles of single-strand polybraid and delivering plenty of juice to keep the cows in. The S1000 just helps me sleep a little better.
This little Gallagher charger has a lithium battery and can be grounded with just a step-in post. We use it for fencing around deer feeders to keep the cows out and it works great. It’s nice to not have to worry about grounding on such a short stretch of fence.
If you have access to AC power for your fence, you can’t beat a Cyclops.
This is what a game changer looks like! I had the chance to try out the Range Ward Power Reel when it was in R&D, and I fell in love. It makes both spooling and unspooling wire so easy. Roll your wire up with an electric motor, and engage the brake for unspooling to prevent tangling when you stop to drive a post. It’s made to go in the receiver hitch on the back of a truck or UTV, but I welded a receiver on the front of our ATVs so that we could make it a one-man job. This thing made fencing easy. I can’t wait to get my hands on one again.
Important Small Items
Zammer handle- These are the best handles on the market by far. They have both conductive and non-conductive hooks so they work in every scenario.
Cold only handles- I like to use these when running electric fence off of a barbed wire or net wire fence. We have deer hunters going through our gates sometimes and it’s better to give them a cold-only handle so they can’t accidentally short our fence out with a Zammer (it has happened).
Power Hammer Ground Rod- This allows you to make your ground rods just as portable as everything else. After leaving several pieces of rebar out in the pasture that I couldn’t get back out of the ground, I decided the Power Hammer wasn’t as expensive as I thought.
Spring Gate- Highly visible and easy to open. We use these when crossing ranch roads, and sometimes to block a cattleguard that is too narrow for brahman-influenced cattle.
Four Wheeler- It’s hard to beat a good light-weight ATV for building a temporary fence. Click the link to see a video of how one of ours is set up.
Once you have all the equipment, you need to make a plan. PastureMap is a very important piece to the puzzle. It helps us plan our grazing, track available forage, optimize grazing and recovery periods, and even saves range monitoring pictures and organizes them by pasture. I highly recommend PastureMap to every grazier.
Lastly, the best tool a grazier can have is his/her own skillset. You can have all the right equipment, and it won’t make a difference if you don’t know how to graze. The best investment you can make into your ranch is in yourself. Here’s a list of schools I would recommend:
Holistic Management International
Thanks for reading! If you have any questions, or want help getting started, please reach out. Go forth, and move your cows!
Hunter Lehman
CEO, Grazing Lands
(512) 749-2510
hunter@grazinglands.com
