Goat fencing that actually works

0:04My name is Mike Canaday and I’m a contract grazer in California. We run about 4,000 head of goats. My wife and I, we started with five goats and we’re up to right around 4,000. I’ve seen a lot of misinformation, in my opinion, on YouTube about goats and fencing.

0:51My number one suggestion would be to be smarter than the goat.

1:32All right. My name is Mike Canaday and I’m a contract grazer in California. We run about 4,000 head of goats. Seen a lot of misinformation, in my opinion, on YouTube about goats and fencing. My wife and I, we started with five goats and we’re up to right around 4,000. We couldn’t have got here without electric fencing. Electric fencing will definitely keep a goat in, and almost all goats will stay in with electric fencing if they’re introduced correctly to it.

2:08Now, we’re going to talk about a few different things that are not going to work for you. The stuff we’re going to talk about right now is stuff that will not work. And the first thing you need to know about electric fencing is how much electricity it takes. How much voltage does it take to keep the animals in? If you’re talking about cattle, horses, you probably only need about 2,500 volts. If you’re talking about keeping coyotes out, and if you’re talking about keeping goats in — goats are some of the hardest things to keep in. Sheep have a lot of wool on them. So when we’re talking about sheep and goats, I want to see my fences running about 8,500 volts.

3:06And the biggest issue that people seem to have is they don’t really know what the fence is doing. You’ve got to test your fence in a few different places. Now, the one thing that you’re not going to be able to do — and I see people doing it on YouTube — is they’ll holler to their spouse and say, “Hey, baby, come on over here. Grab this wire,” so they can test the fence, and she’ll scream and holler and jump up and down, and the guy will think that fence is working just fine. Truth is, just because it’ll light your old lady up doesn’t mean it’s going to work to keep goats in the fence.

3:42You need a really good fence tester. This one here is actually in use — you can see it’s kind of a little dirty — it’s a Speedrite fault finder. Stafix also makes one; it’s pretty much the same. Gallagher makes a good tester. These testers can test over 10,000 volts, and you need a fence charger that can put out 10,000 volts. If you test with one of these fence testers — and I want to show you where that big zero is — that’s actually not the voltage. What that tells you is how much leakage is on the fence: how many amps, where there’s a draw, and which direction the draw is, so you can fix the fence. Up in this corner over here, that’s actually the voltage. If you’ve got one of those light testers, the kind with five lights on it, that’s not going to tell you. You’re not going to be able to keep goats in. So the number one thing you need to do is know how much voltage is in your fence.

5:04The other thing that you need to do: never, ever leave it off because you think the goats are broke to stay in. It just teaches them to get out. A guy on YouTube lost a baby goat in the fence. The fence wasn’t on because he didn’t want the little baby to get shocked, so he turned the fence off. Then sometime during the day, the little baby got caught in that net fence — we always use net fencing — got all wrapped up, balled up in it. The bottom line is you’ve got to keep that fence on all the time. It’s not a physical barrier. It is a psychological barrier, and that’s what we’re working with here. So it’s always got to be on. It’s the safest thing. People say, “Well, we don’t want the little babies to get shocked.” More than likely, if from time to time you turn that fence off, you’re going to end up with dead animals in it. Even if they’re not dead — we’ve had, in the past, where you get a bad battery or whatever, an animal gets caught, has an extremity wrapped up in the net fencing. It’s like a tourniquet. The limb can atrophy, and you’ll end up with an animal that you’ll have to put down. So never, ever, ever run your fences without them having juice in them.

6:46Okay. Now, the other thing: you’re going to need a good fence charger. A good fence charger can put out — when it’s not hooked to the fence, if you just test it with one of these testers (and the reason I’m saying one of these testers is they can test over 10,000 volts; a lot of the cheaper ones can’t do that) — if you hook the fence tester directly to the energizer, it should have over 10,000 volts in it to be one that’ll keep goats in. The Speedrite 3000 can do that. I know that because that’s what we use. There are probably other ones that can do it, but what usually cannot do it is the ones that people buy that have a little solar panel built on them, maybe like [brand unclear]. Those little solar panels can’t put out enough juice to get the power into those energizers so that they can have that kind of voltage. If you start out with 10,000 volts and you hook it to the fence and it drops to 8,000 or 8,500, that’s one thing. If anything happens — a tree branch goes down onto it — it’s going to lose some voltage. If you don’t have at least 5,500 volts in that fence, all the way around, coyotes can get in there. That netting fence is your number one defense against predators. The fence itself.

8:09You’ve heard the dogs barking — those are Anatolian shepherds. They are our second leg of defense. We don’t want them getting in a fight with a predator, but we want them barking and keeping those predators away. The fences that we set up are usually anywhere from three to four to five acres. That keeps the dogs in contact with the livestock. On that size of a fence, you can usually keep a lot of voltage in there.

8:37A lot of people have a lot of predator loss. I’ve heard some folks on YouTube saying they have 10% predator loss. If the rancher’s got, say, 3,000 head, that’s a lot of animals. That’s hundreds of dead animals. It’s really important that we understand the coyote, too. The coyote usually does not jump these netting fences. The netting fence that we use is 42 inches. It’s sold by Premier Fencing, and it has semi-rigid stays that keep that fence from sagging. The coyote will not jump that fence. What he tries to do is stick his head through it. You’d be surprised what a coyote can squeeze through. That’s why you need 5,500 volts. That coyote needs to get hit by that voltage you’ve built up in the fence. If that happens — they’re a very wary animal — that coyote will warn the other coyote he’s running with. Out here in the West, the western coyote, sometimes you’ll see six or more of them running in a pack, usually juveniles less than a year old, and they’re pretty dangerous and they’re smart. But if one of them gets hit by your fence, it can actually transmit that there’s danger there to the other coyotes. So you don’t have to have every coyote hit that fence.

10:17Where we are out here, there are just tons of coyotes, and people are always saying, “Well, you must have a lot of coyote loss.” Actually, we don’t. Out of the 4,000 animals that we have, we don’t lose 1%. It’s just not that many. It doesn’t necessarily transfer over to cats, because cats can jump that fence. If you’re talking about a bobcat or a mountain lion, they usually don’t even get hit by the fence. We don’t have bears, but I understand it is effective on bears also — you’re going to need a lot of voltage. Goes back to that fence tester: know what the voltage is all the time. Keep the fence on all the time.

11:04So, here’s another thing that will not work. That’s [pos/neg] fence. Premier One Supplies — if you do an internet search on Premier 1 and fencing, they will come up — in my opinion have the best netting fence for goats or chickens or whatever you’re trying to keep. Their fencing has those vertical stays so the fence doesn’t sag. Any time a fence is sagging, it’s losing a lot of voltage.

11:41I’ve seen some of these guys on YouTube. They’ll have these huge fence chargers, 12-joule chargers. And again, we’re using like a three-joule charger. And the fence, when you look at it, it’s all sagging. When you build a fence — any kind of fence — the corners have to be at least straight. They can’t be sagging down. If the corners sag, the whole fence is going to sag. And if the fence sags, especially if it’s in green grass, it’s almost impossible to get any kind of decent voltage through it. Yeah, they might get 2,500 volts, but it’s not going to be enough to keep the predators out and to keep the goats in consistently.

12:26As much as I believe in Premier fencing, they will sell people stuff called pos/neg fence. In a regular fence, you touch the fence, the electricity goes in your arm, down your body, and out through your feet. In a pos/neg fence, one wire is a positive, the next one’s a negative, the next one’s a positive, the next one’s a negative, all the way to the bottom. The thing with goats is they’re smarter and more devious than sheep. They’ll figure out the bottom two wires — the bottom one is basically just a piece of plastic, and the next one going up is negative. Goats can figure out that the bottom one is not going to hurt them, the next one up isn’t going to hurt them, and they’ll start taking their nose and flicking that fence up until they can get their nose underneath that bottom one. It teaches the goats to get out. The pos/neg fence will teach goats to get out, so you want to stay away from that. Just get regular positive fence. It’s cheaper anyway.

13:25And use the proper grounding system. Almost always, people think they get away with one ground rod, about that far in the ground. Out here we can’t — again, probably because we just don’t get enough moisture in the ground. When you read the directions on your energizers — any decent-size energizer, and again we use the Speedrite or a Stafix; the Stafix, I think it’s a 3X, and the Speedrite is a model 3000 — they’re able to be used either plugged into regular house current or on a 12-volt battery, so they’re kind of handy. They put out a lot of voltage for what they are. You can get them on eBay or through a fencing dealer. It’s really important that we pay attention to what the charger’s manufacturer recommends. Very few of them recommend one ground rod. You’ve got to have two ground rods, ten feet apart — regular ground rods that you can buy at the hardware store, copper-coated or maybe galvanized. We go to an auto supply store or maybe a building supply store. They sell cheap jumper cables for vehicles — not a real thick wire — and you can pull those jumper cables apart and use them to go from one ground rod to the other ground rod. Then the first ground rod is hooked up directly to your energizer.

15:12So, at least two ground rods in a really dry climate like where we are. If things are getting bad, we’ll actually water down the area where the ground rods are. That makes a big difference. If we’re in an area where we can’t do that, then we just take a plastic milk jug, a gallon jug, put a little pinhole in it, put water in it, and put it right next to the ground rod. That’ll slowly let that water go down around the ground rod. Ground rods are so important, and people underestimate their importance. You really need to make sure that they’re working correctly. With the fence tester that we were talking about — or any fence tester, actually — if you touch a ground rod with it when the fence is on, you should actually be able to touch a ground rod without getting a shock. If you’re getting a shock, that’s because there’s a lot of juice going into the ground rod instead of going down the fence. You can test the rate directly on your tester, and if it comes up to like 1 kV, 2 kV, that’s just not acceptable. About the most you can really put up with is maybe 200 volts — not 1,000 volts or 2,000 volts or something like that, because that’s not going down the fence. It’s just going directly into the ground. It’s not doing the charger any good and it’s not doing your fence any good. So don’t forget to not only test the fence, but test your ground rods and make sure that they’re good. Lower is better, not higher, on the ground rod. Higher is not good on the ground rod. Higher is good on the fence. Most of the time, the fences around here, we want to see them around 8,000 volts.

17:01As I say, we’ve been doing it a long time. We have a lot of animals — 4,000 goats and 3,000 sheep — and I couldn’t stay in business if we had goats and sheep out. That’s just not going to work for me. Again, always keep that fence on all the time. When you’re testing your fence, if it was doing 8,000 volts and you test it sometime and it’s down to 5,000 volts, find out why it dropped 3,000 volts. Walk the line. Test your battery. Test your grounds. See what’s going on. Keep that voltage high.

17:42Okay. The other thing that’s handy is something called cheat stakes. These are available at Tractor Supply. They’re a fiberglass rod about four feet long, and they’re used to hold the fence up in soft ground or to help hold the corners tight. It’s what we call a cheat stake. It’s just a fiberglass rod, and anyplace that fence is sagging, you can drive it in the ground a little bit and wrap the top wire. It’ll take some of the slack out of it, too, and hold that fence up to where it has to go. These are the things to use. Do not buy fencing with a double prong on it, because when it dries out and the ground gets hard, there’s almost no way to get those things in the ground. You’ll be beating them, they’ll be all bent up, and you make a mess out of them. Basically, trying to put one of those pieces of crap in the ground will break your heart. It’s just impossible when the ground gets hard. Don’t buy two-prong fencing. If you’ve got rocks, or clay that gets hard when it dries out, this is not the fencing for you. And people think — and again, it’s the people that sell fencing, everybody thinks, well, that’s the expert from afar, these people know what they’re doing. Actually, they don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t have the experience, and they don’t try to keep a thousand goats inside a city someplace with nothing but a psychological-barrier fence.

19:31All right. When we’re talking about this netting fence, when you look at it, you can hardly see it, but there are little stainless steel wires in there — very fine wires. You’ve got to look close. They are there, but they don’t push a lot of electricity in each wire. There are usually about six in each horizontal line. They can only push electricity so far, and that’s why, when you’re using a 10- or 12-joule fence charger, it’s a waste, because you can’t push that much electricity through those little tiny skinny wires. It’s not like a high-tensile fence wire. That’s why we’re using the three-joule chargers. What we do with them is run five or six pieces of fence on each side of the charger. So we’ll have the charger in the middle, and then five or six going one way, five or six going the other way. If you can’t get around the field, then you’re going to need another charger, another whole setup, and you don’t hook them together. You never hook those wires together. People think, well, we’ve got to have a circuit — electricity has to go all the way around and come back to the charger again. Actually, that’s not the way that works, because the electricity goes in your finger, or whatever you’re touching the fence with, down your body and out your feet. If it’s in a circle, you’re actually losing a little bit of electricity, because it allows that to go around the circle when it’s trying to find ground again. Really, it’s probably better if you don’t connect them. A lot of times we do, just in case something comes disconnected, so it doesn’t shut off half of the fence. But the bottom line is you don’t need to do that. You can run the fence in a U and it’s going to work just as good, maybe even better, than if you hooked it all back up and made a circle or a square or whatever with it.

21:42I’ve seen a lot of stuff on YouTube that just boggles the mind. You can probably find this one guy: on one side of his fence, he left the fence up high, so that the bottom wire — which isn’t really a wire, it’s just a piece of nylon twine or whatever — he lifted it up so that they could get out from underneath it if they were going to get out. He wanted them to get out on the one side, not on the side that went out into the road. The bottom line is, what you’re doing with that, if you have no clue about fencing, is you’re teaching them to go underneath the fence. Goats are incredibly smart when it comes to that stuff, and they pick up on it. The last thing in the world you want to do is teach a goat to go underneath the fence, because they can flick that fence up with their nose and you won’t be able to keep them in. I’ve seen it too many times. To me, that was crazy. The other thing he did: he would put up one enclosure, and to move them he’d have another enclosure — which is a way to do it — but to move them from one side to the other, he’d turn the charger off and then just pick up the fence so that they could all go underneath it and get to the other side, instead of disconnecting the fence where the two rolls come together and opening it up there. What are you doing? You’re teaching those animals to go underneath the fence.

23:30The other thing about the netting fence, or any kind of electric fence, is you want to keep it clean. I’ve seen too many people just walk around and stomp things down with their feet. If you don’t have a mower or a weed eater — some way to keep that thing clean — we sometimes use a four-wheeler, but out here it’s so dry it just breaks off and it’s not a big deal. We run over it, and then we can put our fence up and it’s clean enough. In other places, you’ve got a lot of tall green grass, and you’re going to need some way to knock that grass out of the way. If you don’t have a tractor, it’s a weed eater. It’s not easy, but it is so important to keep your fence clean, whatever it takes. I’ve seen these guys put fence up directly in grass that’s three or four foot high, and the fence just looks like this going down there. I don’t even think they know how much electricity they’re losing. I think that was the guy who was using a 12-joule charger and said everybody ought to use one, and he only had like two pieces of fence. Sometimes we’re doing five acres at a time. We’ve got a lot of fence out there — a lot of rolls — and again, a charger can only push through that little wire so much. So we’re only going in maybe lengths of 12 rolls, which is approximately [1,800 to 1,900] feet. If we need more than that, we just set up another whole setup. Remember, don’t hook them together. That’s going to screw up the chargers. You’re going to ruin your chargers. Keep them separate. But that’s how you keep them in: you keep that fence at a high plane of output, and you won’t have any trouble with your goats.

25:36What we couldn’t do without, though, is the border collie. Just a quick word about border collies. People ask me, well, how many goats can you move with a border collie? Most of the time our goats are in groups of like 450 or 500, sometimes 600. You can move about 600 head on a semi-trailer. If we’re going long distances, and sometimes we are, we use semis. Sometimes we use gooseneck double-deck trailers; they haul about 150, 160 goats. To be able to load and capture the goats again when we’re done, to get out of a particular site and move, we need border collies. People ask me, how many goats can you actually push around with a border collie? I had one dog — we were going down a road, there was green wheat on both sides of that road, and they were hungry. We had to go down a section, that’s about a mile and a half. One dog kept [number unclear] goats up on the road for a mile and a half.

26:47When you’re pushing like [number unclear] goats or a thousand goats, even 600 goats, the ones in the front — there are always ones that are leading and getting ahead, and there are always some laggards behind, so they start getting spread out. And the border collie: most of the time you’ll hear a couple of them in the back scream, the ones in the back that she’s getting a hold of. When they make that noise, the ones in the front get with the program, because goats follow goats. So you need those front ones running out so that the ones in the back will follow. I know there are some border collie people who say, “Well, you don’t need to bite them to get them to move.” Well, if you’re working a whole bunch of them like that, you do. Otherwise, they don’t have much respect for your dog, and that’s not going to work. In most cases, a lot of sheepdogs won’t work for goats, or they won’t work for goats very long, because the goats will get their number and it’s all over. So most of our dogs, they’ll work cattle — they’re cow dogs — but they’re aggressive. They can get the job done. There are other breeds; I’ve trained a couple of kelpies in my time, but for the most part the border collie is the dog for the serious stockman. Everybody’s got their favorite, and you don’t need to get any hate mail over it, but the bottom line is, for us, the border collie has got us where we are. It’s the dog that we use to handle thousands of animals. All of our herders — and we have over a dozen herders — everybody has a border collie. It’s not like buying a car, though. You’ve got to learn how the border collie works, how the border collie thinks, and you’ve got to train one or have one trained for you. If you want to do the kind of things we do, you definitely need a border collie. There’s just no way.

28:49Goats are tough to get into a trailer if they don’t want to go someplace. Our goats get to the point where they see a ramp and they want to run up it, because they know they’re going to another place with more feed. But they’re broke. They’ve been doing it for years. We don’t buy and sell goats. The goats that we started with go back to maybe a couple hundred goats that we actually started with. All the females are here. So they learn to do all this stuff. They learn about the fence. The babies are born in this fence. They just don’t get out afterwards, because they don’t know anything different. They don’t know they can get out. And I’ve seen the fence where a deer knocked it down or a tree branch came down on it, and the thing is sitting there zapping on the ground and the goats won’t cross it. They just won’t cross it. They just don’t know they can, and they won’t get out. When something like that happens, you know you’re doing it right. There’s really no reason why people should be afraid to get goats because they can’t keep them in. There is a learning curve, no question about it. There’s a learning curve to all this stuff. There’s a learning curve to the dogs. And I think our next video is going to be about dogs, and we’re going to talk about guard dogs. Guard dogs are essential.

30:11Again, we talked about predators and how little our loss is. I can’t even tell you how little it is. It just doesn’t happen. It would be rare for us to lose a goat or a sheep to a coyote, and yet coyotes are all over here. You see them all the time. We will occasionally lose one or two to a bobcat. We don’t have much in the way of mountain lions, but we do have them. When you’re using this kind of fencing, the other thing is you’re never in one place too long. These predator animals are pretty wary. If you start moving around, they think it’s some kind of a trap. So you’re here one day, and the next day you’ve moved a little bit. Coyotes almost never attack on the first night they see the animals come in. Ninety percent of the time they wait till the third night. It gives you a little time.

31:10We didn’t talk about RV batteries, but when you’re talking about batteries, either to power your fence or the lights, you want an RV deep-cycle battery, because you can pull them down farther and they’ll be able to charge back up. A regular car battery uses all its juice just to get the motor running and then charges right back up quickly. These RV deep-cycle batteries are better for the kind of stuff we’re doing.

31:39Okay. Well, thanks for watching our first attempt at a video on YouTube, and subscribe, because we’ll be doing some other videos pretty soon. We’re going to be doing training dogs and border collies, and also guard dogs, and a lot of other things you’ll be interested in if you’ve got sheep, goats, even cattle. So hit that subscribe button, and we’ll see you in the next video.