Last week we spent a day, or more accurately mostly Jason spent a day, moving one of the cross fences between pastures. We have very few things we would do differently if we were finding ourselves building out the farm again, However, there is one thing that would top the list, and that would be to do all of our cross fencing with the Centaur fencing we used in two locations. We have six miles of four board, wood fence which makes a great perimeter fence. But when you use it as cross fencing, you have made your fence fixed and immobile. Farming is not a fixed and immobile endeavor, so our one do-over would be no wood fence for cross fencing.
Thankfully, between the first two pastures we used the Centaur electric fencing for our cross fence. We always found ourselves mowing the first pasture repeatedly in past years because the horses couldn’t keep up with the grass. Conversely, we often found ourselves moving the horses off of the second pasture to let it rest because the horses were over grazing it. We had been telling ourselves for a year that we should move the cross fence to balance out the pastures, and we finally did it last week.
As you can see from the pictures and video below, there was much excitement from the horses concerning the change in location from the fence. This group of horses is one of our more elderly groups, and there is a 30 year old, a 29 year old, a couple of 27 year olds, and more horses down through their 20’s running around in these pictures and the video. There are a couple of younger horses in their late teens but most of this group is quite old, and given their ages I think they look fantastic.
You can see the line from where the fence used to be, it’s the dirt line immediately followed by green.
A short video of some of the initial exploration of the new space
Fabrizzio and Havana headed out to explore
Merlin, Remmy, Hesse and Duesy
R-L Duesy, Cino, Merlin, Burno, Fabrizzio, Remmy, Hesse Baner
R-L Duesy, Cino, Merlin, Bruno
R-L Cino, Merlin, Hesse, Remmy, Baner, Bruno, Walden, Fabrizzio
Duesy and Havana
Fabrizzio and Baner
Hesse, Remmy, Baner and Fabrizzio
Sabrina and Bonnie watched the excitement from across the driveway
Flyer, Silver and Faune watched from the other side of the fence; their group stayed in the pasture as we moved the fence so there wasn’t any excitement for them
Cisco and Chance
George and Romeo
Homer, Moe and Levendi
Convey and Apollo
Gus, Donneur and Lofty
some of the mares and ponies were hyper on a rainy morning; Traveller, Dawn and Charlotte
Traveller and Charlotte
Dawn and Cinnamon
Charlotte and MyLight
Dolly saying, “wait for meeeee!”
Lily
Charlotte, Norman and Renatta
I love this picture of Dawn (followed by MyLight with Calimba in the background)
Renatta
Cinnamon and Dawn
