Adventures in Hobby Farming -- The Cattle Panel

There are very few things more useful to a capital-strapped amateur farmer than the cattle panel. What is a cattle panel?

It's a 4' tall by 16' long section of heavy welded wire fencing. They run around $25 for a 16' section, or around $1.60 a linear foot.

With them, some t-posts, as shown in the picture, a post-banger and some lashing wire (or in a pinch hay string) you can put up a lot of fence in a little bit of time for around $2.50 a linear foot. It's a strong enough fence with the t-posts spaced 8' apart to keep goats in, especially if you run a hot wire at shoulder height.

But what makes the cattle panel so useful is that anything you've built with it, you can unbuild just as fast. And that's the key. Having a supply of them (and hob panels, which are shorter, 3' tall, and have tighter spacing near the ground) around the farm allows my wife and I to respond to changing conditions quickly.

Got a sick goat you need to quarantine? Close off a corner of the yard with a couple of them and a temporary shelter like the ones @goatgarden builds. (https://steemit.com/homestead/@goatgarden/the-frugal-homesteader-pt-4-small-animal-shelter)

Need to train a new herd protector to chickens? Again, fashion an area for them in 20 minutes.

We use them to cordone off our ducks into different areas of the yard. In the winter we buy a roll of moldy hay and spread it out over the ducks' area and let them filthy the place up when they're locked in there night and compost the hay. Then in the spring we move them next door and plant corn and field peas in that area, keeping them out.

Again, made easy by lashing a couple of hog panels together.

Have some escape artist young goats that refuse to respect the electric fence? Hard fence your buck paddock in no time.

The two Nigerian Dwarf bucks in that video required us to do that. They found their way out of electric netting designed to keep chickens in! Little buggers.

But, like the great Ron White, I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Bean Arbor Extraordinaire

This is a picture of my back porch. You can see that we took a couple of cattle panels, buttressed them with sections of t-post near the ground and bent them over and attached to the house using flat-metal strapping and deck screws. Then we planted the yard-long asparagus beans which grow like weeds down here (on left).

This year's crop is a little scraggly from a bad drought and aphid infestation but they're beginning to grow well now. By the end of the month they'll cover the entire area and I'll simply walk out my back door and pick beans.

If you look carefully, you'll see the goat milking stand on the right inside the porch. Instant goat treats to put in their bucket when they come to milk. We call those beans goat spaghetti.

On the right in the foreground is a big pot with Camille's cucamelons. That's new this year and she'll bring them to the Farmer's Market and give out as treats (they're tiny sweet cucumbers) to customers.

Raised Garden Beds

Another simple use for cattle/hog panels are raised garden beds. This one is simply cattle panels, t-posts, hardware cloth and a fabric liner. Those are purple sweet potato vines. That 4' x 8' bed will produce around 150 lbs of sweet potatoes.

This one is an example of the same thing except as opposed to lining the cattle panel with first hardware cloth and then the fabric to hold the dirt in, you cover the whole thing with burlapcrete.

Burlapcrete a thin, Roman cement that uses alum and salt (but in my experience most internet recipes use too much salt) that you soak burlap in and then layer on like papermache. It hardens like a rock and is crazy strong. That bed was done with a mix that turned out better than the sandbag bed we did (not shown).

I also built a goat tote for hauling goats to the slaughter house or to deliver to customers out of cattle panels. Then I wrapped it in shade cloth so the goats don't overheat. That thing has been incredibly useful as a chick pen, quarantine area for recovering poultry, puppy kennel, etc.

You can't run a hobby farm without these things. Cheap, flexible, multi-taskers. Alton Brown would be proud.

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