Right now the plan is to have 75 ewes by the end of the year and more than double that by the end of the next year. We realized that we need a good fence if we wanted to manage this many animals. We also have another problem, we have more grass than what the sheep can eat and our management system that requires a 60 day resting period (for paracite management) does not account for the rate that grass can grow. We have to get some cattle!
Electrified high tensile fence is the way to go. The basic recipe for high tensile is, pound posts into the ground, build braces for corners and ends, pull and hang the wire, tighten and electrify. We were fortunate to be able to borrow the Madison County, NY post pounder and started pounding way. I wish I can pound posts with finesse, the way the pros do it, most of the time I blame the fact that our farm is located on shale rock (even though I still know that the pros would be able to do a better job).
Dressing the posts with high tensile wire makes everything look better. There's nothing like seeing the glistening parallel wires going up the hill. It can even make the posts that were pounded not as straight as it should have look better. We are almost done with the fence building now, then we can move onto electrifying the fence.
We can get cattle once we have a good fence, that will allow us to rotate grazing between our sheep and the cattle.