Keeping goats penned

[Buster]

I'm new to the concept of goat keeping. My wife and I hadn't seriously considered it until recently, but have decided to investigate them as a possible source of food. Please forgive me if I ask stupid questions.

We have several neighbors who keep goats, and they seem to spend almost as much time on the outside of their fenced pastures as they do on the inside. I have read in several places they are master "escape artists". That is now probably our biggest concern and the greatest hurdle to us making the leap to raising goats. We own a very small 8 acre farm with neighbors fairly close by on three sides, and the last thing I want to do is raise an animal that is going to create a nuisance for these good folks.

All that to say, how do you go about keeping your goats penned where you want them to be? We don't want to pen them very tightly, as we prefer for our animals to be able to roam about in a reasonable manner. We have cattle/hog panels, but not enough to cover our pastures.

I'm very intrigued by electric netting, and would especially like to hear about any experience you may have with it, but am interested in any and all methods used to keep goats where they are supposed to be.

Thanks!

 

[lilhill]

Hi and Welcome. We raise Nigerian Dwarf goats and use 2x4" 5' tall welded wire fencing. Never had an escape in the four years we've been doing this. I'm sure that for larger goats and horned goats (especially bucks with horns), this type fencing wouldn't work.

 

[TxMom]

I'm using 2x4 inch welded wire also, and mine have escaped several times. Mostly at "seams"...like where one roll of fencing meets the next roll...if they are not extremely tightly connected all the way down, they can somehow squeeze through. We had ours connected about 3-4 inches off the ground, and the silly goats somehow squeezed UNDER it. I don't know how they do it...SERIOUSLY!!! Also, they've gotten out where the fence post is next to the corner of the house in the front and in the back... When we put this fence up, it was for dogs and chickens, not goats. I will definitely do things differently on the next fence.

 

[lilhill]

Uh-oh. When we connected the rolls, we overlapped by three squares all the way down, so there were no "seams" to squeeze through, and there's only about 1/2" between the bottom of the fence and the ground. If a goat can get their head under it, they'll figure out how to get the rest of their body to follow.

 

[Chirpy]

My Nigis are in a 6 ft. high 2x4 welded wire enclosure - it's my chicken run. There is chicken wire buried 18 inches into the ground that is attached to the welded wire and the welded wire is stapled to 4x4 posts every 8 1/2 feet around the enclosure. They have no chance of getting out of that fenced area.

However, they get to free roam most of every day with the chickens. My dairy goats are in a temporary fenced area using horse round pen panels with chain link fencing binder twined to it. The dairy goats have yet to get out of that but the Nigis go in and out at will by going under the fencing. When we finish the dairy goats permanent fencing we will be attaching the chain link to 2x4s at the top and bottom of the fencing and stapling the chain link to it to make sure no one goes over or under it.

 

[nightshade]

Hi I have Nubians mostly (10) as well as one pygmy and one pygmy x. I have mostly 4ft chain link fencing as well as some 4ft live stock fencing. DO not like the livestock fencing because they can eaily get their heads stick in it. And will never use it again, I will use the 2x4 fence or chain link as I expand their areas.

I have had smaller ones push out under the fence even though it is fastened on the posts tight to the ground. Fixed that by putting a board between the posts on the ground and stapling the fence to it. I put our post in at 8ft centers just in case of something like that. But have had no other problems. I do though let mine out of the fence a few times a week to eat off my mom's yard and graze in the brushy hill side between our two properties.

 

[username taken]

I'm very intrigued by electric netting, and would especially like to hear about any experience you may have with it, but am interested in any and all methods used to keep goats where they are supposed to be.

Thanks!

It works very very well, but you do have to be prepared for the possibility of one getting its head stuck in the mesh once in a blue moon. Most of the time, they are okay, sometimes a little woozy and not feeling so well after you get them out, very occasionally one dies from it. But its not very common and I think the benefits of it outweigh the cons

 

[()relics]

keep in mind you not only have to keep your goats in but you must keep the predators out ; unless you have a guardian animal...we have a donkey......I use cattle panels that are 16' long and 54" tall...some goats have jumped over them but most get used to them and stay inside without issues....Remember the biggest predator of goats in the US are dogs either feral or the neighbors pets.....get a donkey....if your fence can hold her you will have no worries.

 

[OHMYKIDS]

I have 2 boys in one pen and 2 girls in another one. I use field fencing 4 feet tall. When I first got my goats, one girl wanted out but they are all content to stay in their pen. The only other time I had one of them get out was because it was scratching up against the fence and rolled out underneath it. He even stayed right by the fence so when I saw him, he could go back in. We have rocky terrain and it's not leveled, so we have that issue. They have no reason to be outside of the pen because the toys and food/water is all in there.

Although when the boy wants the girl, we might have issues. They're still young right now (5 months old)

 

[cmjust0]

We have some woven wire fencing, but most of the property is fenced with 4 to 6 strands of very hot 12-1/2ga smooth hi-tensile wire. We also use a bit of electric 16ga aluminum and some polywire here or there, but after using the polywire...I'll never use aluminum again.

If I had it to do again, I wouldn't have wasted my time on woven wire at all... I'd have gone 100% electric.

Woven wire is more expensive, much harder to work with, and allows the animal to put physical pressure on it and break it down. Welded wire, in my opinion, is even worse than woven wire because it won't flex off a perfectly flat horizontal plane. Talk about a PITA...try running welded wire over a hump in the ground.

Our goats don't go closer than a foot or so to the electric fences.. The power was out for six days this past January, and only one goat was brave enough to test it out and go from one field into another.. I could have prevented that with a car battery and a backup DC energizer -- or even my cheapo 12v inverter -- but I got lazy.. Run of the mill "momentary" power outages are of no concern to me whatsoever...

Not to mention, cross fencing or sectioning is a breeze -- and cheap -- when your perimeter fences are electric. Drive a few t-posts, string some wire, make a few connections, and you're done. I fenced off a two-section kid pen that was probably double the size of an average suburban backyard in a few hours with t-posts and polywire. I even wired in a cutoff switch so I could be lazy and slip through the fence instead of having to walk the extra 50' and fool with the gate handles...

The key to electric fence is the ground system...remember -- the ground is half the fence! Drive real ground rods -- plural -- and be sure to run heavy enough wire to them and connect them tight enough to carry the load back to the energizer. So many people spend hours running a decent fence only to wrap an old oxidized length of 16ga aluminum around a stick of rebar poked haphazardly into the dirt and call it a "ground."

Don't be one of those people...

If you get your grounding system right, you'll automatically bypass about 90% of the problems so many other people seem to experience with electric fences.

Good luck!