Spring Fencing on the Farm

We have 37 different fields; many of which are perennially pasture. Ten are used as hay fields until June (weather permitting the haying to be done) and they are pastures thereafter. One to four additional fields also might be baled into hay based on the volume of grass available early in the spring. The balance of our hay fields, 17 parcels, are all rented land from three neighbors in the towns of Jackson and Greenwich.

Notes about Fencing
We've always tried to fence our own fields along the early 19Th century paths of stone walls with gates at the original gateway openings. We maintain miles of modified high tensile fencing powered by 2 100 mile electric fence chargers. One is plugged in at the Lewis farm barn and one is at the Waite's farm barn.
This April we've been pounding into the ground old and new black locust fence posts (black locust is the best for resisting rotting), installing new fiberglass mid span posts, and restringing the wires. We've been repairing gate wires, straightening gate posts leaning in all directions, adding missing gate handles. We are removing errant stones from fields and repositioning them on back on the stone walls. We cut any dead or fallen trees and branches laying across the wires and either save firewood or leave the wood to rot and add to the soil fertility. The HARDEST AND WORST JOB OF ALL IS CUTTING THE MULTI-FLORA ROSES FROM OUR FENCING (the big ones are about 9 feet in diameter!) / A PARTIALLY BLOODY MESS AND AN UNENDING YEARLY TASK (of course it is way better to get them while the are small but some areas are pretty tough to monitor constantly and they grow like weeds!).

WE DO ALL THIS BECAUSE WE STRONGLY BELIEVE the following:

We want to maintain our heritage fields and their boundaries.

We have no interest in using chemicals to eliminate that which we cannot tolerate.

We will try harder to spend more time to cut out our problems prior to them growing to larger proportions.

We will continue to experiment with our animals learning to eat unconventional nutritional plants that are generally unwanted plants (called weeds!).

Thank you for all your support, Alan & Nancy