Which Should Come First? The Fence or the Water? By Jim Gerrish

MAY, Idaho: 

The two key components for making MiG work effectively on your farm are stockwater availability and fences to manage grazing time and recovery time. Ideally, we develop the water and fences concurrently but sometimes capital considerations, labor availability, soil conditions and changing season all affect our work plans. Let’s think about some of the considerations.

Starting with the financial consid- erations, we very often see stockwater infrastructure costing two to four times as much as the fence cost for a well-developed grazing cell. A lot of graziers are hesitant to invest in wells, ponds, pumps, pipelines, and tanks because of the big dollar price tag on many of those items. This is why I always like to look at these developments on a cost per acre basis rather than just the lump sum whole project cost. Then I think in terms of in what else could I invest this same amount of dollars that would give as much or more benefit to my farm.

Typically, return on investment looks very favorable on stockwater development projects as long as it supports significant change in grazing management. Too many graziers try to build lanes and weird-shaped paddocks to avoid the stockwater investment. That generally ends up hampering the potential effectiveness of their well-intentioned grazing strategies. They are disappointed in the outcome and may give up and return to the simplicity of set-stocking with all of its inherent fail-points.

Sometimes we come across a farm where the owners got carried away on pond building in the past. When there are a couple of ponds on every 40 acres, we might be able to just build fence and capitalize on the existing abundance of ponds. That gives us the opportunity for a pretty effective grazing cell with no investment at all in stockwater infra- structure.

I am not a big fan of letting cattle water directly out of ponds, but when we are regulating the amount of time they are accessing any particular pond, we can improve bank stability, vegetation health, and water quality. We can also use a solar pump to move the water out of the pond to a movable trough and keep the cattle out of the pond altogether. As solar pumps have increased in function and dropped in cost, the solar pump option looks better every year.

Depending on the scale of operation, developing additional watering points can change grazing distribution to some degree without the full fence investment being immediately nec- essary. All watering points should be installed with shutoffs, so any point can be turned off without affecting the availability of water at other points. Livestock will generally travel to the nearest water point until they have depleted the forage at that location. With fenceless grazing, we should monitor the grazing utilization so we know when to shut off that trough and start water flow into a new location. The stock will figure that out pretty quickly and drift to the new area.

Bottom line here is it sometimes makes sense to invest in stockwater infrastructure even if you can’t afford to build the fence right now. If you have the funds to install both stockwater and fences, we like to do all the water work first and then build the fences to interface with our new water troughs. My experience is it is much easier to precisely place a fence where I want it relative to a tank than it is to precisely place the tanks relative to an existing fence. 

I also hate to build a new fence and then have to cut it to run a waterline through. We should be planning ahead better than that.

You may have heard it said that when it comes to grazing cell develop- ment to just use temporary fences the first year or two. This allows you to fig- ure out where you really want your permanent fences to end up. You can use a similar approach on your stockwater system. We have used over-the-surface (OTS) pipelines in many situations.

This approach can help you locate your water points more optimally. If you are doing year-around grazing in a cold environment, OTS pipelines and movable tanks can be problematic so you need to figure out pretty quickly where you want to put permanent tanks and get that pipeline properly buried. If you have live water from a spring or diverted from a year-around flowing stream, you can use continuously flowing water to prevent OTS pipelines from freezing even at double-digit sub-zero conditions.

We do take placement of buried pipelines and permanent tanks very seriously as it is inconvenient and expensive relocating misplaced stock- water infrastructure. It is fairly easy
to pull out a 1 or 2-strand hitensile electric fence and relocate it. Tanks and pipelines are not so easy to just pull out and move around. ■

Jim Gerrish is an independent grazing lands consultant providing service to farmers and ranchers on both private and public lands across the USA and internationally. He can be contacted through www.americangrazinglands.com. His books are available from the SGF Bookshelf.