Picking up fence. Part 2.

In the comments to Picking up fence. Part 1, Jeff asked, "Ok, so why do you need electric in winter, but not in the summer? Also, do you have some big ole' wire spools that take a mile or so of wire that you just roll along to get that wire?"

Electric fences or a 'hot wire fence', as they are sometimes called, are used mostly in winter because they are temporary and fairly easy to put up and take down. Stubble fields are crop fields after they have been harvested. Grazing stubble fields provides a food source that otherwise would go to waste, and allows us to rest the grass pastures for the coming spring and summer. In the fall, we fence certain stubble fields hopefully before the ground freezes, and take them up when the grounds thaws. Once the fence is out of the way we can farm the field according to its crop rotation.

Occasionally, a barbed wire fence will include a hot wire on it as a secondary deterrent in an attempt to keep our bulls home, and the neighbors bulls from visiting. 

Once all the small metal posts are picked up, we take them home and dump them. Then we hitch up the wire roller to the John Deere and drive to all the corners of the fence, releasing the wire from the porcelain insulators, or dolly bobbers, as we call them. I don't know why we call them that, and no one else seems to call them that; it must be a Felzien thing. We pull up the wooden fence posts that are used for the corners, and put them in the loader. 

Now there remains a single long piece of wire lying slack on the ground, outlining the field. We splice it to the wire on the spool as shown above, and hook up the hydraulic hoses. With one person in the cab manning the hydraulics and another standing at the roller, guiding the wire onto the spool, the tractor makes short work of this part. We can pull up one and a half to two miles at a time. Each spool on the wire roller holds about five miles of wire, and weigh hundreds of pounds. 

So much of the fencing process embodies one of the defining ethics of farm life, which is reuse what you already have.  This lends everything history; everything resonates with narrative. You can trace everything back to its origins like some obscure etymology embued with family and farm history.

The wire, wire splicer, and the dolly bobbers are leftovers from the old telephone system that served us until the late 1980's. Some of our metal fence posts were made by Grandpa Marvin from pieces of well rod and old sickle teeth. The red, post-pulling tool below was a bracket to hold up the wings on an old one-way, an implement no longer used.  The holes are perfect for slipping over the post to provide some leverage. The wire 

roller was built by Gary. The frame is made from an old rod-wheeder. The cage is made from the shipping crate of a riding mower. The spools full of telephone wire are army surplus. The rear end comes from a Camaro that Joel rebuilt back in the eighties. Those gorgeous maroon, whitewall studded snowtires come from Grandpa Marvin's El Camino. The green hydraulic motor came off our John Deere millet pick-up head. 

All these things are simply scrap parts and pieces from the iron pile, but when we reuse them we revive the history in them. Every time I use the wire roller, I see those maroon wheels and I remember Grandpa Marvin. I remember how he would drive these dirt roads so slowly that he didn't raise any dust. I remember how, no matter what field I was working or what fence I was fixing, he would find me. He would pull up, roll down the window and ask, "What's Ned up to today?" Then he'd get out, open the cooler behind his seat and hand me a cold beer, the whole time smiling broadly because he found someone out here, in his history, to visit with. 

Comments

[Lari]

Lari wants to borrow your wire roller

[Lex]

I feel like I post way too much, but this blog entry is amazing. Ned, you do such a wonderful job of making the reader feel that they are right there with you. The detail in the description makes it all so tangible. I knew you were good, but not that good! I see a book in the making. And I can't believe how hard the work is! I am so glad you are doing this because it makes us city folk much more appreciative of what it takes to make a living there. Breezing in for a few days just gives me the romantic version of your life, not the day to day grit. Thank you!